France Gall 1947-2018

Photo c. 1966. Click to enlarge.

Hello all, I've had to have a little break from blogging, so since this is my first post of the year, I want to belatedly wish you all a Happy New Year. Unfortunately, the year had a very sad start with the loss of an artist I hold very dear, France Gall. I have some special France Gall-related things to post, coming up soon. For now, I just wanted to share a few words about what France Gall has meant to me – if I can even begin to capture such a thing.

When I first heard France Gall's sixties music, my mind was blown. It was everything I loved in pop music, turned up to eleven. A lot of people describe something similar on discovering her for the first time. Gall has clearly meant a lot to so many, her infectious joy reaching beyond any particular time or place. She got to make some of the best, original music in sixties French pop (unlike her contemporaries, she hardly did any cover songs), and there are indeed many to credit for the brilliance of her songs. But there is undeniably something so special and appealing about Gall that made those songs truly amazing.

Image via Discogs

I love a good depressing seasonal tune, and it doesn't much bleaker than one set in a desolate, post-apocalyptic world!

'Juste quelques flocons qui tombent' ("Just a few flakes falling") isn't really a Christmas song, but is apparently associated enough with this time of year to be included on Christmas compilations. This is curious, because the lyrics don't reference anything related to Noël, and from what I can find, the track seems to have been released not around Christmas time but in February, 1967. Perhaps the association comes from its snowy imagery, or the chiming bells that unusually punctuate its psych-folk-pop sound, or perhaps it's because of the story of how Antoine came to write the song.

The idea for the song came to Antoine on Christmas Eve, 1965, according to Anthologie des tubes rock: Soixante ans de musique pour les kids (François Grimpet & Daniel Lesueur, Camion Blanc, 2016), This was shortly before he would score a huge hit with 'Les Élucubrations d'Antoine' early the following year, becoming not only an overnight pop superstar, but a major force in reshaping the French pop scene in the post-yé-yé years. At this point however, he had a debut EP under his belt that hadn't made much of a splash, and was still a struggling musician. Having performed that evening for a modest fee, Antoine had just enough to dine out with his girlfriend but nothing left over for transport, so they footed it home. Walking toward the Marais district, the couple looked back to see a snow-covered Paris, nothing visible except their footprints in the snow, leaving them with the feeling of being the only two people in the world. With his songwriter's imagination and having keenly absorbed the pacifist themes of the likes of Bob Dylan, Antoine soon turned this image into a song about a world decimated by nuclear war, where he and his lover are the only survivors.  

If I'm understanding the lyrics correctly, the final verse sees Antoine comparing himself and his girlfriend to Adam and Eve, but cautioning they must avoid repopulating the world – since the last world was such a flop! What a sentiment to hear in a track that gets billed as one of "Les plus belles chansons de Noël"!

Here's a scene from a 1967 French film, Les Poneyttes, in which France's biggest pop star, Johnny Hallyday, performs 'Le Mauvais Rêve' ('Bad Dream'), dressed and painted as a golden statue. I'm not sure exactly why (not having found subtitles for this film), but I'd guess it's a commentary on the god-like status afforded the idoles. The lyrics describe a nightmare that starts in a desolate city, empty but for some zombie-like inhabitants, and ends in a loveless void, with Hallyday assuring himself "it's only a dream... a bad dream". So the idea here is probably to contrast the hollow trappings of stardom and fan worship with an inner fear of true loneliness. It's quite a spectacular, effective scene that suits the epic feel of the song, in what otherwise strikes me as a fairly silly, mediocre film.

In part one, I shared a video of Uta Taeger performing 'Hier, aujourd'hui, demain', the A-side of her 1969 single, on sixties French television. The B-side is the superb 'Baudelaire':

Here, Uta recites the title poet's 'Recueillement' from Les Fleurs du mal over a potent psych rock jam, brimming with fuzzy, heavy guitars, phaser effects and rhythmic electric organ. The song's credits read 'musique de Groscolas', referring to Pierre Groscolas, at the time a songwriter, session musician and backing vocalist, most notably for Eddy Mitchell. Groscolas, who was also a founding member of the sixties band Le Cœur, would go on to find success as a solo singer-songwriter in the early seventies, releasing more standard fare than the striking 'Baudelaire' shows he was capable of conjuring up.

The Shangri-Las

'Baudelaire' is an interesting pairing with the A-side, a cover of The Shangri-Las' haunting 1966 single 'Past, Present and Future'. An unusual girl group release, the original is sombre and stripped back, its arrangement mostly a simple piano accompaniment borrowed from Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata. Over this, lead vocalist Mary Weiss forlornly speak-sings a soliloquoy that captures the devastation and shock of first heartbreak. Uta's version has a slightly sped up tempo and there's a lighter touch to her vocal delivery, but the cover otherwise sticks close to its source in tone and theme, the lyrics a mostly faithful translation.

