Byline: Phoenix Jay

A blunt grey snout swims slowly into view. Following it, at glacial pace, glides a massive flattened head. Shards of sunlight flicker across vast blue-grey flanks that stretch seemingly into infinity. Pale vertical stripes lead up this colossus of the deep to meet two dorsal fins. Then a funny thing happens: the human brain, not designed to process such things, triggers its most primal survival instincts. Pupils shrink to pinpricks. Heart jack-hammers against rib cage…

JAWS!

Because this is a SHARK. A very BIG shark. The sort of behemoth that once prompted cartographers to scrawl across sea charts the ominous words ‘Here be monsters.’ But unlike the razor-toothed, man-eating protagonist of Peter Benchley’s 1974 horror novel, this is a gentle giant.

Rhincodon typus, better known as the whale shark, is the world’s largest fish. Where the great white or carcharodon carcharias sports a bite force of more than 18,000 newtons (4,000lbf), Jaws’ bus-sized cousin is a filter feeder who dines exclusively on plankton. A few weeks ago, off the shores of Cambodia’s first luxury private island, one was caught on camera by the $2,000-a-night resort’s scuba diving instructor – the country’s first recorded sighting of a live specimen since a French photographer spotted one near Koh Prins four years ago.

In the past, whale sharks daring to skirt our coastline haven’t always fared quite so well. In 1973, one weighing 800kg was shot by a soldier in Koh Kapi. In 1998, a 1,000kg example entangled in a gill net was later eaten by locals. A taxidermist was the ultimate recipient of an 1,800kg monster accidentally snared by fishing nets near the Thai border in 2007. And in August of last year, hundreds of people crowded into Sihanoukville’s Leak 1 commune to see a carcass hauled in by fishermen between Koh Del Koh and Koh Tas.

The safe return to Cambodian waters of what British marine biologist Barnaby Olson calls such “charismatic mega fauna” bodes well for the coastline’s future. Although pelagic species of such staggering proportions are rare in these parts, the sighting of a whale shark – known in Khmer as chlarm yak – seems especially auspicious coming, as it does, just as the country’s first private marine conservation area is formally extended to 40 times its original size.

Darting between foreign guests and local dignitaries at the blessing ceremony in the island community of Prek Svay (where, happily for those of us on a more restricted budget, you can stay in a guesthouse on the jetty for $10 a night), a small girl diligently gathers up empty drinks cans. “There she goes! She’s a little entrepreneur, that one. Next thing you know, she’ll be building a luxury resort…” Dr Wayne McCallum, an affable New Zealander, is the pencil-moustachioed head of Song Saa resort’s conservation and community programme. His task today, here in the Koh Rong archipelago, is to help cut the ribbon as the reserve set up in 2006 officially swells from 5.5ha to 219ha. Dabbing his face free of chili-induced sweat, McCallum offers his young charge another empty can.

This is the very essence of what Song Saa’s philanthropic arm, Footprints, is trying to encapsulate: ‘Luxury that treads lightly,’ to borrow from the official pamphlet. A full no-take zone, Cambodia’s first and only, extends 200 metres out from the shore of each island. Song Saa’s underwater lab, another national first, allows the marine team to monitor everything from reef generation to the impacts of climate change. One hundred artificial reef structures have been built. Borrowing once more from Song Saa’s tantalising literature, ‘While guests can snorkel and swim to visit the reefs, or view one on dry land at our Discovery Centre, those who occupy an overwater villa can view the reef through the see-through floor portion of their accommodation. Better than television, fish can be seen moving in and out of the artificial reefs without the need to get your feet wet.’

There’s more. The Blue Carbon Project gives guests the option of offsetting their footprints, while more than half the land has been deliberately left undeveloped as a nature reserve. And more: island community projects funded directly by profits from the resort now include everything from organic farming and aquaculture to solid waste management and midwifery.

