French Pop History

  Back on the first post on this blog, I touched on the early French charts. I’ve been away recently, and tied up with promotional work for the  BOOK  (hence the lack of posts) but as I’ve got a little time free today, I thought I would revisit a post I originally made on the UK Mix chart site, updating it to include as near as definitive an account of the various charts as I can make. As I stated at the top of that earlier post, the history of the French music chart is very messy . To begin with, there was no official French chart until November 1984, when the top 50 was published for the first time. This was a sales chart and seems to have been accepted as accurate from the start, although like most other country's charts at the time, it would have been based on sales from sampled retail outlets, and so not 100% reliable (it would take the universal use of bar code scanners to overcome that hurdle). It was certainly close enough to be seen as authoritative and was cer...

  The first rock 'n' roll song to make the French charts was, unsurpisingly enough, Bill Haley's "Rock Around The Clock". As elsewhere, it was buoyed by the success of the film "Blackboard Jungle" (titled "Graine de violence" for French consumption), making the top ten best-selling list in "Music Hall" magazine in early 1956. Although French singers and musicians had been covering rhythm'n'blues hits for a couple of years (notably Line Renaud's take on LaVern Baker's "Tweedlee Dee"), the sound of Haley's record still came as a revelation to French audiences, especially when heard blasting out of a cinema screen. As was customary at the time, the French record industry responded to Haley's hit (it peaked at #4 in the spring) by rushing out a host of cover versions, with each label pressing one or more of the house artistes to add the song to their repertoires in an effort to siphon off some of Haley...

Every UK chart fan knows that the first number one hit was Al Martino's "Here In My Heart", which was on top in November 1952 when the New Musical Express published the first UK pop chart. Many Americans probably know that the first US number one was "I'll Never Smile Again" by Tommy Dorsey and His Orchestra, with vocals by none other than Frank Sinatra and the Pied Pipers, sitting at the top of the first ever Billboard list of best-selling records in July 1940. Actually, neither of the above facts are entirely true - at least, they are only true when it comes to record sales. Prior to that, hits were registered on the basis of sheet music sales, and so the first UK number one apparently dates to October 1936 and the first American one goes back to 1913 or 1914! But of course, they were not number one records...  But what about France? Strange as it may seem, despite a thriving record (and sheet music) market before the war, France was slow to develop a hi...