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The Guardian
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Oi! la la: meet the new wave of French punks making noise
Wearing washed 501 jeans, buzzcuts, boots and braces, punks and skinheads are packed into a small and sweaty venue. They're pogoing to power chords and shouting along to the terrace-style chants coming from the stage. But this isn't London's 100 Club in 1978, it's a gig by French band Syndrome 81 in the suburbs of Paris in 2025. They sound like a surprising but appealing mash-up of Cockney Rejects and the Cult. And they are part of a new wave of French Oi! punk bands who are blending scrappy, working-class angst with a firm nod to the country's synth-soaked coldwave past. In the UK in the 1970s, Oi! erupted as a wave of rowdy street punk with solidly working-class roots, attracting a new set of skinhead fans with its simple but upbeat sounds, pairing power-chord riffing with anthemic vocals. Yet from Bordeaux to Brest, from Lyon and Lille to Paris, countless new additions to France's punk scene are breathing post-punk and new wave influences into the genre. There are Rancoeur, with sparse post-punk, punchy basslines upfront in the mix, and there are Oi Boys, and Rixe, with their drum-machine-driven rhythms. Bands such as Chiaroscuro fuse typical Oi! snarls with darker melodies, while Utopie opt for frosty lo-fi riffing and uptempo synth-punks No Filter throw quasi-industrial keyboard twinkling into the mix. These bands gleefully experiment with Oi!'s common motifs, layering back-and-forth gang vocals over catchy synth hooks – variously construed as a whole new genre: French Oi, or sometimes Cold Oi, though the bands themselves often balk at such labels. And unlike the British scene that influenced them, these French bands are uniformly antifascist. Some, like Rancoeur, have vocally distanced themselves from the genre's historic far-right associations, after realising that some of their followers on social media were racist. These post-punk currents kicked off across France in earnest about a decade ago, with groups including Zone Infinie, Traitre, Douche Froide, Litovsk and Hinin. Since then, this new wave of French Oi! bands have gained a zeitgeisty following in the international punk underground. Although the approaches of these bands differ, they tend to share some common notes: heavy on the atmosphere and with a broadly minimalist output, played with melancholic feeling and a lower tempo. The slowed-down sound of Syndrome 81, whose 2022 LP Prisons Imaginaires was met with acclaim, was 'an accident, to be honest', admits vocalist Fabrice Le Roux. The usual drummer for the group was unable to attend rehearsals, forcing the band to write slower songs that they could actually play. Other bands have leaned heavily into electronic influences. Matthieu Pellerin of Oi Boys picked a Yamaha rhythm box to bring a 'cold and martial aesthetic' into their music. Rancoeur, meanwhile, started life as classic Oi! in the vein of Welsh band the Oppressed. But during Covid, says bassist and singer Julien Viala, the whole group started listening to post-punk and coldwave. When they could finally rehearse after lockdowns lifted, they all 'arrived with new effects on our guitars', and that's when they named their sound 'Cold Oi', possibly coining the phrase. Crucially, these bands sing en français – something Syndrome 81's Le Roux was sceptical about at first. 'I thought singing in French could be sketchy,' he says. 'Some bands are very good but when you listen to the lyrics, it sounds dumb and shitty. I never thought it would speak to people abroad.' But speak to people abroad it has. Multiple comments on widely streamed YouTube playlists and in online punk communities proclaim the superiority of French-sung Oi!, while even monolingual gig-goers attending tours in the US do their best to sing along in the language. While this gloom-tinged Oi! is having a moment in France, its influences run deeper. In the UK, after a fissure in classic Derbyshire Oi! band Blitz, the remaining members steered so abruptly into post-punk and new wave that they shed many of their fans in the process. But 'Blitz opened the doors to new influences between Oi! and post-punk', says Julien Viala of Rancoeur. 'Every band tries to do something new. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. We're lucky to have a strong French punk history and I think a lot of new bands are inspired by old bands.' In France, 1980s Oi! bands such as Brest's Komintern Sect and Camera Silens – whose bassist and singer Gilles Bertin notoriously robbed a cash-handling company in Toulouse before going on the lam – are infused with a darker, heavily reverberated edge. Further back still, France has not only flirted with the punk avant garde but helped to define it, says Andrew Hussey, a historian of French culture and punk. 