“The general consensus is that things have improved since Song Saa was built,” says Nick Chandler, director of sales and marketing. “The owners, Rory and Melita Hunter, first visited here eight or nine years ago and it was a completely different place. They fell in love with the region and have been really conscious about ensuring this isn’t a big obnoxious luxury resort that just gets dropped in next to this little village. That’s why you see from the design perspective that Song Saa doesn’t stand out from 20 miles away: it’s designed to look like the surrounding fishing villages and blend into the landscape, while still providing the kind of amenities someone expects for $2,000 a night.”

Barnaby nods. “The response has been a very good one, partly because this island had a very strong sense of community to begin with. We’ve made a real effort to do the work in an appropriate manner, addressing the right people at the right time, moving things nice and slowly but making sure each of our projects has the legs to look after itself. We don’t just come in and throw money at a problem and expect it to work. We engage the community; explain why we’re doing things, how we’re doing them and what the benefits will be. Really build up a good understanding of what we’re trying to do. Two local guys do all of our community work for us. Having locals talk to locals: it doesn’t matter where you are in the world, that’s the way to go.”

Part of the Song Saa team for two-and-a-half years, Barnaby is a witness to how the ecosystem is changing as a result of their efforts to protect the archipelago’s giant clams, turtles and sea horses against the use of bottom trawling, poisons and explosives in fishing. “Certainly around Song Saa you can visibly notice more fish and more big fish, which is the important one because bigger fish produce more juveniles and the juveniles than add to the ecosystem. It’s important to be seeing these big snapper and barracuda and we’re seeing them here a lot more.

“It’s a very diverse system. We get slower-growing corals here; they save up their energy and put it into structural strength and energy reserves. In places like the Great Barrier Reef in Australia you get faster-growing coral, but it’s more boom and bust: it grows very quickly then along comes the next storm and flattens it. The corals we have here are known as boulder corals because of their shape – they look like big lumps of rock. They’re a lot stronger and have more energy reserves, which allows them to get through periods when the water climate isn’t so great and they’re not getting as much sunlight as they need.

“If you can protect a coral reef from all the impacts you can, whether it’s overfishing, damaging fishing techniques or uncontrolled anchoring of boats, then when that big ugly global impact comes along, whether it’s rising sea temperatures or pollution from another source, you’ve given it the best fighting chance you can. It’s the same with a human: if you’re stressed and tired and rundown and not eating well, of course you’re going to get that cold and that cold is going to put you to the floor, but if you’re healthy in every other way, that cold comes along and you can fight it off and stay healthy.”

But such eulogising isn’t restricted to Song Saa staff. Guests, many of whom are impossibly famous (our hosts are too discrete to name names but note that Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie were turned down when they tried to book the entire resort for Christmas just three weeks in advance), are getting in on the act, too. “The people who come to Cambodia have done so as a conscious decision, so automatically they’re a little bit different,” says Wayne. “Obviously not everyone comes with the same philosophy, but you only need a few. Some of the people we get here – we can’t say who they are – they’re pretty amazing. Someone left a $2,000 tip a while ago, which we gave straight to Life Options: no board meetings; no funding proposals, none of that crap.”

Whale sharks, sea horses and turtles: yours for $2,000 a night (or $10 – up to you).

WHO: Adventurous travellers with sound ethics
WHAT: Cambodia’s newly extended first private marine reserve
WHERE: Song Saa and Prek Svay, the Koh Rong archipelago
WHEN: Now
WHY: To live off the sea, we must understand and respect it

 

When Steppenwolf immortalised the term ‘heavy metal’ in their berserk 1967 biker anthem Born To Be Wild, they were borrowing from a source that had very little to do with music. The words had been previously deployed by William S Burroughs, appearing in his 1962 novel The Soft Machine, then again in the sci-fi hackery of 1964’s Nova Express: “With their diseases and orgasm drugs and their sexless parasite life forms – Heavy Metal People of Uranus wrapped in cool blue mist of vaporised bank notes – And the Insect People of Minraud with metal music.”

