PARIS, 4 October 2003 — Long-term social trends being impervious to the shifts of mere politics, the Iraq war has made little dent on the flow of American influence into France — so here is the latest in that long list of imports which began with fast food and the baseball cap: Christian rock.
Inspired by groups like DC Talk who have captured as much as 20 percent of the US rock market, three brothers from the southern town of Valence have single-handedly created a Gallic version of the genre — with a success that suggests there will be more acts to follow.
Glorious — Aurelien, Benjamin and Tomas Pouzin — have sold 20,000 copies of their eponymous first album and can easily fill medium-sized venues on the concert circuit. No mean achievement, given that their overtly religious message has assured them zero airtime from France’s secular-minded media establishment.
“We are under a kind of boycott. The radio stations totally ignore us,” said Benjamin, the group’s 20-year-old guitarist, in an interview at the studio in Versailles where they are mixing their follow-up CD.
“But what happened in the US will happen here too. Young people are thirsting for something authentic — groups who sing things that come from their guts. They want performers who believe in what they are saying — not all the pre-fabricated ‘product’ that is on offer,” he said.
Unlike most Christian bands in Britain and the United States, the Pouzin brothers are Catholic. They describe themselves as born-again charismatics and are devoted disciples of Pope John Paul II, whose encounters with massed Catholic youngsters — on World Youth Days — were an early inspiration.
They begin their concerts with a prayer, and their songs are either explicit hymns of worship or — more so on the forthcoming album Free — allusive pleas for spiritual re-awakening. They have titles such as “Seeing another world” and “Let us lift up our eyes.”
The brothers — the youngest Tomas is lead-singer — had been brought up in a religiously observant family but they had little musical training, so they moved to the Mediterranean port of Toulon and a house made available by the local bishop, took lessons, and waited for the songs to flow.
Their unwavering ambition is to rejuvenate the image of the Roman Catholic Church, too long associated — they say — with a drab and aging priesthood or with the succession of sexual scandals lavishly covered in the press.
“The Church did not know how to communicate. But we are the tool of evangelism,” said 24-year-old Aurelien, who like his brothers sports an image that is more neat than street. “We have to show that the Church is cool. We have to put back the joy in religion. That is what they did in the US.”
But were they conscious of representing yet another French cave-in to the manners of America? “Look, everything in France comes from the US,” said Benjamin. “Our clothes, our styles, our way of speaking even. Everyone wants to be part of it.”
“We were against the war in Iraq because the pope was against it ... But we are not anti-American. On every level — entrepreneurship, human commitment, cultural — they are the leaders. It’s not a question of our giving in to it. It is just the way things are,” said Aurelien.
“France is going down the tubes. People work less and less, and we’re being overtaken by the rest of the world. We are no longer a beacon to the world. You can’t even fly the flag any more without being accused of being on the far-right. How different in the US,” he lamented.