Flip the record over and the change in style is stark. It would seem 'Baudelaire' has nothing in common with the A-side, save for the spoken word vocals. Here you have a psyched-up reading of a weighty, once-banned poem backing an angsty teen ballad about failed first romance. 'Baudelaire' is just the sort of wild experiment that sometimes gets smuggled onto a B-side, where an artist can let loose and express something that the main cut, intended for radio play and chart success, doesn't allow. But looking more closely at the two songs, they may be more of a deliberate pairing than it would seem. It turns out there's actually an intriguing thematic continuity between them. And though the A-side is the more radio-friendly, it's a curious choice for a debut single. A teen pop song from three years prior – an eternity in pop years back then – that didn't quite crack the American top fifty, covered by a nearly thirty-year-old actress, wasn't a likely formula for a hit record. These two things taken together make me wonder if this wasn't more of an artistic endeavour than an attempt to launch a new female pop star. Perhaps it was even, in a sense, a concept single.

Eurovision has wrapped up for another year, but thanks to the magic of the internet, pretty much every performance lives on forever – for better or worse. Amid the endless amounts of cheese and sap, there are some truly worthwhile gems to be found. You can check out my Eurovision tag for a few of my vintage picks that generally don't make it onto lists of nostalgic favourites.

Today I want to revisit one such entry: 'Boum badaboum', performed by Minouche Barelli, a French singer who represented Monaco in 1967. Written by Serge Gainsbourg, it's a rather bizarre number for the contest, one that certainly stands out among the typical mawkish ballads and emptily jaunty tunes. In a bold, shouty vocal style, backed by a booming rhythm and disorienting strings, Barelli brazenly sings of her desire to experience all life has to offer in the face of an expected nuclear apocalypse. It's perhaps one of the first genuinely weird entries in a contest that now doesn't feel complete without at least one a year.

'Boum badaboum' was the second of Gainsbourg's three contributions to Eurovision. In 1965, France Gall took home first prize for Luxembourg with Gainsbourg's 'Poupée de cire, poupée de son'. The song was innovative for the contest, with its uptempo rhythm and lyrics rich with layered meaning. Gainsbourg pulled off a seemingly impossible feat with this entry: he impressed Eurovision judges accustomed to more conservative, sentimental fare; he didn't compromise his literate, chanson-inspired lyricism1; he deftly satirised teen pop; and he created a successful modern pop song that appealed to and expanded Gall's young fanbase. The song poetically reflects on the artifice of a pop idol, and the gulf between the realms a performer like Gall inhabited, that of the worldy, confident figure in her songs and the limited, sheltered reality of her lived experiences. While the song "unobtrusively plays on words to deconstruct the yéyé industry"2, there's an empathy alongside Gainsbourg's wryness that gives it poignancy. Gall's later recollections of her life as a pop star during this era suggest she found Gainsbourg's lyrics painfully apt.

Though a less sophisticated effort, it seems with 'Boum Badaboum', Gainsbourg was continuing to attempt to push the boundaries of what was acceptable to Eurovision audiences and judges. Nineteen-year-old Barelli sings of wanting to experience life before the world ends in a nuclear explosion. She pleads for a little more time to have the chance to fall in love, and, it's heavily implied, experience sexual pleasure:

While flipping through my collection of vintage French magazines the other day, I came across an interesting little segment in the October 1966 issue of Salut les copains, France's enormously popular and influential youth music magazine that launched in 1962 to complement the radio show of the same name. It features Françoise Hardy sharing her ten current favourite songs, as part of a running segment where popular music stars were asked to create their own 'hit parade'.

Hardy's tastes encompassed a variety of popular genres of the time, from the easy listening of Frank Sinatra and Petula Clark to the garage rock of Syndicate of Sound and The Troggs, whose 'Wild Thing' she calls "breathtaking". Most of the picks here are from the USA and UK, as was more fashionable by that time than homegrown music. Hardy, though, was no bandwagon jumper and had long been a fan of Anglo-American sounds. She often had the chance to hear new British music when she ducked across the channel to record an album or play some venues, and she mentions buying Syndicate of Sound's 'Little Girl' in London and seeing Dusty Springfield perform 'Goin' Back' on Ready Steady Go! A couple of her fellow Gallic singer-songwriters are represented here in Michel Polnareff ("She could have cited any other of Michel's songs, she loves them all equally"), and Antoine, who had debuted nearly a year earlier and transformed the local scene.

I've playlisted her choices so you can immerse yourself in what the wonderful Ms Hardy was grooving to 50 years ago:

I was hoping to do a Christmas mix this year but haven't had a chance, so I thought I'd share one I made very last minute last year. It features Christmas-themed and seasonal yé-yé and rock songs from 1960s France and Québec.