Traditional military speak for ‘fortified guns’, the phrase was immediately Hoovered up by Creem and Rolling Stone rock critic Lester Bangs, who regurgitated it in 1968 to describe a show by Detroit’s MC5. The signature sound is one that rolls up from the bowels of the Earth like an erupting volcano, but the effect is more than just physical. Done properly, heavy metal can loosen your very mind from its moorings.

Black Sabbath, heavy metal’s original chapter, are masters. As John Doran writes on thequietus.com, “Perhaps one of Sabbath’s most under-appreciated songs is… Children Of The Grave: an impassioned plea for politicians, media and the powers that be to tell the truth, over a galloping riff and clattering percussion. They were and still are the prime contradictory truth about heavy metal. Tough guys who threw peace signs. Headbangers who smoked weed but cautioned against the depression it could cause. The bringers of a violent new noise who railed against the war in Vietnam. The producers of a sound that was at once primitavist and virtuoso. Literate and loutish. Frightening but fun. The harbingers of a sound that was brand new, while carrying on a tradition that was jet black and centuries old. Sometimes obviously daft, always limitlessly righteous.”

Among the poster boys for this daft-but-righteous duality are Tool, cited by re-emerging Phnom Penh metal peddlers Splitter as sculpting their sound. “The thinking person’s metal band” is how Patrick Donovan of The Age described Tool: “Cerebral and visceral, soft and heavy, melodic and abrasive, tender and brutal, familiar and strange, western and eastern, beautiful and ugly, taut yet sprawling and epic, they are a tangle of contradictions.”

Here at Thea Heng Music School on Nehru Boulevard, wedged between guitar cases in a windowless room with granite-coloured foam slathered over walls and ceiling, duality is again the order of the day. Above thunderous drums and battering thrash guitar riffs soar piercing vocals and weird, experimental guitar melodies. Splitter call them ‘Squeedleedees.’

After more than six months offstage, busy evolving from a clean-shaven indie rock quartet into a 3/5-bearded heavy metal quintet and writing an album’s worth of original material, Splitter’s new line-up debuts at Showbox this week (“Not so much a hiatus as a gestation period,” says vocalist Sean Barrett, who’s quick to point out that his name is an anagram of ‘A Better Satan’). The end game: recording their first album.

The members, all but one in their twenties, all sport slightly crumpled cargo shorts and faded t-shirts. Bass player Wayne is loudly wishing he’d worn something he didn’t fish out of the laundry basket. We’re on the roof of Thea Heng on a muggy Saturday afternoon, taking a rare smoke break between tracks. Among scattered empty beer cans, the conversation turns to Tool, the use of odd time signatures and the importance of musical experimentation.

“Squeedleedees should be a proper music term,” says Doug, the band’s experimental guitarist. Sean nods solemnly and then giggles: “Pentatonic squeedledees!” Classically trained Norwegian jazz drummer Henrik, grinning from beneath a hefty ginger beard, slaps his palms on his thighs in a complex rhythm: “Drum moves have names like that: paradiddle and parama flimflam…” All five shriek in unison: “SQUEEDLEEDEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!”

Pressed to define Splitter’s sound during a rare moment when he’s not pogoing up and down in a sweat, Sean shrugs. “I have a really hard time answering that; I’ve been trying to do it since I joined the band. The short answer I give is that it’s metal for stoners but that’s not sufficient. It’s progressive but driven, I guess. Progressive in that we’ll use weird time signatures, play outside the major key, have weird instrumental breaks. Stuff you’d expect from bands like Tool and The Mars Volta, but with a more gut-level punk rock kind of force about it. It walks the line between going out really far into experimental metal land and still having a bit of an edge, but that’s largely the drummer’s fault; he’s a very energetic chap. Doug has a background in sound engineering, so he’ll use a myriad peddles and his music theory abilities and paint really fun weaves over what Ryan does… I jump a lot.”