'There was a lot of crossover between art, literature and rock music,' says Hussey, helping to drive more experimental sounds. Although influenced by UK bands such as the Clash, the pioneering French punks Métal Urbain plumped for a machine over a human drummer in the mid-1970s. These proto-industrial leanings influenced other French bands such as Bérurier Noir, who, at their most idiosyncratic and weird, create an uncanny kind of punk with mechanical beats. Le coldwave, meanwhile, with its icy guitars and synth melodies, was born in the late 1970s – a mixture of post-punk and new wave pop exemplified by bands such as Asylum Party and Marquis de Sade. All together, says Hussey, these new French Oi! bands take the real working-class energy of historic French punk and 'graft it on to this European sensibility' with additional coldwave flair. Pellerin – who has retired Oi Boys but will soon release a new synth-driven Oi! band called Nuits Blanches, with members from Rixe and Headbussa – credits the shared commonalities of France and the UK with birthing these sounds. 'Blitz were making Oi-wave in the early 80s,' he says. 'France and England, with their pasts of struggle, of landscapes deformed by industrialisation, unemployment rates and endless autumns, have musical periods marked by anger.' That can be found in the UK post-punk of the late 1970s, he says, just as it can in the French emo scene of the early 00s or in this new crop of French Oi! bands. 'With disillusioned voices over minor chords, there's less of a tautological relationship, and a kind of subtlety to the music,' Pellerin says. 'And it makes me happy that internationally, people are interested in France for all this too.'
Daily Mail
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
EXCLUSIVE Revealed: The rural French property owned by controversial Salt Path couple 'Raynor Winn' and her husband 'Moth'
They famously told the world they were homeless, yet this is the rural French property owned by controversial Salt Path couple 'Raynor Winn' and her husband 'Moth', MailOnline can reveal. The couple – whose real names have now been revealed as Tim and Sally Walker – bought a ramshackle stone farmhouse near Bordeaux in 2007, with the intention of refurbishing it, along with its next-door neighbour, a pigeon tower already owned by Tim's younger brother Martyn. But these days both properties are deserted, overgrown and occupied only by those pigeons, in the tiny hamlet of Le Village du Dropt, surrounded by maize fields and vineyards in the lush valley of the Garonne river. Meanwhile, Sally Walker, 62, is furiously defending herself and her husband against a catalogue of charges of misleading the millions of fans who bought her soul-searching blockbuster, The Salt Path, which in turn spawned two sequels and this Summer's hit movie starring Gillian Anderson and Jason Isaacs. Last week, The Observer claimed that far from falling victim to a bad investment as the book claimed, the reason Raynor lost her house in the Welsh countryside was that she embezzled £64,000 from her employer, the Hemmings family. She avoided criminal charges by paying back the money in a settlement, the newspaper reported. The report also uncovered evidence of their ownership of a house in France at the time they claimed to be homeless. Just as disturbing was the suggestion from nine neurologists and researchers that they were sceptical that Tim could have survived for so many years with the rare and fatal neurological condition, corticobasal degeneration (CBD), which affects movement, speech and memory. But long before their live took such wildly differing paths, this poignant photograph taken 21 years ago by one of the Walker brothers' few neighbours in Dropt, Mme Nathalie Duparant, 74, shows them and their families at what can now be seen as a watershed moment. It was 2004, and tile-fitter Martyn, now 63, and his 59-year-old wife Carole had already quit the rat race in Burton-on-Trent to move to Lot-et-Garonne with their six children to live a simpler life. Tim and Sally and their own two children, on a visit to see their in-laws, camped in the grounds of the property and subsequently decided to invest in the next-door house, at the cost of a few thousand Euros, given its dilapidated state. According to sources, the side-by-side refurbishment project was intended to be a chance for the brothers, born just over a year apart, to bond with each other and their respective families. But things didn't turn out that way. While Martyn and Carole decided to invest in a rambling 16th century chateau about 40 minutes' drive away, Tim and Sally returned to their life in Wales and barely returned to France at all. 'It was very sad that they only came back once and camped in the ground,' recalled Mme Duparant, speaking in the grounds of her rural house above the din of her geese, chickens and a brace of turkeys. 'Both the pigeon tower and the house next door are potentially beautiful buildings and have stood for centuries, and it would have been lovely to see them restored to their former glory,' she added. 'But Sally and Tim didn't seem to have the same enthusiasm as Martyn and Carole, and as the two properties are side by side, it's not worth improving one if the other is still a wreck.' Mme Duparant said she was 'shocked' to hear the allegations against Sally Walker and had never read the book nor seen the film. 'I had no idea they were so famous,' she told MailOnline. 'I cannot believe what they are being accused of, it all seems so unlikely.' Dropt's only previous brush with fame was because it was also the home of the late esteemed French novelist Marguerite Duras. Her erotic novel of forbidden love in 1920s Saigon, L'Amant (The Lover) was turned into a major film of the same name and caused a scandal in Britain and elsewhere when it was released in 1992 because of its unusually graphic portrayal of sexual violence. The house which Sally and Tim bought for a few thousand Euros in 2007, has long been uninhabited, but would certainly have given them enough land to pitch a tent when they lost their home to the bailiffs in 2013 and began their epic 630-mile walk around the South West Coast Path, nicknamed the Salt Path. Now, fighting our way past the 6ft high thorns, weeds and ivy surrounding the French property, it's clear that the robust stonework dating back hundreds of years, looks sturdy enough, but the same cannot be said of the oak beams, rotting because of the completely absent roof. The house which Sally and Tim bought for a few thousand Euros in 2007, has long been uninhabited, but would certainly have given them enough land to pitch a tent when they lost their home to the bailiffs in 2013 At some point, someone has attempted to build an inner structure with modern bricks inside the old stone walls but they didn't get that far. A particularly precarious-looking beam appeared to be supported only by a single steel 'acro-prop' and we decided to beat a hasty retreat. The empty property now has a British next-door neighbour, chef Sean Morley, from Bristol, who grew up in both Britain and France, and is restoring his own converted barn. 'You can see the potential of both the house and the pigeon tower,' said Sean. 'These buildings probably go back to the Middle Ages in some form or other, but it needs someone to spend a proper amount of money restoring all that original brickwork and the oak beams. 'In England, someone would already have done that, but here, it's just as likely some French farmer will knock down the lot and build something in its place.' According to the Mayor of the nearby town of Pardaillan, Serge Cadiot, whose bailiwick includes Le Village Du Dropt, the local taxes on the house haven't been paid 'for years' – an accusation which Sally Walker rejected in her statement this week. But M. Cadiot was adamant that the taxes remained unpaid, though was unable to specify exactly how much was outstanding when MailOnline spoke to him at his home. 'The taxes haven't been paid for a long time, but we keep sending the letters. The place isn't worth much, but there's not much we can do if the owner lives abroad. 'We did send a letter to his brother, but that came back unopened,' he said. Shortly after the Walkers bought their property in Dropt, according to widow Ros Hemmings, whose late estate agent husband Martin employed Sally Walker at their firm in Pwllheli, north Wales, money began to go missing from the company. Bookkeeper Ms Walker was eventually accused of 'embezzling' £64,000 from the firm. Ms Hemmings said that one day in 2008 Martin looked at the company bank balance and realised that Walker had failed to deposit a large sum of cash. A loan was then allegedly taken out to avoid prosecution and when this was not paid their home in Wales was sold, it has been claimed. Tim Walker has been living with an illness for 18 years with no apparent visible symptoms that medical experts claim would require round-the-clock care within 12 years. The claims in The Observer prompted a medical charity supporting victims of the disease to cut ties with the