French Pop History

  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, ...

  As next weekend will see the 2022 Eurovision Song Contest in all its glory, I thought that this week we could take a trip down memory lane and look at the very first Eurovision contest, not least because it was won by a song sung in French - albeit not by a singer representing France... Eurovision was the brainchild of a Swiss journalist and broadcaster, Marcel Bezon çon, who was also, from 1954, the director of the European Broadcasting Union (EBU). Noting the popularity of the annual San Remo Song Contest in Italy  (first staged in 1951) , he hit upon the idea of a Europe-wide contest, with the various members of the EBU submitting songs for inclusion. Fittingly for a Swiss creation, the first contest in 1956 was held in Lugano, at the Teatro Kursaal, with seven countries participating: Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg,  The Netherlands and Switzerland.  Viewers who have grown up - and grown old - with the contest over the subsequent six or seven decad...

Back to business after a two week break for the Easter holidays, which got me thinking about the fact that while Christmas songs a two a centime, songs about Easter are few and far between. Outside of gospel and religious music, anyway... This is certainly true in British and American pop music, but it seems to be true in French pop music too. Although there is this one... The early seventies were the protest years in France, as the hope engendered by les évenements   of May 1968 gave way to the frustrations of the Pompidou presidency. While student protests began to fade in the US after the shootings at Kent State University, in France barely a week went by without striking workers, marching students and sometimes violent clashes with the forces of law and order. Hardly a likely environment in which to find the country's primary religious icon, and yet... In 1970, Philippe Labro was a novelist and journalist with a long career in television and a recent feature film, Tout peu...

"  Any rock and roll fan worth his or her salt has heard of Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller. American songwriters and producers supreme, repsonsible for the biggest and best hits of the Drifters and the Coasters, creators of the soundtrack for Elvis Presley's Jailhouse Rock  and so much more...  The list of artists who have recorded their work is a very, very long one, but few fans would expect to find the name of Édith Piaf in the list. Yet there she is...and therein lies a story. In the early fifties, la môme Piaf  had established herself not only as the leading French music hall performer of the era but also as the international embodiment of French chanson , with a repertoire full of future standards such as "La vie en rose" (1948), "Hymne à l'amour" (1950), "Padam... padam" (1951) and "Bravo pour le clown" (1953). She was however spending increasing amounts of time abroad, principally in the United States, where she toured regular...

  It was one of the biggest global hits of the seventies. Breaking first in Canada as 1973 drew to a close, it swept across the United States and then spread over the globe to become one of the biggest hits of the decade. Milkmen (remember them?) whistled it and school children lifted their voices to join in the deathless refrain, "We had joy, we had fun, we had seasons in the sun...". The song shifted millions of copies around the globe, bringing a fortune to its original creator, a Belgian songsmith who had long since hung up his songwriting pen to pursue, well, seasons in the sun... Jacques Brel had begun his recording career in 1953 with an underwhelming and commercially unsuccessful 78 rpm release for the Belgian branch of the Philips label (Philips P 19055). Neither "Il y a" nor "La foire" were particularly memorable, but there was something there that caught the ear of Parisian label boss (and chanson  champion) Jacques Canetti, who summoned the sin...

    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...

    7 May, 1954. The French military have just been humiliated by the Vietnamese in the battle of Dien Bien Phu and hopes of reconstituting the pre-war French empire in south eastern Asia have been vanquished along with the army. The government is in shock and the defeat hangs heavy over a country still piecing itself back together after the most calamitous of decades.  The very same day, Marcel Mouloudji, a rising chansonnier  with a following among the intelligentsia congregating on the left bank in Paris generally known only by his surname, was giving a concert. Among the repertoire he chose to perform that day was a newly written song by poet, jazz musician and journalist, Boris Vian, who had been trying to get someone to perform it for some weeks, without success. At length, after Vian reworked the lyrics to adopt a more pacifist approach, Mouloudji agreed to sing it, and 'Le déserteur' received its first public airing in front of a shocked and stunned audience....