The sudden disappearance, Friday at the age of 65, of Tai-Luc, book seller and charismatic leader of the French underground rock group La Souris Déglingué, was announced on Sunday morning on the Meta page (ex-Facebook) of rock critic Philippe Manoeuvre. , confirming “horrible news: the death of this punk soldier who joined The City of Angels.”
Tai-Luc, whose full name is Nguyen Tan Tai-Luc, was born on August 10, 1958, in Suresnes, to a Vietnamese father and a French mother. From 1976, the year the group was created at the Hoche high school in Versailles, until 2015, with Les Toits du Palace, the final album which revived the rock’n’roll rage of its beginnings, La Souris déglingué, often abbreviated to LSD, was a veteran of French rock largely ignored by the media but benefiting from the unfailing support of a hard core of supporters united within the Raya Fan Club.
In around twenty albums, the “lysergic” formation contributed to the emergence of an original style, borrowing as much from rock’n’roll and punk as from reggae, rap and Far Eastern music. A whole generation will recognize themselves in it. In 2007, he recorded a very beautiful solo album, Jukeboxe. Fifteen songs drawn from his family history, alongside nuggets of the French repertoire by Pierre Mac Orlan or Charles Aznavour, as well as French adaptations of American standards.
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For the band’s 35th anniversary, on May 9, 2015, La Souris déglingué took the stage of the Olympia for the second time in its career, surrounded by the big names of the French underground scene. The first time, a few years earlier, it was the debutants of the group NTM who opened the ball in the legendary venue.
Since 1996, in parallel with his artistic career, Tai-Luc had become a teacher in the South-East Asia and Pacific department at the Institute of Oriental Languages (Inalco), in charge of the taï-kadaï diachrony and synchrony and initiation course. in the tham-pali of Laos. In 2000, he defended his doctoral thesis devoted to the Lü language of Sip Song Panna.
Since 2018, Tai-Luc had put aside his musical career and set up as a bookseller at 2, quai de Gesvres, a stone’s throw from Paris city hall. A profession that allowed him to reconcile his taste for human contact with his passion for Asia and love of books: “I have always read and bought a lot of them. Today I am selling them. »
The rocker’s boxes presented a selection of graphic fanzines and some rare vinyl records. One box was dedicated to the Celtic world, a tribute to her maternal heritage. But most of his merchandise concerned Asia: Vietnamese or Cambodian magazines, essays, newspapers or comics from before 1975 or works evoking Indochina.
According to one of his relatives, Jean-François “Camboui”, drummer of La Souris, he had undertaken a few days ago to bring a whole stock of books into his Parisian apartment, in preparation for the second-hand booksellers’ move in June 2024, scheduled by the police headquarters, as part of securing the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games. A painful and dangerous effort which probably proved fatal for Tai-Luc, who has been seriously asthmatic for several years.
On the freezing evening of November 17, with a small crowd of second-hand book sellers and their supporters, Tai-Luc was at 11, quai de la Tournelle to demonstrate his hostility to an operation to dismantle and reassemble three boxes of books. bookseller carried out at great expense by the City of Paris, as a feasibility test.
