2021 LaScam: Nuit de la radio LaScam: Nuit de la radio
A session of collective listening
Sanitary measures: face masks must be worn and a sanitary pass presented
Friday 27.08 at 21:00 at Saint-Laurent-sous-Coiron
Free shuttle buses from the Lussas Church : 19:15, 19:45, 20:00, 20:30.
Please note: limited capacity. Tickets will be available every day at the welcome desk. Please use the free shuttle buses or shared cars to get to Saint-Laurent-sous-Coiron!
BEING 20
“I’ve been twenty. I won’t let anybody say it’s the best time of life,” wrote Paul Nizan in 1932 in his book Aden Arabie.
At the beginning of the years 2000, at the turn of the millennium, the LaScam “Nuit de la radio” was born. The event proposed by the organisation’s sound commission celebrated its 20th birthday in 2020. The theme popped up as obvious: being 20, the time of buddies, of love, war also, of time passing... “You’re not 20 years old every day [so goes the song], it only happens once in life, a day that goes by, alas, much too fast which is why we should enjoy it...” So is being 20 the best time of life?
An age in two figures, that comes so slowly that we couldn’t believe it, that our twenty years mutated into thirty, forty, and fifty, but – how curious! – “we were always twenty, even if it showed less and less”, said Colette.
Thanks to archives, that fabulous machine for rolling back the years, it is by immersion into radio from the 1920s to our time that we can perhaps find different answers. The words of young and less young people, famous and anonymous, from one generation to the other, one decade to the other, up to the years 2000, who tell us about their life at 20.
Listening to the archives, you realise that certain songs marked their time, just like certain voices, styles of voices, intonations, dictions that give, much like music, the tempo of a generation. The voice of youth rings out in a particular tone for each period covered...
I haven’t been 20 for a long time, there’s certainly some nostalgia in my choices, old tunes that I like, voices that I searched for, some that I didn’t find, others I discovered. I have selected a few for you. The voice of Pierre Lazareff, so recognisable, coming from afar and prophesying for the generations of 2000 a message recorded forever on magnetic tape. Warning, oracle! The determined tone of the resistance fighter Madeleine Riffaud who celebrated her 20th birthday in Paris on 23rd August, 1944, the day of its Liberation. As for Louise Weiss, she evokes her youth in a world without men, while Léo, the old anarchist, sings “For all baggage, you’re 20 years old, the experience of the parents, you don’t give a damn for the third or the fourth…” The warm, comforting voice of actor Didier Bezace, who died last year, crosses that of Haydée Alba in an immortal tango, followed by the floating riffs of a tribe on its way back from the Isle of Wight, the sound of Sophie Simonot’s answering machine announcing the year 2000... Thus the years roll by, we rewind the march of time... following airwaves... the greatness and misery of the state of youth. So you who were once 20, or who are 20, is it really the best time of life?
Thanks to all those who, for more than 20 years, have brought alive the LaScam “Nuit de la radio”.
Leïla Djitli
Programme by Leïla Djitli, journalist, radio author, television director, member of the LaScam sound commission.
With the help of Gwen Michel, Ina archivist, and Frédéric Fiard, editor/mixer.