Potemkine

Taken from: http://alain.lebon4.free.fr/soleil/potemkine-gb.html . In 1971, in Toulouse, SouthWest France, Charles and Gilles GOUBIN, two brothers and music fans, decided to form a band. They started out playing covers of rock standards of the time, numbers from the Rolling Stones, Deep Purple, etc... In 1973, they discovered jazz rock, particularly the MAHAVISHNU ORCHESTRA, WEATHER REPORT and Miles DAVIS. This discovery laid the ground for their future compositions.

In 1971, in Toulouse, SouthWest France, Charles and Gilles GOUBIN, two brothers and music fans, decided to form a band. They started out playing covers of rock standards of the time, numbers from the Rolling Stones, Deep Purple, etc...

In 1973, they discovered jazz rock, particularly the MAHAVISHNU ORCHESTRA, WEATHER REPORT and Miles DAVIS. This discovery laid the ground for their future compositions. They chose the name POTEMKINE for the strength and power it evokes, as well as for its phonetic qualities and Koba?an overtones (at the time, the band attended many Magma concerts). As early as 1974, they recorded a self-produced single : "MYST?RE/RICTUS". Charles and Gilles had then been joined by a third brother, Michel, along with Maurice BATAILLE and Xavier VIDAL. In October 1975, the fourth brother, Philippe, joined on drums and Dominique DUBUISSON on bass. POTEMKINE released "F?TUS", its first LP, another self-production distributed on the Pole label. Touring began in the wake of the LP, first in small suburban venues, but they soon found themselves playing bigger audiences thanks to their growing success and to TARTEMPION, a non-profit organization putting up concerts.

For the second LP, POTEMKINE, now turned into a trio, decided to push their musical quest further and to fuse jazz rock with early 20th century contemporary music which had by then become one of their major influences (VARESE, SATIE, DEBUSSY...) The result of those sonic experiments, the LP "TRITON", was released in 1977. The title of the LP comes from the musical chord of the same name which in the Middle Ages was considered as the musical work of the devil (during the Spanish Inquisition, musicians were even burned at the stake for having played that particular chord). The chord was only reintroduced in Western music at the beginning of the 20th century, in particular by STRAVINSKY and BARTOK.

After the recording of "TRITON", a network of bands started to form, with ART ZOYD and MOSAIK in Northern France and ETRON FOU LELOUBLAN in the South, each band organizing concerts for the others. Touring increased, with POTEMKINE playing as many as 100 gigs in one year and opening for MAGMA on several occasions. On stage, the band would fuse the music from "TRITON" with high-energy improvised passages set in a more rock-oriented structure. As this was going down very well with audiences, POTEMKINE decided to explore that direction further. In January 1978, this new orientation was confirmed by the recording of the LP "NICOLAS II", where POTEMKINE developed a high-class, energy-driven European jazz rock recorded in the spirit of a live act. The band was then composed of the three brothers, Charles, Michel and Philippe, and Doudou DUBUISSON. August of the same year saw them opening for SHAKTI, an evening culminating with John Mc LAUGHLIN's warm congratulations at the end of their set. Touring continued with ever-growing success until 1979, the year when Charles GOUBIN died in a road accident on June 11th.

POTEMKINE resumed touring though, and in August played a memorable concert in front of a crowd of 8000 in Bilbao, Spain, with Pierre BENICHOU on guitar and Gilles GOUBIN on cello. The band then had a break, touring having become more difficult with the times. In 1980, Gilles and Michel GOUBIN decided to turn professional and constitute the central unit of POTEMKINE as a quartet with R?my SARRAZIN on bass and Jean-Marc BELKADI on guitar. That line-up went on for a little over a year and disappeared in 1982 without having ever recorded. Apart from the original recordings, the two CDs "TRITON" and "NICOLAS II" contain the numbers from the "F?TUS" LP as well as those from the single "MYST?RE/RICTUS", thus offering POTEMKINE's complete recorded legacy.