Raging Against The Artifice: Edith Nylon

It was 1977 when Edith Nylon burst onto the Punk scene in France. Still a little wet behind the ears, it was another couple of years before they achieved mainstream success with their eponymous debut single and album.

With its foreboding opening riffs, the single is particularly distinctive, its narrative foretelling the transformation of a young woman (Edith Nylon) into a sort of bionic, hypersexual plaything made of synthetic materials and modern technology. The arrangement is quite astute for such a young band, skillfully alternating between moods of suspense and jubilance.

The lyrical theme speaks of our increasingly commercial and synthetic culture, and comparisons with bands like X-Ray Spex are irresistible. Plastic Bag, The Day The World Turned Day-glo and Germfree Adolescents invited us to ponder similar ideas, but both bands existed in the same pop-cultural bubble; both were inspired by the same clichéd talking points of their generation.

While Edith Nylon went on to achieve further success, their later output became less provocative. Even after learning recently that they reformed (I’ve apparently been asleep for three years) the temptation to talk about them in the past-tense is strong. I’d love to see them live, but the band I fell in love with was very much of another time.

(The performance above is an out-take from La Brune et moi—the cult punk film I previously wrote about here.)

Clémenti to Obscurité

La Brune et moi (“the brunette and me”) is a 50 minute film which explores French punk in 1979, showcasing several bands that were dominating the scene back then.

I’ve been meaning to watch it since discovering Edith Nylon and Taxi Girl over a decade ago, but I was too slow on the uptake to notice it was available on YouTube all this time, and for a while on Henri—Cinémathèque française’s free VOD platform.

Most of the music in this feature is actually pretty great, but it is unfortunately punctuated by a low-effort screenplay about a notorious (at the time) groupie called Anouschka who decides the time is ripe to be exploited by a businessman in return for a music career.

Bizarrely, the businessman in this puerile flick is played by none other than Pierre Clémenti. I heard his career had been derailed following conviction and imprisonment for drugs offences in the 1970s, but I had no idea the event was of such Granville-Paris Express proportions that the trajectory had taken him from Belle de jour to something as tawdry as this.

Nevertheless, La Brune et moi does offer an interesting look at how punk counterculture was playing out in Paris back then—something the media in the Anglosphere largely ignored—and for that alone, it’s worth a watch.

Actually… not for that alone. You need to see Pierre Clémenti in this. You really do.