Valjean (1958 - 1978)

In 1958, Valjean is arrested and in the following year, sent to prison

Between 1959 - 1978, Valjean is in prison. He misses the Summer of Love, psychedelia, the moonwalk, the civil rights movement, the legalisation of homosexuality, the Vietnam war, the Beatles, the sexual revolution, the Nouvelle Vague, Woodstock, Watergate, red peril, hippies, Mai 68, the Prague Spring, the Great Leap Forward, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the pill, Star Trek, the wall of sound, Motown, Mandela's imprisonment, second wave feminism, the death of JFK, the invention of BBC2, James Bond movies, colour television, mods, polyester, Lady Chatterley's Lover, teenagers.

In 1978, Valjean is released from prison. Marginalised by his passport, he is taken in by the bishop and given a change of direction.

In the winter of 1986, Valjean escapes prison and returns to rescue Cosette.

The Mix

  1. AGiftFromTodd vs Vinny Marchi - Hostile Government Takeover
  2. Billie Holiday - Everything Happens To Me
  3. B.B. King - Why Does Everything Happen To Me
  4. Johnny Cash - Folsom Prison Blues
  5. Frank Sinatra - Willow Weep for Me
  6. Pink Floyd - Hey You
  7. Peter Gabriel - Intruder
  8. Teddy Pendergrass - You Can't Hide From Yourself
  9. Virginia Astley - A Father
For a father isn't blood
For a father is love

Liner Notes

Album cover photograph taken by Bert Hardy, capturing life at Strangeways prison in the late 1940s - but one step intervening between the convent and prison.

For the Preface - consciously datestamped by Hugo with his time and location, to situate the reader within a time and place - I asked friends for advice on the most 2025 song they could possibly think of. I hate Hostile Government Takeover, it's perfect: a tiktok user's soulful vocals remixed as an EDM banger which went viral, embodying a kind of weary-jolly-ironic-distance-and-internet-apathy mood, a song that - from content, to context - really could never have existed at any other moment than right now. i endorse nothing about this song.

The key goal for this album is the sharp contrast between the music of '58 and '78, an album of two halves. Although Valjean's incarceration is conceptually short - a thing that could be communicated in one song - I dwell on the 1950s because it takes up time. Not much happens, but it takes forever.

Fortunately, the 1950s were an excellent year for classic blues: Billie Holiday and B.B. King (and Howling Wolf, whose How Many More Years didn't quite make the cut), expressing Valjean's downslippery life up until his arrest. What a stroke of luck that Johnny Cash, one of the most iconic balladeers of the downtrodden, released one of his many great songs about men behind bars this year. Frank Sinatra Sings for Only the Lonely is one of my favourite albums. It sounds like 2am heartbreak.

The original draft had a 'shock' contrast between a 50s and a 70s sound but in the final week I reflected on a recommendation and went for a more interminable, imperceptible shift in time but without change in mood into Hey You by Pink Floyd. I love the lyrical evocation of becoming numb to it all and i think Hugo would have loved to riff off Valjean constructing the 'wall' of the concept album name. It's a great Valjean song.

It was a wrench to cut Peter Gabriel's Not One Of Us for the people of Digne turning Valjean out of doors, but from the same album is the creepy masterpiece Intruder and the unsettling feeling of a stranger being in your home and taking your things.

Teddy Pendergrass is an easter egg for fans of the cult Les Miserables disco musical, Boys From the Backroom. After 34 minutes of blues and abrasive post-prog, the bishop's intervention is at long last, a touch of euphoria.

The album ends with another leap eight years forward, to the lyrically scathing dream pop of Virginia Astley as Valjean becomes a father.