Derrière un kleenex

Sad news. That most beautiful and uber-cool of chanteuses Mlle Françoise Hardy has ascended the glittering stairway to Fabulon, Gauloise in hand...

A core performer in the so-called yé-yé craze in early 1960s France, her cultural impact was such that Bob Dylan became obsessed, sending love letters, and wrote a poem about her, and Mick Jagger said that she was his "ideal woman".

Over her long career she released almost 30 LPs (the most recent in 2018), modelled for Yves Saint Laurent and Paco Rabanne, represented Monaco at the Eurovision Song Contest, and worked with a diverse range of arists including Serge Gainsburg, Jane Birkin, Air [on the b-side of their smash Sexy Boy], Michel Berger, Iggy Pop and Blur. Remarkable.

Here is a selection of her songs, by way of a tribute:

Françoise Hardy - Mon amie la rose

[as covered by Natacha Atlas]

Françoise Hardy - Tous les garçons et les filles

... and finally, a classic - made famous decades later by Jimmy Somerville:

Françoise Hardy - Comment te dire adieu

RIP, Françoise Madeleine Hardy (17th January 1944 – 11th June 2024)

I am but a fool

Another week in lock-down begins - albeit without the "work" bit for me as I am on leave till after Easter - with the cheerful discovery of a new wannabee-"Diva".

Señorita María Isabel Llaudes Santiago (for it is she), under her stage name Karina, was the darling of the "ye-ye" years in Spain. Indeed, so popular was she that she was asked to represent her country at the 1971 Eurovision Song Contest with the song En un mundo nuevo, where she came second.

Her biggest hit, however, was with an American song. Eminently suitable for a Tacky Music Monday is this clip with its mind-blowingly bizarre juxtaposition of dancers on amphetamines with the lady herself seated in what looks remarkably like Jon Pertwee-era Doctor Who's car "Bessie"...

...I very much doubt Mr Neil Sedaka envisioned his teen classic to ever be interpreted like this!

Karina - Oh Carol

Have a good week, dear reader, as best you can in these peculiar times.

Everything drives me irresistibly to you just as before

"The Beast" - our enormous Begonia × tuberhybrida “Sangria”

It's been another remarkable - and record breaking - hot and sunny Bank Holiday, and once again every moment of it has been spent on the extensive gardens here at Dolores Delargo Towers - lifting and repotting a few plants that were congesting their neighbours, and generally tweaking round the edges, feeding and watering. Oh, and sitting with a cider enjoying the sunshine, of course!

I haven't forgotten it is still a Tacky Music Monday, however - so let's enjoy a little jolly from Canada's own yé-yé girl (turned politician's wife, as I noted before) and today's birthday girl, Mlle Chantal Renaud!

Chantal Renaud - Irrésistiblement

C'est fabuleux!

El go-go

What a hideous change in the weather - from balmy to maelstrom in just 24 hours. On Saturday night I was sat outside in shorts after 10pm. Yesterday, it was utterly foul, wet and gloomy, and this morning is much the same. I hate getting up in the dark, but such is our lot from now until March...

Enough of the dankness - on this Tacky Music Monday we have something special from Spain to cheer us up. Señorita Silvana [or Sylvana; nobody seems to know how she actually spelt her name] Velasco (for it is she) was a teen singer who rose to fame in the mid-60s, just when the French yé-yé style of go-go-pop was at its height. She had a few successes at the time, mainly with covers of songs by artists such as Dusty Springfield, Sandy Shaw and Petula Clark, but, according to the Ready Steady Girls website [the font of all knowledge in such matters]:

"Theoretically, Silvana was the perfect yé-yé singer. She was already known to the public for her films, and her prettiness and up-to-the-minute fashion sense caught the eye of young and old alike. However, her sexiness failed to translate musically..."

Regardless, what I do know, is that whether or not she hit the "big time", her legacy certainly appears camp as old tits. On this Tacky Music Monday, let's yé-yé!

Sylvana Velasco - Ninguno me puede juzgar (Nobody can judge me)

That's better.

Have a good week, dear reader!

Mierda

Groan. It's here.