Thrash guitarist Ryan, from the neck up nothing but beard, teeth and baseball cap, leans back against the roof terrace railings and takes a slow drag on his hand-rolled smoke. “You’ve got barang bands doing covers and Khmer bands doing stuff that’s hard as fuck. It’s nothing but pop-rock or deathcore. We offer something in between: a sound that’s heavy, but you can still groove to it.”

Doug, a founding member, conjures forth the experimental sounds of both Tool and The Mars Volta, while the down tuning (although they choose C over D) is a nod to Pantera, “the first to combine the drop D power chord with actual music theory virtuosity,” says Sean. “The Deftones are another one because early on they went back and forth between rapping and screaming. A few albums into their career they were all being very melodic but in a way that felt heavy on a heart level, which is hard to explain.”

Splitter – so christened when North London-born bass player Wayne, yelling for an amplifier splitter once in Sharky Bar, dropped both Ts and inserted a glottal stop much to the crowd’s amusement – squeeze back into the tiny practice space. Power chords. Scratchy noise. Chiming melodies. Thunder-roll drumming. The tidal wave of sound keeps coming. Atop soar man-possessed vocals: now a screech, now a whisper.

Lyrics probe everything from the peculiarities of expat life to more personal demons, including psychotic breakdown. Lube tells the cautionary tale of a girl ‘who took too many drugs and had to go home’; Purple, the dangers of women who turn out to be men, and Bitches on the Balcony surely needs no further introduction in a town like this. “Game Over is a fun one; probably our favourite to play,” says Sean. “It’s a heavy riff and the lyrics are on the surface pretty standard punk stuff, but one or two steps deeper what it’s really about is people who try to get rid of local religions so they can put themselves in the place of the people’s god. I think Pol Pot’s a good example of that; Mao Tse Tung’s a good example of that, too. But on the surface it’s basically Another Rise Above, by Black Flag: ‘You have power, we don’t. We are good, you are bad. We will get you.’”

Delving significantly deeper is Sharks and Spiders. “This one’s really interesting because the first and second parts are musically and lyrically very different. It’s about having a psychotic breakdown, which is something people write about a lot but the second half is about the other side of that: whatever gets people through it. For some people it’s religion; for some people it’s a creative outlet, some maybe find a significant other. It’s something that takes you outside of yourself at the end of the psychotic breakdown and it’s about the process of going through it. You can find songs by Nine Inch Nails about breaking down, but no one ever writes about the process of coming back together after the fact.

“The line ‘Every spider squatting’ is a reference to Infinite Jest, a novel that takes place in Alcoholics Anonymous, where addiction is referred to as ‘a spider that lives in the brain’. It’s about different types of addictions and neuroses being broken down by whatever gets people out of it, whether that’s painting or going to church. I started writing a lot but writing’s pretty insular, so it doesn’t you out of yourself. I think it was more playing in punk bands. Instead of just writing something and having it collect dust in a notebook, I was working with other people, screaming and jumping, things like that. Not much has changed. Splitter was once very indie rock, a little slower, gloomy, a little stonerish. There’s a lot more energy now.”

Each song is delivered with heavy chord progressions that tread the ground between classical traditions and brutal primitivism at punishingly loud volume. Only it’s the sort of punishment you can’t help but want more of. “A lot of the bands we consider our influence aren’t really metal in an obvious chug-chug-chug, rurgh-rurgh-rurgh kind of way. It’s more heavy in the way it feels. The Deftones are a good example: when you listen it’s not Cookie Monster vocals v drums, it has a certain sincerity to it. Lester Bangs, in his essay about Elvis, talked about the music giving him ‘an erection of the heart’. That’s from a Thomas Pynchon novel: ‘His heart became erect then came.’ That’s the type of stuff we want to give our listeners.”

WHO: Splitter
WHAT: Original heavy prog-metal
WHERE: Showbox, St. 330 (cnr. St. 113)
WHEN: 8pm March 9
WHY: A sound that’s heavy, but you can still groove to it

 

Style has been scandalising for centuries, with certain fashion trends branded everything from indecent to unpatriotic – not least the bewigged, stripey stockinged Macaronis of the 18th century. A dress made from 3,000 cow and yak nipples courted controversy two years ago at London Fashion Week. In 2010, Alexander McQueen launched a line of ‘hooves’ teetering atop 10-inch heels, and a full 25 years before that Jean Paul Gaultier invented ‘man skirts’.

Today, a little closer to home, Claude Garrigues – founder of the label CGBCN – is planning his own sartorial assault, a 15-minute ‘shock and awe’ fashion show the likes of which have never been seen on Cambodian soil. A graduate of the illustrious Esmode fashion school in Paris, Garrigues is launching his first collection – a collection created entirely in the small apartment he shares with his girlfriend in the southernmost reaches of BKK.

Here, among towering shelves and bulging wardrobes overflowing with monochrome fabric, this heavily tattooed Frenchman, inked koi carp swimming lazily up his left arm, has fused two of history’s most disparate style disciplines: punk and haute couture. Draped carefully over silver hangers, post-apocalyptic fabrics have been aggressively sculpted into deconstructed takes on the classic Little Black Dress. The Advisor pinned the ever ebullient Garrigues down to talk secret fabric societies, asphalt and wearing pyjamas in public.

Why fashion design?

If I’m not creating, I’m not living. At school, honestly, I didn’t like sewing. My god, it was horrible! But now I’m doing it and I appreciate having learned about it because I’m free to do what I want. Now I live with a sewing machine.

And I’ve caught you doing the ironing! You’re every woman’s dream.

Exactly! I start from a sketch, although what it is when it’s finished is rarely what I first drew. Sometimes I’ll be doing something that takes me to something else. I don’t really have a method. I have to be honest: I don’t know how I do it. Suddenly, POOF! I can be watching TV or talking with you and suddenly something starts. I always try to start with a sketch, but it’s really bullshit because most of the things they never happen or they change, you know? From this [points to a sketch] to this [presents a small bag full of black fabric sraps]: voila! This is your future dress! I don’t know what it’s going to be, I just get a feeling.

Where do you find such unusual fabrics?   

I cannot tell you. It’s a secret! I’m lucky; I’ve been initiated by someone who gave me the secret after many, many months.

There’s a secret fabric society here?

All the international brands have factories here and when they’re finished with the fabric, they just give it away. Finally, I have access to quality fabrics which come from end-of-stock collections. Fabrics from the next winter collections, I have them now.

How long have you had a fetish for fashion?      

When I was a young kid, I went to the shops with my mother and grandmother and they tried to make me wear something but I always decided by myself. Always I would take the most fashionable thing. I remember one pair of huge flares that were dark jeans on one side and light jeans on the other. I was very proud to get them. I think that fashion isn’t something I decided to do; I always knew it was what I wanted to do. My mother always dressed really well. Maybe to see her always being in fashion, every day changing her clothes, maybe this helped, I don’t know. But I always liked that and finally now I’m living my dream, here, cutting patterns and looking for fabrics in the middle of nowhere. And it might be crazy to say this but I don’t do it for the money; it’s about more than money. Of course I want money and we need it to survive, but the motivation – my pleasure – is the creative process. If you only work for money, you can’t be truly creative. I made CGBCN t-shirts to make money and now, with this money, I can be truly creative.

There’s a big difference between those first t-shirts and your new Punk Couture collection. 

They’re really crazy. This is the first collection. Let me show you; no one has seen these yet… What I have tried to do is work outside the limits. I break everything.

Have you always been this destructive? 

Yes! I have to be honest, yes. I need to be on the edge. Everything I do is really extreme; always, everything.

Is that what attracted you to punk?  

What I like about punk – you know, I’m 47 – when I was studying in Paris in my twenties, I was wearing Doc Marten boots up to here [indicates knee], tight jeans and a leather jacket. That was the spirit. I was a real punk in the 1970s. Also the music: I was born with that. The Sex Pistols, and all the French groups. I’ve never really been a fanatic: I like extreme things, but the punk look was easy extreme. It was like art. Wow, WOW! Just before, it was the hippy style.

