And now, ladies and gentlemen: Tooookamak!
"Beatles" and "Rolling Stones" were already taken. So when Marc Gallimard was deciding on a name for his rock band in 2005, "Tokamak" came to mind. The three-syllable word sounded just right and fit the band's musical style—"progressive rock with a touch of metal."
A primary school teacher in Marignane, Marc had encountered the word "tokamak" in a science-fiction thriller called The Stone Council. It was the number one best-selling French book of 2000.
In the book the tokamak was a stone ring, located deep in the Mongolian steppe. The ring managed an improbable mix of fusion and psychic experiments that ended in utter chaos.
Still, "Tokamak" was a promising name to Marc and the band's original line-up: Marc on guitar, Thierry on drums, and Marcel, Marc's father on guitar. "We started by playing standards and it took us some time and a lot of work to begin writing our own stuff and finding our identity."
Tokamak is not a big name yet, but on the local rock scene the band has built a following. Their first concept album, "Evolution," is scheduled for release in April. "It's about the history of mankind," says Marc.
Now that they've heard more about what a "Tokamak" is, Marc and his partners Romain, Thierry, Laurent and Marcel have found new reasons to justify their choice. Says Laurent, an engineer in microelectronics and the band's singer: "We all have different musical backgrounds and experiences, which we fuse in Tokamak... and onstage, let me tell you, we get almost as hot as a fusion plasma!"