All that many people think they know of French pop is Je T'Aime... Moi Non Plus – but the notorious record by Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin is of course just one fleeting moment within the history of la musique française.
Quite a few stars of high-level repute in popular music across the Channel had impinged on the British consciousness before the arrival of rock'n'roll – among them Charles Aznavour, Sacha Distel (first emerging as an ace jazz guitarist), Jacques Brel, Edith Piaf, Maurice Chevalier, Juliette Gréco, Gilbert Bécaud, Stéphane Grappelli and Django Reinhardt.
But the rock and pop era would unleash a whole torrent of youthquake newcomers - not least the sheer phenomenon that was Johnny Hallyday, a dynamic performer who was soon streets ahead of all his rival countrymen, and on his way to becoming a true national icon.
Like Hallyday, several others adopted Anglo-American names – the likes of Richard Anthony, Dick Rivers, Eddy Mitchell, Rocky Volcano(!) and the clarinettist who assumed the pseudonym of Earl Cadillac. The wealth of home grown talent also included the aforementioned Monsieur Gainsbourg, plus Claude François, Jacques Dutronc and lots more – and that was just the men. The pool of chanteuses incorporated the much-acclaimed Françoise Hardy, Sylvie Vartan, Gillian Hills, France Gall, and the relocated Petula Clark. Meanwhile the pre-eminent groups had in their number Les Chats Sauvages (the Wild Cats), Les Chaussettes Noires (the Black Socks) and - er - Les Surfs.
It was always far more than accordion players in berets along the banks of the Seine.
This very substantial paperback – illustrated with black¬and-white images of vintage, star-laden record sleeves – has its sights largely focused on the period from the start of the 1950s until the mid-60s, and highlights a veritable host of big-league French purveyors of pop.
The informative narrative text and richly detailed appendices combine to provide a vivid picture of how the leading proponents fared while deploying either original material or translated adaptations of smash hits from overseas – and also shows how although they had relatively little impact on the UK or American scene, domestic singers and instrumentalists of the time did find considerable success in other parts of the world.
Russell Newmark, The Beat (April 2022)
After introductory essays on the French recording industry, labels, and charts, Jones traces French pop music's progression from 19th century café concerts and music halls through external influences (American, Middle Eastern, Greek) to the musical counter-revolution of the early '60s and the death of Edith Piaf in 1963. French chanson, jazz, rock operetta, blues, and more are examined under Jones's microscope. He also explains how Existential troubadours, political chanson, the zazou resistance, TV, film, magazines (Salut les copains and its legendary La Fête de la Nation concert that birthed the phrase "yé yé"), the occupation, liberation and more influenced the various musical styles.
Rest assured, this no mere collection of discographies, but an extremely detailed history of French pop via analyses of instrumental combos, dance crazes (twist, Madison, tango), musette and accordion traditions, the influx of American jazz, UK and US ex-pat rockers, male and female groups and solo artists, the provincial scenes, talent shows, Eurovision, etc). In essence every "pop" sub-genre you can imagine had French contributors and Jones rightly champions their importance to the history of Western music.
All the big names are here (Chevalier, Piaf, Brel, Aznavour, Hallyday, Gainsbourg, Hardy), but Jones digs deeper into the unfamiliar or forgotten trailblazers like Aristide Bruant, Charles Trenet, Richard Anthony and Leo Ferré. His "Recommended Listening" helps you build your French discography, and the overview of international French pop recordings, bibliography, websites and song and artist indices (making it easy to locate your favourites) add up to the most comprehensive introduction to French pop music available in English and sets the stage for eagerly anticipated volumes on yé-yé, prog, glam, punk and new wave.
Jeff Penczak, Shindig! (April 2022)
Encyclopaedic trawl through early pop across La Manche.
The Olympia Music Hall in Pans opened in 1893, and its debut headline act was a certain Le Pétomane, a French entertainer who could fart on command. Some would argue that music across the Channel peaked that night, though Gareth Jones makes a vigorous case for its vitality, leaving no stone unturned as he traces a lineage that culminates in the hitherto biggest free concert ever staged in 1963 for a Salut les copains yé-yé spectacular at Place do la Nation: 150.000 teens showed up from all over France when a few thousand had been expected. French Pop repudiates the idea that was simply a knock off of American rock 'n' roll with a French twist, and the author includes jazz, chanson, bossa nova, exotica, surf and a plethora of other genres to make his case, all contextualised culturally and histoncally. Such stringent detail helps bring to life artists you may have never heard of like Danny Boy et ses Pénitents, outsider rivals to Les Chats Sauvages; the Pénitents were supposedly Madagscan students who wore KKK-like hoods so their parents wouldn't recognise them on the telly. French Pop may become a reference book for a niche group of enthusiasts but its very existence is welcomed all the same.
Jeremy Allen, Record Collector (May 2022)
Anyone researching or even merely inter¬ested in French pop should go first and last to Gareth Jones. If sometimes you might find the descriptive inventory of artists and records overwhelming, his infectious enthusiasm and witty way with words enhances near-unerring factual accuracy throughout a history from the dawn of the domestic record¬ing industry to 1963 when the onslaught of British beat coincided with the death of Edith Piaf, that im¬perious little madam who endured as a sort of Linda Ronstadt of chanson in that she was renowned chiefly as an interpreter of the works of others.
Piaf was also within the mandate of veneration for pop's elder statespersons with a zest that other countries might have thought excessive, even corny—as instanced by Les Filles A Papa, a trio containing daughters of songwriting fathers, who finished performances by donning masks of their better-known parents' faces. If unmentioned by Jones, they were reverberant too of the 'decent' music that national radio programmers thought the public ought to like. This meant that there was little middle ground between nursery rhymes and Maurice Chevalier, illustrious to a wider world as an 'ow-you-say professional Gaul.
Teenagers, therefore, had to put. up with the same artistes that their elders and younger siblings enjoyed—such as pipe-smoking and avuncular Bourvil—a sort of Norman George Formby, just as Franck Pourcel was a Marseilles-reared equivalent of Laurence Welk. Nevertheless, an instrumental version of the Platters' "Only You" would be attributed to Franck Pourcel & his Rockin' Strings after the first stirrings of rock 'n' roll warranted cursory spins on the wireless before being brushed aside as another overseas fad as transient as the Cha-Cha-Cha or hula-hoops. Yet, if he "looked more like a wine waiter in some posh restaurant," Milou Duchamp's "Tropical" from 1958—though very much in debt to Screamin' Jay Hawkins' 'Alligator Wine"—"managed to be simultaneously frightening and sensual." There was a tendency otherwise towards gimmick discs traceable from the same US source, exemplified by translations of "The Purple People Eater" (by Gabriel Dalar), "The Chipmunk Song" (the Alegrettes) and "Baby Sittin' Boogie" from Sacha Distel, who'd been a prodigious jazz guitarist prior to focussing on vocals and penning "Great Big Bulging Eyes" and "Et La-Bas"—"the country's first original rock 'n' roll songs"—for Mac-Kac ("arguably the stupidest name ever used by a French rock 'n' roll singer").
These were issued on an EP, more common a format in France than singles, and attractive as both a cheap device for wringing maximum financial blood from an artiste—and colourful artwork, particularly if it pictured, say, Brigitte Bardot who became as legitimate a pop icon in Europe as Elvis Presley a legitimate movie star in the United States.
The Beryl Bainbridge to Brigitte's Jackie Collins was Juliette Greco, the Thinking Man's French actress whose EPs were as omnipresent in sock-smelling student bedsits as pictures of Johnny Hallyday would be on the walls of schoolgirl bedrooms.
He'd left the runway as resident Elvis Presley impersonator in Le Golf Drouot, Paris's foremost hangout of yé-yé ("a catch-all label for the whole of French teen pop"), becoming conspicuous among generally unexportable home-grown rockers after his bi-lingual cover of Chubby Checker's "Let's Twist Again" in 1961 convinced most then that this insipidly handsome youth was not so much France's Elvis as its 'answer' to Bobbies Rydell, Vee and Vinton.
Johnny wasn't the only one to cash in on the Twist as it lingered long sur le continent as "the biggest dance craze ever seen since the tango." Even Chevalier succumbed to a Twist 45 with Les Chausettes Noires (avec Eddie Mitchell), whose stock-in-trade tended to be xeroxes or translations of US and UK smashes for home consumers—as it was for the likes of Dalida, Richard Anthony, Les Chats Sauvages, Sylvie Vartan (Hallyday's first wife, whose "I'm Watching You," a Number One sung in English was taped in London with Nero & the Gladiators), Sheila ("a gawky schoolgirl with a nauseatingly winsome smile") and Claude François, whose native reproduction of 1963's "If I Had A Hammer" was behind counters a week after he heard Trini Lopez's blueprint on Radio Luxembourg.
In parenthesis, it sometimes cut both ways—as instanced by Jane Morgan using Dalida's French version as a useful demo for her US million-seller, "The Day The Rains Came," an interpretation of a Gilbert Bécaud composition; Jacques Brel's "Le Moribond"—about a dying man's reconciliation to his wife's routine adulteries—mutated by Rod McKuen into innocuous "Seasons In The Sun" (with as much resemblance to the original libretto as a Marx Brothers film to its screenplay) for the Kingston Trio, the first of many hit revivals of same. Lest we forget too, Sœur Sourire, the Singing Nun, topped charts in Australia and the USA with "Dominique, "which, if maddeningly catchy, demonstrated that "the chanson was alive and well, even as the barbarians gathered at the gates".
Crucially, being enormous within French-speaking territories was enormous enough for Brel, Bécaud, Charles Trenet, Jean Sablon, