French Pop History

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...

  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...

  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, ...