World Musette

It's not widely-known that the man who was Pope of the underground comic in the Seventies is also a great admirer of Twenties' and Thirties' recordings – principally blues and country, but also French music like the musette variety popular in Paris. A talented mandolin-player who also plucks the banjo and the ukulele, Crumb was for a long time the leader of a now-legendary group calling itself The Cheap Suit Serenaders.

He was introduced to Dominique Cravic, who took him forthwith to visit another mandolin-freak by the name of Jean-Claude Asselin, and the result was a kind of mpromptu “musette jam”. Before Crumb returned to The United States, the whole crew decided that these moments of great utopia should be preserved for posterity. A gleeful Cocktail d’amour was recorded – a famous 10" vinyl now a real collectors' item – containing six tracks that mingled blues and musette with a tender fervour.

The group quickly found a name for itself: Les Primitifs du Futur. The droll, provocative paradox in the name was seen by Cravic and Roussin as a deliberate statement of a basically simple conviction: that it was possible to invent a new youth for the past, to make new from old.