French Pop History

  Christmas, 1961. The rock 'n' roll wave that had finally broken over France the previous year had gone from strength to strength and the onset of twist-mania at the end of the year had helped to cement its place in the French musical firmament - even parents were happy to get out on the dancefloor to do the twist. The yé-yé explosion was just around the corner. Everywhere, it seemed that the new teenage music was in the ascendant. Everywhere except, so far, the world of Christmas music. Christmas in France was synonymous with Tino Rossi, a star since the thirties whose 1946 festival offering "Petit Papa Noël" had been a hit not just that year but every year since, making the transition from 78 to EP without even pausing for breath. The biggest commercial success of Rossi's career and the biggest selling French record ever, it was (and is) to the French what Bing Crosby's "White Christmas" was (and is) to Americans - inescapable, ever-present and in...

  As soon as cinema began the shift from silent movies to "the talkies",  music and song became part of the staple cinematic diet. From the early jukebox musicals to the extravaganzas of the golden age of the Hollywood musical, singers (and musicians) flocked to film studios to become singer-actors, forging dual careers that kept them in constant work, on film sets, stages and studios, for many a long year. There would also be a slow but steady trickle of actors making the same journey in the other direction, drifiting into recording studios in a (sometimes successful) attempt to forge a parallel singing career. This was (and is) common enough in America, but it was really in France that this tradition truly established itself. The trend began, as one might expect, in the thirties. Tino Rossi made the jump from chanson  and operetta to cinema in Marinella , with its deathless title track generating one of his biggest hits. However, Rossi had made the journey in the tradit...

  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...

When Édith Piaf died in 1963, aged only 47, she left a huge hole at the heart of the French music industry. The previous three years had seen the chanson gradually eclipsed by the oncoming horde of  yé-yé  singers, at least as far as the media were concerned, although there would always be room on the airwaves and in the country's leading music halls and theatres for the stars of a more traditional form of French popular music. Piaf had been in ill health for several years but her sudden passing was still a shock that left the country reeling. Forty thousand people turned up to attend her burial in P ère Lachaise; many thousands more flocked to the shops to pick up one of her many classic recordings. Piaf may, to paraphrase her most famous song, have had nothing to regret, but her fellow citizens very much regretted that she was no longer alongside them. Perhaps inevitably, Piaf's departure from the stage engendered any amount of debate as to who might possibly repla...

  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 ...