My alarm has awoken me at an ungodly hour (the sort of hour I feel I should be just coming home from a club), and I have to steel myself for the horrors that await in the office. There will inevitably be tons of work left over that no-one has touched, and we still have this shitty "reorganisation" going on, which means at some stage I will once more be facing an interview to save my own job.

And the fucking lottery numbers haven't come up. Again.

Hey ho - let's venture back to Spain (if only!) for a little smattering of 60s yé-yé nonsense on this Tacky Music Monday...

...here's the completely fruit-loop Silvana Velasco and her gays de seguridad!

Silvana Velasco - Dime que me quieres

She's faboo, but: ¡Me cago en todo lo que se menea!

Heureuse si tu peux

After rather an eventful weekend - not just preparing to move house, but interrupted by a party for our friend Jim's birthday as well - we have the sad news that one of the quirkiest of the famed French "yé-yé" girls and Eurovision-winner (and a fave here at Dolores Delargo Towers) Mlle France Gall is dead.

As we struggle to wake ourselves in this darkness to get back to work, on this Tacky Music Monday, one can't help but smile at the combination of a typically cheap and garish Scopitone video and the eternal jollity of France Gall...

France Gall - Baby Pop

Have a good week, dear reader.

RIP, France Gall (born Isabelle Geneviève Marie Anne Gall, 9th October 1947 – 7th January 2018)

The season of love

“La chanson française (French song) is a good lyric and, if possible, a good melody. La chanson américaine is a good melody and, if possible, a good lyric.”

Thus none other than the commanding figure of Charles Aznavour, creator of some of the finest works within the genre, summed up the cultural differences between the traditional French chanson and any other kind of song-style in the West.

With good reason, as the delightful documentary Je t'aime: The Story of French Song we watched last night explained - presented by Petula (not yet a Dame, but should be) Clark, whose own mega-successful career is largely based around such chansons.

Suffice to say it was everything we could want from a potted history of a beloved type of music; one that delights in "challenging" themes, such as prostitution, alcohol, homosexuality and politics. Everyone from Edith Piaf to M. Aznavour to "yé-yé" to Marc Almond to Stromae was featured, including Charles Trenet, Gilbert Bécaud, Jane Birkin, Jean Sablon, Georges Brassens, Anna Karina, Jacques Brel, Barbara, Léo Ferré, Brigitte Bardot, France Gall, Étienne Daho, Françoise Hardy and of course Serge Gainsbourg...

...and the très magnifique Juliette Gréco - here singing Si tu t'imagines [the lyrics of which translate as “If you imagine, my dear, that the season of love is going to last forever, you got it all wrong...”]

Juliette Gréco - Si tu t'imagines

Vive “La chanson française"!

Let's Go Classics

A "classical" musical interlude on this wet Tuesday - it's Ludwig van Beethoven as you've never heard him before...

Takeshi Terauchi - Für Elise (Let's Go Beethoven YeYe)

Groovy!

Takeshi Terauchi

As a boy

It may be a Bank Holiday, but here at Dolores Delargo Towers it is Tacky Music Monday all the way...

Here's some groovy yé-yé music to brighten up our morning, courtesy of today's birthday girl Chantal Renaud (here looking remarkably like Susannah York's lesbian character from The Killing of Sister George auditioning for Star Trek), and Comme un garçon:

Chantal Renaud - Comme un garçon

Mlle Renaud progressed from covering French pop songs to be the wife of former Quebec Premier Bernard Landry, apparently.

Poupée de Cire

Heavens! The Queen of the yé-yé filles France Gall is 65 years old today!

I have (of course) featured the lovely Mademoiselle Gall before, and indeed she featured in my tribute to the artform that was yé-yé back in July.

However, we can never have enough of her particular brand of coquettishness here at Dolores Delargo Towers...

So, without further ado, here is the lovely Mlle Gall looking suitably excited to have her very own Scopitone - it's Baby Pop:

France Gall - Baby Pop

In this clip of Teenie Weenie Boppie she appears to have discovered "The Summer of Love" big style...