It was a big shift, from flower power to Johnny Rotten wearing pinned-together suits because he couldn’t afford a whole one – a look you’ve given the haute couture touch in your new line.

This is the spirit! All deconstructed. Visually, it was really interesting. I didn’t understand it immediately; I think I’m just starting to understand it now. When I chose the name Punk Couture, it was because what I like about punk is not having rules. This is what I like in my creativity. I know all the rules, but I like to break them. If I didn’t know the rules, how could I deconstruct a dress? Many people start with deconstruction, but can’t do it because they don’t know the rules. Start with a square: what would you do?

Pass. I can’t stress enough how awful I am at sewing. How long does a piece take to make it from the sketch pad to the runway? 

I think I’ve been working on this for maybe two months, but it spends most of its time on the hanger. Each time I think about it, I don’t want to do it! It’s different: sometimes everything flows; other times you need time to think about it. This is the most difficult thing to learn: to be patient, because we want to finish things immediately, but you can’t do everything in one day.

And every piece is unique?

This one is mass production… [holds up two identical t-shirts]

Two? Hell, everyone will be wearing them.

[Laughs] It’s the top seller! I did it because I had a lot of zips like this so I said OK, I can do two! I’m not H&M. If I’m going to design something for someone, I need to feel a connection with them. I’ve become really selective.

So who are your clients? 

I would like to know! Obviously, they’re not here in Cambodia: they are afraid; they’re not ready. Cambodia is like a book of fashion history. When I’m here, I see the fashion of the 1950s and ’60s. You can imagine how I feel, with what I’m doing and the fashion background I have. Here we have the traditional with just a touch of modernity, but they don’t know – and I think they realise this themselves – they don’t know how to match the two. The big problem with fashion here is that for 30 to 40 years there was no development, but the rest of the world carried on – and not far away: in Thailand, Vietnam… And the big problem with bad clothes here is that everyone has been sending them second-hand clothes and they’re still receiving second-hand, second-hand, second-hand. Phnom Penh is a bit different, but immediately when you go outside the city you see they are wearing the clothes you were wearing 10 or 15 years ago. It’s like a look book of all trends and the way they mix them. For me, to be on the street looking at people – wow! Fifty per cent of the time it’s wrong. How can you match this colour with that colour?! But at the same time they are punk also because they break the rules.

Wearing pyjamas in the daytime.

I don’t know whether that’s good or not. I can’t judge that, but what’s interesting is that they do things that no one else is doing. You don’t put yellow, fuschia and red together! But OK, if it’s what you want to do. I came here intending to develop abroad: Singapore, Hong Kong, Seoul. They’re the places to be and when I do this I’m thinking of there, not here. For starters, there’s no fashion movement here. Magazines like F and Sovrin are trying to do something but they’re taking a risk. From where they are to where I am is a big jump and I don’t have time to wait. I’m old! You can’t compete in a country where jeans are $15 and a shirt is $5. I sell my jeans in Seoul for $450. Here, we need a lot of time to develop people’s minds to understand creativity: what is the difference between my jeans and the $15 jeans; what a designer really is.

Tell us about the show. 

It’s going to be something very different than people are used to seeing here. More than a fashion show, it’s a presentation. I don’t like the term ‘fashion show’ because here everyone claims to be doing fashion shows, but they’re everything and nothing: a runway, lucky draws, singers. With my show, you are coming purely to see the clothes: that’s six months of work for 15 minutes. It’s going to be very raw and minimalist; very underground, this music with the sophistication of the clothes. This is the ‘Why’ of Punk Couture. It’s a tribute to what I like: the energy and aggressiveness of punk. In the beginning it was really ‘RAAAARRRRGGGGH!’ This is what I like: things that are strong. And the couture because, finally, it’s design; it’s sophisticated.

Where do you get your inspiration?

