Living the dream - a new life in France with Les Malfonctionnaires

A barn-full of French twenty-somethings dance to the Beatles, the Stones and Motown. The band is a little older and from Chicago, London, Stafford

The dancers are mostly young and French. The music, distinctly Anglo-Saxon, comes from the 60s, 70s and 80s, played by people who’ve already led musical lives in Britain and the United States.



June is festival time when French towns and villages emerge blinking into the sunlight and make up for months of hibernation. And so it is in Quillan, a small town at the head of the Aude valley 50 kilometres south of Carcassonne.

This is a place which straddles the river, sandwiched between the Corbières hills to the east and the mighty Pyrenees to the west. In summer it lives from festival to festival. The season starts with “Artistes à suivre” when any remotely public space becomes an improvised arts centre.

One of them is Brasserie les Prés en Bulles, an artisan brewery which hides away in a converted barn where people come to look at the beer and then drink it. Tonight, though, it’s party time.

The band, Les Malfonctionnaires, are all British apart from bass guitarist Stan, who’s from Chicago.

If only King George the Third hadn't gone the full Gaddafi back in 1776, firing on his own people and hiding the country’s money in an offshore bank account, Stan might also have been one of her Majesty’s subjects.

He had a classical education, studying cello and composition at the University of Michigan. Then followed a period in New York including work with Madonna before Stan found himself in London. There Britishness was thrust upon him and he met wife Deb and played with Arthur Brown. Away from the band, Stan teaches, composes, records, lives and breathes music.

After spending her early life in Malta, singer Kate struggled to settle back in the United Kingdom. Some years later she met the band’s drummer and keyboard player Mark.

They reached a point where they found themselves searching for pastures new. France was accessible and offered a good environment for children.

Outside the band, Kate is an accomplished professional artist.
Deb has sung all her life. She spent 10 years performing with Emergency Exit Arts Theatre Company in London before the move across the Channel.

Here she combines being a songstress with making an imaginative and intriguing line in ceramics.

She and Stan swapped a three-roomed apartment in London for a house in the sun.


Eddie has played guitar for more than three decades. In his native Staffordshire in the English Midlands, he was a journalist, sub-editing a regional daily.

To progress, he’d have to move to London and start again at the bottom in Fleet Street. Or he could do something else.

The something else was writing and music, the best of both his worlds.
Mark has had a long involvement with experimental and world music, starting as a student in California in the late 1970s.

He's been pianist, composer, conductor, teacher, rock drummer and ethnomusicologist.

For 13 years, he was a lecturer in composition and world music at Birmingham City University. Now he lives in Limoux with singer Kate and their son, Ezra.


In another life, Stan and Mark lived just 500 metres from each other in New York where they worked on different projects with producer Brian Eno.

Later they would both move to the same district in London, frequenting the same people in the music business. One day they would both move to France. They never met.

The paths of these two lifelong musicians crossed for the first time in Limoux.

The group have been friends for years, but now they've achieved something new with Les Malfonctionnaires. Their strong sense of musical identity and clearly-defined repertoire crosses cultural boundaries. The proof was there in the French barn crammed with gyrating bodies.

Above all this story’s about people of working age with young families, who’ve risked everything, burned their boats, to start a new life in another country.

Related links :

• http://www.lesmalfonctionnaires.com/