France Gall - Teenie Weenie Boppie

And finally - and featured here again for the simple reason I absolutely adore this song so much - here is the track that (briefly) resurrected her career in the 80s:

France Gall - Ella Elle L'a

France Gall on Wikipedia

Baby doll dresses, twee voices, false eyelashes, oversized eyewear, excess lipstick

Bastille Day, Eiffel Tower, Paris, 1936, photo by Andre de Diene

Today is Le quatorze juillet, the French National Day (or Bastille Day, if you are feeling particularly revolutionary).

To mark this eminent day for our Gallic chums, I thought I'd focus on the quintessentially French musical style - yé-yé!

As Rohin Guha writes for the website Crushable:

It’s a fad that many of us would be hard-pressed to term, but many of us recognize: The baby doll dresses. The twee voices. The false eyelashes, oversized eyewear, excess lipstick. The two-and-a-half minute jingles. Though it was dominated primarily by French, Quebecois, and Spanish popstrels who were easily interchangeable, yé-yé performers’ hallmarks seeped through the ages. Everyone from Baby Spice to Ke$ha have co-opted some element - affected naïveté, hemlines, bubbly hooks - from the yé-yé girls. During the height of its success, Susan Sontag wrote of the movement in her essay Notes On Camp:

"In the last two years, popular music (post rock-’n'-roll, what the French call yé-yé) has been annexed into the camp sensibility."

The movement takes its name from the yells of “Yeah! Yeah!” that peppered the movement’s hits. Yé-yé songs, though explicit by nature, still opted for more subtlety. It was an era when mankind on the whole wasn’t so desensitized to sex that we needed a musician to hammer us over the head with sex and booze. Fans made do with France Gall’s Les sucettes, or “Lollipops” which at once managed to be subtle and profane - clearly an allusion to oral sex.

Without further ado, here is Mademoiselle Gall herself (read my previous tribute to her), not with the "Lollipops" song [check the link above for that], but with another, groovier hit Cet air-là:

France Gall - Cet air-là

Next up is that most beautiful of the yé-yé artistes, Mlle Françoise Hardy, with a classic (later covered by - of course - Jimmy Somerville):

Françoise Hardy - Comment te dire adieu

A lesser-known name among the singers of this genre, here is Marie Laforet with the rather fab Ivan, Boris et Moi (the dancers are Jean Yanne, Sacha Distel and Serge Gainsbourg!):

Marie Laforet - Ivan, Boris et Moi

In a very weird live appearance indeed, here's another groovy Gallic chick Annie Phillippe - we really should make an effort to learn the dance steps!

Annie Phillippe - J'ai tant de peine

And finally, the lovely (and not very French-sounding) Gillian Hills with the classic Zou bisou bisou (which was covered by, among others, Sophia Loren):

Gillian Hills - Zou bisou bisou

Oui, baby, oui!

Bébé Requin

For no other reason than I rather like her, today I am in the mood for one of France's most popular chanteuses of the "yé-yé" style of the early 1960s. This style of music (described by Susan Sontag as "an example of an entire genre being annexed by the camp sensibility") became a symbol of a resurgent chic Paris, and many girl singers emerged at the time to varying degrees of subsequent success - Sylvie Vartan, Françoise Hardy, Nicole Paquin, Sheila (of "B Devotion" fame) - but the eternally coquettish France Gall seems to most epitomise the era.

With songs written for her by such luminaries as Serge Gainsbourg, including the 1965 Eurovision-winner Poupée de cire, poupée de son, she became a national treasure to the French, and despite drug problems and the death of her husband and producer Michel Berger, is still massively popular today. She lives in semi-retirement in Paris, but a documentary about her life broadcast in 2001 received nine million viewers!

Here's the lady herself...

France Gall - Bebe Requin

France Gall - Avant la Baguerre

France Gall - Poupee De Cire, Poupee De Son [Eurovision Song Contest, 1965]

In 1983, Mademoiselle Gall made a brief reappearance in the charts on this side of the pond with her sultry tribute to the legendary Ella Fitzgerald. I love this...

France Gall - Ella, Elle L'a

France Gall
France Gall biography on RFI