French Pop History

  The French music industry of the fifties - as elsewhere - was as full of chanteuses as it was chanteurs . True - most (but not all) of the musicians, songwriters and producers were men, as they were in thne rest of the world, but French music halls and cabarets had always been as open to the female voice as they had to male performers. Indeed, it was not uncommon for male singer-songwriters to make their initial breakthroughs thanks to the women who chose to sing their wares. This tradition went way back - think of the partnership between Rip and Jeanne Aubert in the twenties - and even recently emerged stars like L éo Ferré, Georges Brassens and Jacques Brel owed their start to the support of Catherine Sauvage, Patachou and Juliete Gréco respectively. Rock 'n' roll though, was something else. When the new wave of teenage music first hit France, it was seen as just a fad and ripe for covering by music hall and cabaret performers, men and women alike. The results were, well, j...

  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for the  BOOK  (hence the lack of posts) but as I’ve got a little time free today, I thought I would revisit a post I originally made on the UK Mix chart site, updating it to include as near as definitive an account of the various charts as I can make.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...