I am urban. I like the green and the trees, but after 20 minutes I need…. asphalt! This is my visual call. Sometimes I feel lost here, but… I just want to show people the other side of fashion with Punk Couture. With that, you’re touching something different; you’re in another world. You’re opening doors that not everyone can open. This is a really creative trip and sometimes it’s, well, WOW!

WHO: Claude Garrigues
WHAT: Punk Couture CGBCN fashion show
WHERE: De.Gran Japan, #19 Street 352
WHEN: 7pm February 26
WHY: Sartorial scandal in the making

 

A carved-up photograph of Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II with a safety pin through her face has become one of the defining images of punk rock. Created in 1977 by artist Jamie Reid as the cover for the famously banned Sex Pistols’ single God Save the Queen, it cemented the otherwise abstract social ideas the Pistols had sung about a year earlier in Anarchy in the UK. But the roots of punk ideology stretch far beyond the advent of Johnny Rotten; beyond even the sweat-soaked stages of the most venerable punk hang-outs in 1974 New York: clubs like CBGB’s and Max’s Kansas City, where bands such as The Ramones were launching their musical counter-culture manifestos. The seeds of punk’s anarchic politics, far from being American or British, in fact sprouted from mid-20th century French philosophy – philosophy that continues to shape punk to this day. The theory is perhaps most eloquently laid out by Greil Marcus in Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the 20th Century, in which the author examines punk in the context of everything from Dadaism to Guy Debord. In the prologue, he describes how Johnny Rotten’s first moments in Anarchy in the UK, “a rolling earthquake of a laugh, a buried shout, then hoary words somehow stripped of all claptrap and set down in the city streets…” – I AM AN ANTICHRIST – “remain as powerful as anything I know.” For as Andrew Hussey, head of French and Comparative Studies at the University of London Institute in Paris, once told the BBC: “Punk rock would have happened in the UK without France. But without the French, without their big ideas and their politics and fanaticism, punk rock in the UK would’ve been nothing more than growly old rockers with shorter hair. The real influence of French punk rock lies in the ideas, the style and the ruthless elegance. They never produced a Clash or a Sex Pistols, but what they did was introduce the real politics in punk.” Those politics were the product of Gallic intellectuals hell-bent on cultural subversion and determined to change the world using art and ideas. Led by rebel extraordinaire Debord, they sought disorder versus authority; youthful zeal versus a sclerotic status quo – the very inspiration for what would later be called punk. Debord was a French Marxist theorist, writer, filmmaker and founding member in 1957 of what became known as the Situationist International – a group of rebels whose defining moment came during the Paris riots of May 1968, when they lent philosophical muscle to the students and workers attacking the state. By the time a young Malcolm McLaren arrived at the scene, the streets of Paris were quiet again, but he found and was immediately seduced by Situationist posters bearing slogans such as ‘Be realistic, demand the impossible’ and others that would ultimately find their way into Sex Pistols’ lyrics: ‘Cheap holidays in other people’s misery’; ‘No future.’ Followers of this prankster-turned-philosopher, finally proclaimed a tresor national (‘national treasure’) by the French in 2009, even helped popularise the very technique used by Reid on God Save the Queen: detournement, the process of flipping images directly against themselves and subverting them so that they become ‘cultural weapons’. But the spark that ignited the first flame of punk, ultimately, was one of boredom. Just as the Situationists sought to create a new world order in which urban areas were divided into zones corresponding to specific emotions, a city where you could find yourself in an unexpected ‘situation’ on any street at any moment, so, decades later, punks yearned for radical social change. As Eric Debrais from punk band Metal Urbain, formed in Paris in 1975, remembers: “Everything was black and white: the TV was in black and white, the streets were in black and white. Everyday life was extremely boring; you felt people needed a push so they’d feel alive. The idea was to stir the pot and see what happened and of course people in England were doing the same.” All of this is not entirely lost on Didier Wampas, for the past 30 years lead singer with another French punk band, Les Wampas – one of only a handful to survive beyond the 1980s. Born in 1962 and currently en route to Phnom Penh’s Sharky Bar, he may have been too young to appreciate the philosophy behind the Parisian riots of 1968, but he’s no stranger to music as a vehicle for rebellion. Mention Debord and his Situationists and the affirmations come thick and fast in a French accent equally thick and fast. “Aaaaaaaaaaaaah, yeah yeah yeah,” he bellows over an impossibly awful phone connection from Thailand at the start of Les Wampas’ Asian tour. “Why not? But for me, the beginning of punk rock was in 1976 or 1977. The music is the most important thing for me – the first Ramones album. Punk is about doing what you want; you can make punk music even if you don’t really know how to play. In 1977, every week there was a new single or album. I was listening to all the punk bands: The Clash, The Ramones, the Sex Pistols, The Jam – everything. It was great to be 15 in 1977. I was very lucky.” Wampas is rare among his brethren, refusing for three decades – until May last year – to resign from his job as a public transport electrician despite having produced 11 albums and a top 20 hit. The reason, he says, is that if he were to depend on album sales, it would compromise his artistic independence – a message reinforced with a loathing of artists who exist on government grants. “If you say you’re a punk, to want to have money from the government is crazy. You say you’re anti-system, but you want to have money from the government to play punk rock? I don’t care about working; it’s no problem for me. I can do what I want. I don’t care about radio or TV; I was just working and making music and I don’t care about the rest.” He’s not entirely immune to the trappings of international musicianship, however. Of his first solo album, 2011’s Shut Me Up, he says: “No, no, no. You can’t shut me up. Nobody can. The record company asked me if I wanted to make a solo album and I said no, but then they said ‘Do you want to fly to Los Angeles?’ so I said OK. It was in winter and they said ‘Do you want to go to LA for ten days?’ No problem! I didn’t want to make a solo album; I just wanted to go to Los Angeles. I did all the singing in a one-metre-square cupboard in the producer’s kitchen because it was cheaper than in France. Fun!” Despite having a dig at one of his former bass players on the track Never Trust a Guy Who, Having Been a Punk, is Now Playing Electro’, Didier and his Wampas – who call their take on the genre ‘Ye Ye Punk’ – span a myriad sub-genres, from psychobilly to pop-punk ballads. Les Wampas’ first album, Tutti Frutti from 1984, calls forth the joyous cacophony of everyone from Demented Are Go to The Cramps. “Oh, yes! I love this album but I didn’t want to be in a psychobilly band. I love rock ‘n’ roll and want to play everything, not just one genre. We played with The Meteors, with King Kurt, with all these bands. It was very fun on stage. And we played with The Cramps in the 1990s, which was a mad experience. But in real life, they were just disappointing – no fun at all.” Didier’s latest project is one involving his other band, Bikini Machine, now in the process of recording a new album in London. But if the name sounds as though it was inspired by Dr Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine – a 1965 B roller in which mad scientist Vincent Price creates a gang of bikini-clad female robots with which to seduce and rob rich men – the significance is lost on Didier, who seems more interested in the fact the London studio’s equipment all dated from the 1950s. What is not lost on Didier is how his on-stage philosophy differs from that of the Sex Pistols. Where the Pistols were infamous for spitting at and punching fans, Didier is infamous for singing off-key and in a high-pitched squeak, amd he prefers to climb into his fans’ midst and plant as many kisses on cheeks as possible. But just how long can he keep it up, after a punishing 30 years as a punk frontman? “You just try to stop me! I remember when I was 15, I knew I wanted to play in a rock ‘n’ roll band and I don’t want to stop. If you don’t want to stop, you don’t stop. I eat peanut butter sandwiches, like Elvis! Yes, yes, yes. It’s the secret of rock ‘n’ roll…”

WHO: Les Wampas
WHAT: French ‘Ye Ye Punk’
WHERE: Sharky Bar, St. 130
WHEN: 9pm February 22
WHY: French philosophy inspired punk rock. No, really.