CANNES, France -- "Let me tell you a little bit about what it was like," said the slight, leathery, oddly familiar Englishman on the stage of the Palais Stphanie. "It was 1971. Nixon was in the White House. The war in Vietnam was raging on. Eddy Merckx had won the Tour de France. But you won't see anything about any of that in the film. We didn't know anything about it. We were in the basement of a house in Villefranche, making a record."