French Pop History

  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 ...

    It is often said that the Beatles failed to make the same impact in France that they made in the rest of the western world, that French teenagers (and adults) were unimpressed by the Fab Four and that the band's records and live performances went unappreciated by French audiences. It has to be said though that this is nonsense.... It is true that the band's sales figures in France fell some way below those in, say, Germany or Spain, but they were far from unimpressive. Partly this was because the French record market in the early sixties was smaller than that of most countries of comparable size, for a variety of socio-economic reasons; it was also true that many French teenagers - and indeed French record buyers in general - preferred to listen to music in their native tongue (there is a reason why "Michelle" became The Beatles/ biggest seller in France, after all). Even so, The Beatles were certainly popular - very popular indeed - among French teenagers; far mo...