French Pop History

  In any hypothetical search for the world's most unlikely pop star, the name of S œ ur Sourire would almost certainly rank highly on any list. A Dominican nun from Belgium, singing religious songs accompanied only by her own acoustic guitar was nobody's idea of a hit parade hero and yet at the end of 1963, under the anglicised nom de guerre  The Singing Nun, she sat squarely atop both the singles and the albums chart in Billboard , the best selling singer in the whole U.S.A. Her rise from the convent to The Ed Sullivan Show  was a truly strange story but sadly the aftermath was less happy and the sad tale of her rise and fall is as cautionary a tale about the effects  of fame as any.  Born in  Belgium in 1933, Jeanne-Paule Marie Deckers was raised in the Catholic faith and worked as a teacher between 1954 and 1959 before deciding to dedicate her life to God, entering a Dominican convent in Waterloo in September 1959, adopting the name S œ ur Luc Gabriel. A keen musician, she

This post has its origin in an article I wrote for another site, but once I'd finished it, I realised that it didn't fit the needs of the site in question. Still, no point in wasting some good research... and it does kind of fit here, so with a bit of reworking, here it is... Inspiration can come from the strangest places. On a flight from Nice to Paris, singer and songwriter Gilbert Bécaud met the German actress Elga Andersen, who was distraught over the breakup of a relationship the night before. (Some folk dispute this, and say that she had just repaired that relationship, although that doesn't make sense in terms of what followed - anyway, as the man said in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance "When the legend becomes fact, print the legend...".) To return to the story... as B écaud lent a sympathetic ear, Andersen poured out her heart.  "What now?" she cried, "What will happen to me now?". Bécaud didn't write lyrics but he knew a hook whe