Tracklist

1. Alice Dona - Le Noël des copains (France, 1964)
2. Jacques Dutronc - La Fille du Père Noël (France, 1966)
3. Les Frères Flamingo - C'est Noël dans notre village (Québec)
4. Les Milady's - Les Anges dans nos campagnes (Québec, 1967)
5. Les Bel Canto - Le Père Noël a pris un coup (Québec, 1967)
6. Les Loups - Cette étoile (Québec, 1965)
7. Cathie Arel - En rêvant à Noël (France, 1962)
8. Richard Anthony - Dis moi pourquoi Noël (France, 1961)
9. Guy Boucher - Neige à gogo (Québec, 1965)
10. Christie Laume - L'Adorable Femmes des neiges (France, 1967)
11. Michèle Richard - Cloches d'argent (Québec, 1965)
12. Les Intimes - Nous allons nous amuser (Québec, 1965)
13. Les Baronets - Cet hiver je n'aurai plus froid (Québec, 1965)
14. Les Roche Martin - Il est temps de penser à la neige (France, 1967)
15. Christophe - Noël (France, 1965)
16. Delphine Desyeux - L'hiver (France, 1967)
17. France Gall - Chasse-neige (France, 1971)
18. Les Chantels - La Fée des étoiles (Québec, 1966)

In case you were wondering, "dans le vent" (literally, "in the wind") is a term that was used in France at the time to denote something was hip, trendy, in fashion. A source I have from 1967 says the term came about as an equivalent to the English "up to date", which other terms like "avant-garde" and "à la page" didn't quite convey. If you've seen any sixties French youth magazines from the time like Salut les copains or Mademoiselle age tendre, you'll see the phrase plastered all over its pages, in article headings and advertisements. I'm not sure exactly when it started but it was around by 1963 and had really taken off by 1964. The Beatles film A Hard Day's Night was released as 4 garçons dans le vent in France and Quatre gars dans le vent in Québec – essentially, "Four hip guys".

'Noël à Vaugirard' was a short film that appeared in an episode of Dim Dam Dom, broadcast on December 23, 1966. Starring Serge Gainsbourg as Joseph and Chantal Goya as Marie (Mary), it's a comedic telling of the Nativity story updated for its young, modern audience, filmed at the abbatoirs of Vaugirard.

It's been exactly 50 years since this odd Christmas sketch first aired on French TV, so I thought it might be a good time to revisit it, this time in more detail than when I first posted it ten years ago. I have also realised the version I originally shared is abridged, so wanted to post the full version, which is four-and-a-half minutes longer. 'Noël à Vaugirard' was a short film that appeared in an episode of Dim Dam Dom, broadcast on December 23, 1966. Starring Serge Gainsbourg as Joseph and Chantal Goya as Marie (Mary), it's a comedic telling of the Nativity story updated for its young, modern audience, filmed at the abbatoirs of Vaugirard. It's a light, throwaway kind of piece, but irreverent in its own way, with some surreal and highly creative moments that reflect the unique approach of the program.

Premiering in March 1965, Dim Dam Dom was the flagship show of the newly launched second television channel of France's national broadcasting service, ORTF. It aired once a month on Sunday afternoon, for a total of 70 episodes until the end of its run in 1971. Daisy de Galard, who had worked at Elle magazine for fourteen years, was approached by Roger Stéphane, a journalist and an advisor to the head of ORTF, Claude Contamine, to create a television magazine aimed at women. Though she had no experience in television, the fledgling producer set out to make something different to the usual fare offered to female audiences at the time. She created a show that was modern and innovative, taking many risks both aesthetically and in terms of subjects the show covered. The program not only showcased some of the most popular entertainers of the time, but was a springboard for many young journalists and directors. The name Dim Dam Dom was an abbreviation for Dimanche (because it was broadcast on Sundays), Dames (since it was primarily targeted at women), D'hommes (because it also featured segments concerning men, and aimed to hold their interest as well). A hit from its first broadcast, and successful later in reruns, Dim Dam Dom is remembered with a great deal of respect as a pioneering program.

Fans of the peculiar charms of French-born songstress and actress Claudine Longet may know the beguiling 'Electric Moon' from her 1971 album, We've Only Just Begun. The song was written by Donovan – whose brilliance and versatility as a songwriter tends to be seriously underrated, in my opinion – and produced and arranged by Nick DeCaro. Assigned by A&M Records to work on Longet's music in 1966, DeCaro was the chief architect behind her brand of lush easy-listening, arranging and/or producing seven of her eight albums (including 1974's Sugar Me, which remained unissued until 1993). Andy Williams, Longet's then-husband, liked DeCaro's work so much, he hired him to work on his own records.

1. Claudine Longet - Electric Moon (1971)
   
2. Claudine Longet - Como la luna (1971)

Longet also released a Spanish language cover of 'Electric Moon' as 'Como la luna'. She appeared on a show called Estudio Abertio on Spain's TVE around early October 1971, performing this and the B-side 'Mucho tiempo mas', a cover of Linda Ronstadt's 'Long, Long Time'.

Donovan never released a version himself but, according to this EIL listing, did record a demo acetate for Longet. The only recording of Donovan performing the song to have surfaced is in a 1970 film called There Is An Ocean, which was unreleased until its inclusion in the 2005 box set, To Try For The Sun.