French Pop History

  When  y é- y é  exploded across France in the wake of the twist, it pretty much steamrollered everything in its path, including, ironically enough, the harder-edged rock 'n' roll that had originally been its inspiration. By mid-1963, both Les Chats Sauvages and Les Chaussettes Noires were without their original singers, Vince Taylor's career had gone into freefall and even Johnny Hallyday was being berated for following Elvis Presley's lead and "selling out to girls". But not everyone was willing to play the  y é- y é  game... Following time-honoured tradition (well, honoured for a year or two, anyway), Parisian rock 'n' rollers Hector et les M édiators made a name for themselves at leading teenage nightspot Le Golf Drouot with a stage act drawn directly from rough and tumble American rock 'n' roll - usually sung in heavily accented English. Although almost all of the leading French rockers had sung in their native language on record, out in ...

  One of the unforseen joys of researching my book was stumbling across the original versions of songs that I had known for years without ever realising that they owed their start to French singers, songwriters and musicians. This week's post highlights a handful of French songs that became international pop classics... Everyone knows Little Peggy March's 1963 American chart topper, "I WIll Follow Him", right? A monster hit at the height of the "girl group" era. Or maybe, depending on where you grew up, you might know the version by Rosemary Clooney, or perhaps by Dee Dee Sharp, or even the disco version by Claudja Barry. But how many people know it started life as an intsrumental called "Chariot", penned by two behemoths of French easy listening, bandleaders Paul Mauriat and Franck Pourcel and first recorded by Pourcel's orchestra in 1962? Or that the first vocal version was in French, with lyrics by Jacques Plante? Yep. It's a yé-yé  clas...

"  American singer April March once famously claimed that  yé-yé was the best music that there is, which might be overstating it although there is no denying the music's considerable appeal. For all that though, there is considerable debate about what yé-yé actually is - a problem compounded by the fact that the term has become decidedly elastic over time. There are plenty of things that  yé-yé is not - a mix of French chanson with rock 'n' roll, for example. Strictly speaking,  yé-yé is not even uniquely French - there were  yé-yé singers in other French speaking countries such as Belgium, Switzerland and - to a lesser extent - Canada, and a healthy  yé-yé scene developed in Spain as well. Nor is  yé-yé an exclusively, or even mainly, female phenomenon; there were plenty of male yé-yé singers too, from Richard Anthony and even Johnny Hallyday on through Frank Alamo and Hervé Vilard to lesser-known but still worthy names such as Jamy Olivier ...