I’ve just spent the morning with the 24-page booklet that accompanies the latest release from Manchester-based reissue masters Finders Keepers. The write-up in small print is a history of an obscure but seminal French record label that formed out of the wind-blown ashes of the May ’68 student demonstrations in Paris. It tells this via a list of names and excited adjectives meant to draw the reader into the ven diagram of projects of various producers and performers: Vangelis, Jean-Claude Vannier, Daevid Allen, Brigitte Fontaine, Elton John; booming, rampant, mammoth, bizarre, amazing. While the names may not register (with the exception of Sir Elton) in any madly popular way, the adjectives are telling. Our heroes, the crate-digging, dusty-fingered djs who founded, manage, compile and curate for Finders Keepers – Mancunians Andy Votel, Dom Thomas and Doug Shipton – love their work, love music and want to spread the word. And the word here is BYG, a combination of the surname initials of Parisian label founders Fernand Boruso, Jon Luc Young and Jean Georgakarakos. Between 1968 and 1974, BYG ‘might not have been the surefire code to financial fulfilment but [the label’s] indelible contribution to experimental pop, free jazz, spiritual prog rock and Total Space Music would continue to send positive vibrations through future generations of progressive pop.’
Heavy words for indie kids – let alone any leftover punks – for whom ‘experimental’, ‘spiritual’, and ‘prog’ when attached to music are bad words (not that one could likely tell you why). But then they aren’t the audience here. Finders Keepers is about re-surfacing with the music you never knew existed. The label isn’t driven by obscurity, however, as much as it is by mystery. So that the appearance of Elton John’s backing band on one of the tracks, or the unearthing of unknown or even unreleased early Vangelis productions (most famous for his Academy Award-winning soundtrack to Chariots of Fire) is to discover gold – expanding the borders of what happened in the history of pop music while at the same time opening them to some genuinely interesting forgotten moments.
The music is what matters, of course, and those indie kids and punks could find at least one moment here to relate to amid the twenty-two tracks: BYG being the kind of label that defied easy genres. Valérie Lagrange’s ‘Si ma chanson pouvait’ is a pop hit that never struck its target, with a steady beat and a melody that would give Joan Baez or Joni Mitchell pause to reconsider; while ‘Floating’, the a-side to the one-off 45 by the Inter-Groupie Psychotherapeutic Elastic Band (likely a Vangelis-related project), should have the boys in Animal Collective listening carefully. The star of the show, though, is one Daevid Allen, once a member of UK-based free-jazz-rock combo Soft Machine, whose projects in France included multiple releases by his utopian madness- and drug-inflected group Gong. The group’s orgasmically groovy ‘Hip Hypnotise You’ knows a thing or two about anti-authoritarian behaviour that contemporary punks have long-since abandoned as ideals.
The proprietors of Ubupopland – an online record store based in Germany which sells the kind of unaffordable vinyl sources compilations like this are based upon – often use the word ‘ungoogleable’ to describe records by unknown artists. And that’s where The BYG Deal fits in, making the ungoogleable googleable, via human connections and researches that go beyond what the internet and all those MP3s we’re downloading can tell us; and presenting in an affordable, handsome package what we didn’t know we were missing.