Located 422 miles east of Madagascar in the Indian ocean, Réunion marks the southernmost part of Europe. To this day, the small island is a department of France.
Alain Péters was one of the island’s finest singer-songwriters.
He played an experimental version of maloya, a local style of folk music. On the image above, he’s holding his trademark takamba, a Sahelian lute.
His mythical solo album, Mangé pou le coeur, was only released locally, and in very limited quantity on cassette tape. As I am writing this, a copy is up for sale on Discogs for a whopping €552. The seller is located in Réunion; shipping is included.
Alain Péters recorded just a few dozens of songs in his lifetime, but his contributions to Réunion’s music history can’t be overstated.
He was a vagabond and a troubled soul who deeply touched his people, inspired many artists, and died way too young.
Born in a poor neighborhood of Réunions capital Saint Denis, he picked up the guitar as a child in the mid-1960s. His father, a taxi driver, played drums and flute. A cousin from England sent him Beatles and Jimi Hendrix records.
Alain was still in his teens when he was recruited for a locally renowned orchestra. Frequently missing school classes when touring, he soon dropped out to live as a full-time musician.
Playing in various groups with other long-haired hippies who smoked loads of Zamal, the local weed, Alain covered the songs of his British and American idols.
This went on until disco started its reign and nobody wanted to hear rock covers anymore. By the mid-1970s, many fellow musicians left the island, but Alain stayed.
Around that time, an underground scene began to gather at a basement studio in Saint-Joseph, the southernmost village on the island. Here young musicians started mixing their rock roots with influences from séga and maloya, local folk musics sung in Creole and derived from African drumming traditions.
Maloya was then seen as a form of protest music. French authorities regarded it as a voice of insubordination.
Alain now wrote his own songs and poetry in Creole, the language of Réunion’s working class. Meeting the revered Creole poet and writer Jean Albany, he wrote some music to accompany Albany’s lyrics.
He also played bass in a new, more experimental group – Caméléon, or Les Caméléons – that managed to put out a few seven-inch singles. When Caméléon split up, Alain joined another group, Carrousel, on bass and vocals. They developed a wild fusion of séga, maloya, rock, jazz, and reggae.
When Carrousel parted ways with Alain after two years, it marked the start of a decade-plus period of nomad drifting and sporadic solo recording – up until the musician's untimely death.
It all started when Alain’s father passed away in 1979.
Prone to constant partying, drinking and smoking, he now started hitting the bottle excessively to numb his pain.
Eventually his partner Patricia left him, taking their daughter Ananda Devi with her.
Alain fell even deeper into depression and alcoholism. Over the next years, he would live an unstable life but record some of his best music.
He had access to a four-track recorder at the house of a music-loving teacher who lived in a village on the west coast. Between recording sessions, Alain would get lost for weeks and months on booze binges.
In 1985, his solo album Mangé pou le coeur was finally published in a limited tape run, alongside a 60-page booklet containing a collection of his poetry.
Alain sustained himself by busking and playing in bars. Due to his alcoholism, it was impossible to plan a tour or even just a gig with him. Often he wouldn’t show up, so promoters had to go looking for him around town. If they’d find him, he was mostly drunk, and they’d literally have to drag him on stage.
As soon as he performed though, he enchanted his audience. All his pain and suffering came through in his wailing Creole drawl, which seemed more influenced by chanson than blues. His songs mostly just consisted of him singing and playing his lute, accompanied by maloya-style percussion.
Now homeless and sleeping in shelters, Alain’s addiction worsened. A group of well-meaning friends and sponsors made plans to get him to clean up. In 1987, he was sent off on a plane to a detox centre in Toulon, Southern France.
Arriving in mainland Europe, Alain fled the centre quickly.
They found him in Marseille, drinking with the homeless at the Old Port.
Some patrons from the music and arts lured him to Paris. For months, he stayed in their apartments and houses, and even recorded another batch of songs in a studio in Montreuil.
After returning to Réunion at the end of the 1980s, Alain vanished from the scene, but reappeared in 1994 to play two memorable concerts. Some of his Paris recordings had been quietly released the year before.
The audience’s warm reception restored his confidence. Friends say he even stopped drinking in a serious effort to rebuild his career.
It wasn’t supposed to happen.
On July 12, 1995, Alain Péters died from a heart attack in the streets of the coastal town of Saint-Paul. He was only 43, leaving just a handful of worldly possessions behind, among them his takamba and a bunch of manuscripts.
Alain Péters’ discography consists of a few seven-inches, his stunning solo album and the Paris recordings, all of which have been remastered and compiled on several posthumous albums like Parabolér (1998), Vavanguèr (2008), and Rest’ La Maloya (2016).
For his unique sound, there are little to no reference points aside from the local maloya style. It distantly reminds me of some melancholic Brazilian soul – say Jose Mauro’s Obnoxius album –, mixed with the percussive elements of Malian folk, the lute sound of gnawa music, and a slight chanson vibe in the vocals.
Sounds exciting?
Luckily, you don’t need to invest €552 to hear the music.
Media Diet
Listening: Shabaka – Perceive Its Beauty, Acknowledge Its Grace (2024)
On his blissful solo debut album for Impulse!1, London jazz don Shabaka Hutchings is playing his trademark saxophone just once, instead resorting to various flutes, including the Japanese shakuhachi, channeling 1970s spiritual jazz and 1980s new age influences and featuring loads of guests, from underground rapper Elucid to house producer Floating Points to flute novice André 3000. At times, this sounds like the more focused, song-oriented counterpart to André’s sprawling New Blue Sun. Harps, flutes, laughter, it’s all happening!
Reading: Nathanel Amar, The Lives of Dakou in China: From Waste to Nostalgia (2018)
Fascinating academic paper on the 1990s Chinese black market for CDs and tapes. Music media dumped in the West arrived in China to be recycled – but often ended up being repaired, sold and listened to. The phenomenon turned into a fringe economy and inspired artists, bands, journalists, and whole scenes.
(via Jake Newby’s recommended Concrete Avalanche newsletter on Chinese music)
Watching: Mia Hansen-Løve, Things To Come (2016)
The stunning Isabelle Huppert is starring in this gorgeous meditation on middle age, in the role of a 50-something philosophy teacher that witnesses her Parisian middle-class life crumble – her husband cheats on her, her children move away, her mother suffers from dementia, even her publisher cancels her long-running book deal. In the midst of the turmoil, she pays a visit to a former pupil of hers, a writer and anarchist, in a remote region of Southern France.
© 2024 Stephan Kunze
Thanks to Lia Kohl for the inspiration to dive into Alain Péters’ catalog.
Full disclosure: I am working as a freelance consultant for Universal Music Group, more specifically their Global Classics & Jazz division. Impulse! is part of Verve Music Group and distributed by UMG. UMG are not in any way affiliated with zensounds.
This is not a paid endorsement. I’ve been a happy subscriber to this well-curated streaming service for a year now and can confidently recommend it to all fans of sophisticated, slightly artsy and experimental cinema.
Thanks for the discovery ! My father in law is from Réunion island. Although he was in France in the 80's I'll ask him if he knows/has listened to Alain's music
Loveee! His music is beautiful. Thank you for the great intro! Happy Weekend 🖤