Reportage“Cultural France following Covid” (1/5). After two years of confinement, the recovery of the music industry is threatened by the fragility of its environment.
“It’s therapeutic, a room like that…”: a crooner’s voice and an angel’s smile, Timothée Régnier, alias Rover – 1.91m tall and weighs more than 100kg – raises his arms to embrace, with a gesture, the public who have come to listen to him at the Chanzy Theater in Angers. Round of applause. Four hundred people acquired, for an isolated concert in the desert of cancellations.
Fault, at the beginning of February, to be able to make him play in front of a standing audience, Le Chabada, the city’s contemporary music scene, negotiated this seated municipal theater with the town hall. The guitarist is not a prude: “I enjoy my job differently. It’s like wine following a long abstinence. With the rarity, the concert becomes an event once more, which makes appointments precious. »
Two years that the man is confined. More, even. Six months before the Covid swept through Europe, he buried his instruments in a workshop cellar of 300 square meters, in the old coolers of Saint-Gilles, in Brussels. He will spend the confinement there and will record, entirely alone, his last album. “I had launched a global trend, he jokes backstage. Music offers this possibility of loneliness, confinement allowed me to go even further. There was something powerful between this addictive place – the smell, the sounds – and the silent and abused city that I found when I returned to my friend’s house. It’s the kind of moment where you say to yourself: “What is a record for? Who are we doing it for? Will there be concerts once more, one day? What will become of this profession, since we can no longer bring people together?” »
Solidarity networks
Angers, Maine-et-Loire. 150,000 inhabitants. Bourgeois city, once the cradle of the Plantagenet dynasty, industrially poor, and reputed to be sleepy. These faults (and their counterpart, tranquillity) gave it, on the arrival of the TGV – which puts it less than two hours from Paris – an attractiveness: it rose to the top of the ranking of “cities where life is good” (awarded on January 30 by the association of the same name).
Mélanie Alaitru, co-director of Chabada: “If there is a positive point in all this, it is the obligation of creativity that confinement has created”
In other times, in the 1980s, local young people had, to fight boredom, chosen to organize concerts, making the city a rock citadel. First in MJCs and bars. Until, in 1994, these bands of rockers united and obtained from the town hall the opening of a place, Le Chabada, in former slaughterhouses, outside the city.
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