French Pop History

  Marketing has been around as long as their has been a record industry - and, indeed, a lot longer than that. In fact, it might be argued that the successful launch of the recording industry was built on a masterful - and misleading - marketing campaign that claimed that the sound of an Edison cylinder was an accurate representation of real life (it was no such thing, but people were happy to be fooled). Over the subsequent decades, the various record companies and publishing companies went to ever greater lengths to market their works - with the latter, keen to secure as many recordings of a hit copyright as possible, often at odds with the former. Still, the joint campaign launched in late 1959 by the French branch of the EMI company,  Path é (also home to sub-labels Columbia and  La Voix de son  Maître (the French branch of UK label His Master's Voice)   and publisher Chappelle was something of a bold masterstroke. At its heart was a new French composition, ...

  As next weekend will see the 2022 Eurovision Song Contest in all its glory, I thought that this week we could take a trip down memory lane and look at the very first Eurovision contest, not least because it was won by a song sung in French - albeit not by a singer representing France... Eurovision was the brainchild of a Swiss journalist and broadcaster, Marcel Bezon çon, who was also, from 1954, the director of the European Broadcasting Union (EBU). Noting the popularity of the annual San Remo Song Contest in Italy  (first staged in 1951) , he hit upon the idea of a Europe-wide contest, with the various members of the EBU submitting songs for inclusion. Fittingly for a Swiss creation, the first contest in 1956 was held in Lugano, at the Teatro Kursaal, with seven countries participating: Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg,  The Netherlands and Switzerland.  Viewers who have grown up - and grown old - with the contest over the subsequent six or seven decad...

Back to business after a two week break for the Easter holidays, which got me thinking about the fact that while Christmas songs a two a centime, songs about Easter are few and far between. Outside of gospel and religious music, anyway... This is certainly true in British and American pop music, but it seems to be true in French pop music too. Although there is this one... The early seventies were the protest years in France, as the hope engendered by les évenements   of May 1968 gave way to the frustrations of the Pompidou presidency. While student protests began to fade in the US after the shootings at Kent State University, in France barely a week went by without striking workers, marching students and sometimes violent clashes with the forces of law and order. Hardly a likely environment in which to find the country's primary religious icon, and yet... In 1970, Philippe Labro was a novelist and journalist with a long career in television and a recent feature film, Tout peu...