Billy Ze Kick et les Gamins en Folie Made Psychedelic Novelty Songs Mainstream

Approximately 30 years ago, a nerdy collective from Rennes released a cult classic

30 years ago (or so), an enigmatic collective from Rennes, led by a gender-confusing singer named Billy ze Kick, released a classic album mixing rock, sampling, novelty songs, white reggae, stoner music and nerd culture.

Let me tell you the story of how Billy ze Kick et les Gamins en Folie was the unexpected success of 1994, thanks mostly to one song about shrooms.

Frenchsplaining Billy Ze Kick

The first thing you need to know is that Billy Ze Kick is a girl ! Born in 1963 in La Flèche (a small town close to Le Mans), Nathalie Cousin is the lead singer on most of the songs from the eponymous first album. 

And les Gamins en Folie [trad: The Crazy Kids] are supposed to be her backing band. The informal collective was created by a bunch of situationist students from Rennes II (our most leftist university with Toulouse’s Le Mirail) with the same love for shamanic studies and LARPing. There’s a lot of voices: no one really knows who really was in les Gamins en Folie. Discogs lists 18 members, most of them unknown, including Nathalie’s brother. 

But among them, you can find a young bassist named Antoine Minne, who will later be known as DJ Zebra. Zebra, producer and radio-host, became famous through his mash-ups that were really popular in the 2000’s. Two songs mashed into one! Crazy times!

The other renowned member was the co-founder M. Bing, the alias for guitarist Benoît Careil, also acting as manager and producer for the whole operation. He worked with Nathalie Cousin for ten years but he eventually quit music. Fun fact: he has been an elected official in Rennes city council (responsible for cultural affairs of course) for the last 10 years.

Crazy Town

To set the tone, the album starts with a sample from Man Bites Dog or, as we know it in France, C'est arrivé près de chez vous [trad: It happened near your home], the cult Belgian dark comedy about a serial killer played by Benoît Poelvoorde in its breakout role. You can watch it for free on Youtube. 

Billy ze Kick et les Gamins en Folie has not one but two intros to explain the concept of les Gamins en Folie. If the first one is a slow burning rock song, the second one leans more into social commentary and nerd culture. So, Encraoudi Encraouda is the first real song of the record but it’s a tone-setting track as well, featuring a neat guitar solo and a ton of references to build the imaginary world where the Crazy Kids live. It’s also a nice teaser for the album's second half. 

To create their novelty songs, Billy Ze Kick and les Gamins en Folie rely mostly on three ingredients: rock guitars, sampling and choir-like singing. For some reason, I think it sounds a little bit like the Avalanches, who will become famous a little later. Even though Nathalie Cousin is against the stoner’s music label, there’s several songs dedicated to cannabis, psychotropics and even mushrooms. 

Mangez-moi ! Mangez-moi ! [trad: Eat me! Eat me!] is, by far, Billy ze Kick’s biggest song. Dedicated to psychedelic mushrooms, the novelty reggae song was hugely popular. With 600 000 units sold, it was one of the biggest successes of 1994. The melody is simple, the chorus is catchy, kids and parents loved it… Until one cop from the drugs department decided to start an investigation for “incitement to use drugs”. Luckily, the case was dismissed but harm was done: the media let go off the band, family weren’t coming anymore, etc. 

Another one of their stoner anthems is O C B named after a brand of cigarette paper and dedicated to smoking hashish. Apart from drug-related activities, most of the first nine songs are located within the realm of political rock, including social commentaries and anarchist takes that have sometimes aged poorly: lots of questionable foreign accents.

Un spectacle de plus [trad: One more show], a song about a loser watching the Olympics on TV, is obviously influenced by Guy Debord’s la Société du Spectacle [trad: The Society of the Spectacle], a “seminal text for the Situationist movement” according to Wikipedia. The last song of this portion, l’Adjudant Géreux [a wordplay on shady officer], is an abrasive anti-cop song. 

When I was researching for this article, I discovered that the last seven tracks were in fact the soundtrack for their short movie called The Killer's Trip. The homemade, self released movie can still be found on Youtube. 

Billy ze Kick plays the blond and androgynous protagonist clashing against enigmatic characters during her quest for artifacts, potions and herbs in a cyberpunk demonic world. Filmed in Rennes and played by the various members of Les Gamins en Folie, the short film, inspired by Stanley Kubrick, Lewis Carroll and Atari videogames, is pretty cheap but has its charm.

It makes perfect sense because the album slowly evolves into psychedelic territories during its second half, embracing tabletop role-playing scenarios with enigmas, adventures and a complicated lore. For example, the verb “encraouder” [slang for to bewitch or to damn], used multiple times, derives apparently from the Breton language (don’t quote me on that).

So, Billy Ze Kick & les Gamins en Folie really is half a concept album and half a compilation of the Gamins en Folie scrawny répertoire. The record took several years to be written and recorded on cheap 4 or 8 track recorders.

It was never supposed to grow big enough to be noticed by people outside of Rennes. First, the band released the record themselves on cassette tape then CD and unexpectedly sold 10 000 of them! Because of that, they were scheduled to play during les Transmusicales in Rennes, a long-running festival proud to always present a line-up full of future stars. In 1993, Billy Ze Kick were programmed to play alongside Björk, Jamiroquai and Ben Harper. It was enough to attract Shaman, a short-lived French subsidiary of the historic record company PolyGram, who was absorbed in 1998 into the Universal Music Group. 

They went on to sell 400 000 units of the album in a couple of years (it’s the platinum certification!). A huge success, especially for such a volatile band, that will provoke the end of it. Last July, Nathalie Cousin talked to 20 Minutes about the move to a major company : “The rest of the band had reservations, but not me. I wanted to get out of Rennes, get away from this rather small community, meet other musicians and go on tour”.

Where are they now?

Billy Ze Kick’s second album, without les Gamins en Folie, was a solo record released in 1996 named Paniac. On this one, you can find a young guitarist called Matthieu Chedid, who will later be known as -M-, a superstar on his own. Paniac is a more straightforward French Rock album, where the novelty reggae songs almost always fall short. Even after the success of the first record and another PolyGram release, it did poorly (not more than 15000 units). 

Nonetheless, Nathalie Cousin is still the only one believing in the goodwill accumulated on the first record’s success. She has released more albums, this time independently. One of them is even credited with the band, even though we don’t really know who’s in the band. She still has gigs here and there from time to time. 

You can find traces of Billy Ze Kick et Les Gamins en Folie on a huge number of French bands mixing comedy and songs with their own twist: Wriggles, Shaka Ponk, Caravan Palace, etc. Not the best music, but fun. Chief among them is Stupeflip, the one-man-collective dedication to bring a bunch of characters and a complex backstory to life can be seen as a direct follow-up of Billy ze Kick’s adventures.

I’m still very fond of this album myself. I’ve listened to it a lot during my childhood. The CD, released when I was 9, is still at my parent’s place (I’ve checked). It was a pleasure to listen to it again while working on this post. Listening to the next ones wasn’t that pleasant.