Photo: Mademoiselle Age Tendre, November 1969.

Johnny Hallyday
15 June 1943 – 5 December 2017

French pop has lost its long-reigning king. It feels inconceivable – both because the young, beautiful Johnny of fifty years ago lives perpetually in iconic images and sounds, seeming forever 'L'idole des jeunes', and because today's Johnny seemed indefatiguable, still full of a zest for music and life. I really have no words for now that would do an even adequate job of capturing who Johnny was or the immensity of this loss. So I thought I'd just share a collection of few favourite things: photos from those gorgeous, seemingly endless pictorials in the pages of Salut les copains and Mademoiselle Age Tendre (I sometimes wonder how much of their lives the idoles spent in front of the camera!), some of his best songs, and a few videos that showcase what a charismatic performer he was.

Click on any of the photos for a larger version.

Salut les copains, December 1963.

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.

The Galaxy Electric are an avant-pop duo from Washington, DC, whose striking debut was one of my absolute favourites of last year. Creating cosmic pop songs using such an interesting palette of sounds, I knew their influences and tastes would be worth mining. So I asked the band members, Jacqueline and Augustus, if they'd make a playlist for me and they kindly agreed. Listen below to their selections, a superb mix of early electronics, way-out pop and other sound adventures. I love how the first track, Ken Nordine's captivating spoken word tour through an imagined 'Sound Museum', sets up the melange of weird and wonderful sounds to come.

Tracklist

1. Ken Nordine featuring The Fred Katz Group – The Sound Museum (1957)
2. Daphne Oram – Wool (1967)
3. Peter Reno – Secrets of the Deep (1969)
4. Joe Meek & The Blue Men – I Hear A New World (1960)
5. Delia Derbyshire – Ziwzih Ziwzih OO-OO-OO (1968)
6. Jean-Jacques Perrey – E.V.A. (1970)
7. Silver Apples – Walkin' (1998; recorded 1969)
8. The Soundcarriers – Step Outside (2010)
9. Broadcast – Microtronics 14 (2005)
10. Amphitryon 38 - Daphne Oram Single (1957)
11. Stereolab – Italian Shoes Continuum (1999)
12. Francis Bebey – Tumu pakara (1984)
13. Roj Stevens – Bongo Workout (2009)
14. Os Mutantes – Bat Macumba (1968)

Playlist curated by The Galaxy Electric. Mixed by me.

If you haven't yet heard their fantastic album Everything is Light and Sound, you can stream and buy it from their Bandcamp page.

Links: NewsWhistle – Interview with The Galaxy Electric
The Galaxy Electric on: Instagram | Twitter | Facebook

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:

It's my first post of the new year and, though late to the game, I wanted to share my favourite music from last year. 2016 was a notoriously terrible year (not that this year is exactly peachy so far!), but thankfully the same can't be said of the music that came out last year. It was, to quote Lisa Simpson's insensitive future fiancé, like a flower that grew out of a pot of dirt. I feel spoiled by the amount and variety of quality music I've been enjoying from last year's offerings. There are the gorgeous vintage European pop sounds of The Yearning and Lia Pamina, the visionary retrofuturism of Adrian Younge, the moving, classic songwriting of Big Smoke, the raw garage rock of The Mystery Lights, some fresh takes on dream pop, and many outings in psychedelic-influenced, experimental pop. Some of these albums have quickly become all-time favourites, not just favourites of the year. Below is a playlist of songs from my most-loved releases of 2016, including albums, singles and EPs, in no particular order. A list of my top eleven albums (I could not narrow it down to ten!) of the year – again, in no specific order – follows it.

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If you prefer Spotify, listen here. Update: By request, now also on Deezer (but missing the Samara Lubelski song).

Tracklist: