WORKING ON THE RAILROAD

PUBLIC PERFORMANCE IN PARIS

Unless pan-handling and mugging count as art forms, there's little culture  or commerce in most most European subways. The Paris Metro is, however, an exception. Decades ago, the Regie Autonome de Transport Parisian (RATP) which runs the system, decided that, as long as people were going to use its tunnels to make money, they might as well license them and pocket some for themselves.

As a result, the Metro is a sort of extended market. It's nothing to pick up a copy of Le Monde at St. Michel, buy mangos and pineapples from the Caribbean fruit stand in the tunnels at LaMotte-Picquet-Grenelle, have a sandwich and coffee at Invalides, then grab a packet of Vietnamese spring rolls from the lady at the bottom of the stairs at Chatalet. If you're in the market for handbags, jewelery, cameras , t-shirts or a three-course meal and don't much care about quality, you can find them all on the Metro.

And then there are the buskers. 

Paris, like most cities, has a long tradition of street performance. For some, it was advertising. Édith Piaf became a pavement singer to attract spectators for her father, a street acrobat and contortionist. In the 1920s, song pluggers cruised working-class suburbs. Selecting a courtyard with good acoustics, they sang a few choruses of the latest ballad to coax people to their windows, then sold them a copy of the sheet music.

Albert Prejean as the somg plugger in SOUS LES TOITS DE PARIS, 1930.

These performers seldom lasted long. Singing in all weathers battered the untrained voice into a grating growl - which, providentially, proved well suited to the songs of poverty and despair written by Aristide Bruant and Jehan Rictus, both of whom wrote of the streets but found their audience and their voice in the cabarets of Montmartre.

Britain’s Henry VIII swore to “whip unlicensed minstrels and players.” By comparison, today’s buskers have it easy. They still face a variety of risks, including arrest for disturbing the peace, being hassled and robbed by rivals, or mocked and abused by drunken football fans. But pan-handlers no longer fight them for a good spot nor demand a payoff to move on.

Skirmishes like these, during the late 'eighties, turned into wars between rival teams of musicians, and moved the city to introduce a licencing system. Since then, every six months, a jury of RATP staff listens to around a thousand applicants and selects three hundred. They alone are permitted to play on the Metro, though only in the corridors, not on platforms or aboard trains. (This doesn’t stop those unofficial performers who haunt the complex subway intersection at Chatelet, risking a fine and confiscation of their instruments to serenade commuters on the trains themselves.)

Licensing has improved the quality. There are fewer doleful gents with a guitar, a harmonica frame bent from a coathanger, and a repertoire of old Dylan songs. Instead, the Metro booms to whole orchestras of drum-flailing Antillais or Peruvian octets in ponchos, with pan pipes, bulbous guitars, drums, and a selection of CDs, posters and t-shirts laid out at their feet. 

The last auditions, just concluded, suggest that novelty counts for more than talent. The trick is to catch the eye or ear; to make people stop. Once they notice you, it’s more likely they will reach for a coin.

Among the latest successes, one singer courts attention by performing in a wedding dress. An unusual instrument helps. An African flailing a huge djembe drum is rejected as being too loud and his bulky instrument likely to impede foot traffic. Keyboards and drum machines likewise fail. But there’s approval for the girl who accompanies herself on a pink electro-acoustic ukulele, one who plays the electric saw, and another who plucks Sweden’s national instrument, the nyckelharpa. Arnaud Moyencourt, who’s been hauling his barrel organ in and out of the Metro since 1992,  is a perennial. “He represents the Paris of old,” said a juror. “I would definitely stop for him.”

Why do they bother? It can’t be the money; an average day’s take is €25. Although a few have done so, most harbour no ambitions to make it to the Big Time. Maybe it’s like that joke about the man who swept up elephant excrement in the circus. Offered a less noisome job, he turned it down. “What? And leave show business?”