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...

"  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 ...

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for the  BOOK  (hence the lack of posts) but as I’ve got a little time free today, I thought I would revisit a post I originally made on the UK Mix chart site, updating it to include as near as definitive an account of the various charts as I can make.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

  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...