Walkers. Earlier this week, Sally Walker issued a long defence to the accusations contained in The Observer article which they branded 'highly misleading'. She posted NHS clinic letters on Instagram addressed to Timothy Walker, which she said showed that 'he is treated for CBD/S and has been for many years'. She wrote: 'The last few days have been some of the hardest of my life. Heart breaking accusations that Moth has made up his illness have been made, leaving us devastated.' In a statement on her website, she said that the article was 'grotesquely unfair, highly misleading and seeks to systematically pick apart my life'. She added: 'The Salt Path is about what happened to Moth and me, after we lost our home and found ourselves homeless on the headlands of the south west. 'It's not about every event or moment in our lives, but rather about a capsule of time when our lives moved from a place of complete despair to a place of hope. 'The journey held within those pages is one of salt and weather, of pain and possibility. And I can't allow any more doubt to be cast on the validity of those memories, or the joy they have given so many.' In The Salt Path, the couple lose their house due to a bad business investment. But The Observer reported that the couple, lost their home after an accusation that Winn had stolen thousands of pounds from her employer. It also said that it had spoken to medical experts who were sceptical about Moth having CBD, given his lack of acute symptoms and his apparent ability to reverse them. Publishing house Penguin said it 'undertook all the necessary pre-publication due diligence', including a contract with an author warranty about factual accuracy, and a legal read. It added: 'Prior to the Observer enquiry, we had not received any concerns about the book's content.' A Hemmings family source this week told MailOnline that: 'He [Martin Hemmings] felt he'd been ripped off by her which he was. 'Ros is still really angry with her as she's knows how devastated Martin was by it all. 'He felt really let down by it all. It was a real messy situation.' Tim Walker's brother Martyn and his wife Carole, approached by MailOnline at their magnificent chateau not far from Dropt, declined to comment.
Scottish Sun
3 days ago
- Sport
- Scottish Sun
Hibs' record signing claims his agent ‘violently attacked him after forcing his illiterate parents to sign contract'
AGENT'S 'ATTACK' Hibs' record signing claims his agent 'violently attacked him after forcing his illiterate parents to sign contract' Click to share on X/Twitter (Opens in new window) Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window) HIBS' new record signing Thibault Klidje once had to go to the Court of Arbitration for Sport to escape the clutches of his own agent after he 'violently attacked' him. And the striker has revealed how his greatest moment in football was being in the same Togo squad as the country's most famous star - former Arsenal, Tottenham, Manchester City and Real Madrid ace Emmanuel Adebayor. Sign up for Scottish Sun newsletter Sign up 2 Hibs have splashed out to sign Thibault Klidje Credit: Alamy Hibs splashed out a huge fee to land the 24-year-old from Swiss club Luzern. But former Bordeaux star Klidje's footballing journey was far from plain sailing as he explained in an interview earlier this year. He said: "There was a huge amount of poverty growing up in Togo. "I started playing football very early, participating in tournaments and there were always men at those tournaments - let's call them agents - who watched you, wanted to help you, and tried to take you under their wing. "My agent helped me at first, which I will always respect. But he forced my parents to sign a contract. "My father was polygamous until his death and had several wives and both my parents were illiterate so they didn't know what they were signing. "It basically signed over exclusive rights to my life on and off the pitch and took commission far over the normal amount and he attacked me violently and threatened my family. "It was very hard. I considered him a brother at first. And then everything changed from one moment to the next. "What he did to me was truly... I can't say inhumane, but it really affected me deeply." The unnamed agent then arranged a transfer to Congolese club TP Mazembe and demanded he sign a five-year deal, but Klidje managed to find another agent who got him a contract with Bordeaux, prompting the matter to escalate. Hibs chief Malky Mackay on his Celtic team-mate who could've been as good as Henrik Larsson Eventually, the dispute was decided at Switzerland's Court of Arbitration for Sport where his contract with the original agent was declared void after the court ruled his parents did not understand what they signed. Klidje admitted: "When something like this happens to you, it's very difficult to trust anyone anymore. But it's not the end of the world. In life, you always meet people who are good for you." And he eventually got to be a teammate with Togo legend Adebayor, who gave him some personal tutoring. Klidje recalled: "He's an idol for the entire country. We were in the national team squad twice at the same time. "But I was very nervous being in the same squad as him! "When you get a chance to play with the best player ever from Togo, you automatically give it your all, pass the ball to him and listen to him to see if you can learn something from him. "And he was very helpful to me." 2 Keep up to date with ALL the latest news and transfers at the Scottish Sun football page
Irish Examiner
4 days ago
- Sport
- Irish Examiner
Transfer latest: Evan Ferguson closing in on Roma move, Andy Carroll joins Dagenham & Redbridge
Evan Ferguson is edging closer to a move to Italian Giants AS Roma, according to reports. The Republic of Ireland striker will be looking to kick start his career after a difficult spell with Brighton & Hove Albion, and an unsuccessful loan spell at West Ham United last season. The Bettystown native made just eight Premier League appearances for the Hammers since joining in January and linking up with former manager Graham Potter, but he would just play 14 minutes in their last eight games. Should his move go through, he will work under recently apppointed Gian Piero Gasperini in the Italian capital. Meanwhile Andy Carroll will play sixth-tier football next season after signing for the National League South side Dagenham & Redbridge on a free transfer. Read More Watch: Snoop Dogg unveils Swansea kit in playful dig at Wrexham owner Ryan Reynolds The former Newcastle, West Ham and Liverpool striker, 36, who became a free agent after leaving Bordeaux this summer, has reportedly taken a minority stake in the club as part of a Qatari-led takeover, and will be managed by the former Manchester City striker Lee Bradbury. Carroll, who won nine England caps, told the Sun: 'I really enjoyed my time in Bordeaux but it's time for me to get settled with my family. I was getting offers from clubs in France, Italy and Spain, but I wanted to come home. 'I could sign for a top club, but me and the managers might not see eye to eye, so I just want to be somewhere I'm going to be happy. It's never been about the money for me, I could have signed for a lot more money. I just love playing football.' The signing coincided with Dagenham announcing a takeover by a consortium of private investors from Qatar, subject to approval by the FA and the National League. Youseph Al Sharif, representing the group, told the club's website: 'I've followed English football closely for years, and I know what clubs like Dagenham represent to their communities. We're stepping into something that matters to people's lives, and we don't take that lightly. 'We're here to contribute properly and earn our place. This will take time, but we're committed to building with care, ambition, and respect for everything Dagenham & Redbridge FC stands for.'
Rhyl Journal
4 days ago
- Sport
- Rhyl Journal
Dagenham seal Andy Carroll transfer coup
The 36-year-old, who played nine times for England, has made the switch to the National League South side on a three-year deal. Dagenham announced earlier on Saturday that they had been taken over by a Qatari consortium. Carroll left Bordeaux last month following one season in the fourth tier of French football. Speaking on Sky Sports, he said: 'The level doesn't matter as long as I get on the pitch and play football. It's not every day… ⚔️ — Dagenham & Redbridge (@Dag_RedFC) July 12, 2025 'I have had clubs ringing me up, higher leagues, but it has to be the right fit and I need to be in control of what I want to do and not go somewhere because it is higher or there is more money involved. 'I know what will suit me and this is something I believe can be fantastic. There is a project in place, getting them back out of non-league and up the leagues. It is just a great place to be.' As well as playing for Liverpool and Newcastle, Carroll has had spells with West Ham, Reading and West Brom and spent the last two seasons in France, first with Amiens and then Bordeaux. He continued: 'I have more excitement now than I ever have. I just love playing football and showing everyone I am playing for the love of football, rather than the money or level. It is something I want to do and I am lucky that I can continue to do that.'
