Rockets: Chrome-Clad Prophets of a Retro Future

From Paris to deep space - a silver-painted band of synth freaks found cult status, cosmic grooves, and gave me something to talk about at lunch.

Sometimes, falling down a weird musical rabbit hole is a good way to learn about a place, but I am not totally sure what this tells me about France except that they were ready for some spaceman music pretty early. 1970s Paris must have been a hell of a city.

In any case, I wasn’t looking for a band of bald men in chrome jumpsuits when I stumbled onto Rockets (I was actually looking to find the French Flash Gordon) but there they were, beaming in from some corner of French-Italian pop history. What started as a curiosity turned into a reminder that the future used to look a lot weirder

Finding france in the weird stuff.

This kind of thing becomes a way of discovering France, little by little. Each odd food, strange event, or forgotten band gives me something to talk about, and sometimes that helps me feel more grounded here. It’s a way to connect, maybe steer conversations a bit.

At some point, you need something more interesting to share than just the weather or what you’re having for lunch, even if those lunch chats go a long way in France.

So let’s talk about Rockets…

On the Road Again Rockets (1978)

On the Road Again was their first big hit, a cover of Canned Heat’s slow bluesy track. Rockets stripped it down while keeping it bluesy, layered in vocoders and made a slow-motion groove from outer space. It works.

It sold over a million copies. French and Italian teens stared at their TVs, unsure whether this was performance art or good music. Why not both?

Spacemen and Yesterday’s Sounds of Tomorrow

There’s weird, and then there’s Rockets, sometimes called Les Rockets, who really sold the idea that they were either from another planet, or definitely from some unusual corner of this one. In this case, they came from Paris.

Formed in Paris in 1974, Rockets had a low-budget space opera look with silver-painted bald heads, metallic jumpsuits, robotic stares and vocoders everywhere. The amount of polyester and thick face makeup must have had these guys sweating like hell with the slightest effort, but they never appeared without it: these guys wanted to be the future, or at least sound like it.

For obvious reasons, they performed with a lot of electronic instruments and a surprising number of gongs.

From 1976 to 1982, they released 7 albums, 13 singles, and sold millions, turning every show into a fog-drenched space ritual: lasers, synths, silver suits, and deadpan stares.

Unfortunately, it gets a bit rough when you steer away from their hits. Listening to some of their lesser-known songs (I’m looking at you, Mecanic Bionic and Future Woman…) can get into some rough listening, but they remain fully committed to the space sound, all over an oddly jangly guitar section.

With each new album, they performed hundreds of shows, while releasing a new album at lest once a year in their “silver age.”

Then they disappeared for decades while their fan based waited. They reunited in the early 2000s and have been performing again, remaining especially popular in Italy and Russia, where they had been fixtures at the huge Russian festival, the Disco of the 80s Festival (Дискотека 80-х), which has featured many of the artists I’ve talked about on this page, including Amanda Lear.

How Rockets Out-Spaced Everyone

There were a few costumed or themed bands like this at the time, but few went quite as far as Rockets. Kiss had comic book paint, Bowie played a glam alien, Alice Cooper had some horror show stuff, and Parliament-Funkadelic called themselves “Afronauts, traveling the Mothership,” but none fully transformed like the silver-painted, chrome-clad Rockets.

They didn’t chase cool. They weren’t ironic.

The Rockets were built for spectacle: laser-lit stadium shows, flying saucer stages, full-body chrome. Iffy video effects and total commitment.

In a world that rewards polish and relatability, Rockets gave us confusion and spectacle, but solid music that has stood the test of time and has been influential on bands from Air to Daft Punk and really, just about any band that wanted to be a bit more Out There.

The classic lineup featured Christian Le Bartz on vocals, Alain Maratrat on guitar and keys, “Little” Gérard L’Her on bass and vocals, Fabrice Quagliotti on keyboards, and Alain Groetzinger on drums. Quagliotti is the only remaining member from the original lineup and still performs.

After On the Road Again, came Electric Delight in ’79 on the album Plasteroid, a slow futuristic groove building up to a rock eurodisco trance, lyrics buried under digital fuzz - a dance track for androids drifting in space debris.

(In the video, that bazooka sparkler would likely be banned from shows now, or at kept away from the front row).

They started touring extensively. With Plasteroid, Rockets became a presence in European clubs and music television shows.

Galactica 1980

Galactica uses every single tool of electronic manipulation possibly available to musicians in this period - and they seem to love it. I enjoy the lead singer’s responses to various noises in the video.

The video effects looked like the types that were spoofed in Tapeheads, but it’s immersive. This track is my favorite at the moment - they got even more eurodisco sounding, but never lost their alien vibe.

Galactica sold a million copies in Italy alone. They played 200 dates on that tour, live every night, under the lights, the chrome, swatched in polyester and alien shoulder pads.

a lost album ending a silver age

Rockets also has a fan-famous lost album, except that it truly was lost after years of being enshrined in fan mythology: Atomic (1982). these are in fact, very rare, but it seems a dispute with their record company kept it shelved. It was a darker, moodier record and they didn’t want Rockets to change style. It got out somehow, fans traded bootlegs and then later, clips online.

But Atomic also marked the end of the original lineup, the end of the bands “silver period.”

Did I miss anything?

Has anyone out there managed to see these guys in concert?

Let me know what you think - and if you know any other strange bands of the 1970s that everyone should know about!

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Go further with Rockets!

• An 1976 Interview where they’re explaining their whole schtick.

• Cosmic Race – Everyone looks bored, but it works. Space travel probably is mostly waiting.
  Groovy background music here

• Venus Rhapsody – beautifully odd digital effects, even if it seems like the lead singer doesn’t quite know what to do with himself during the instrumental.
  Watch here

• Their live performance in 2022 in Verona, Italy. Really, there is so much more to their history - gone are the shaved heads, but the silver makeup remains They remain massively popular in Eastern Europe as well.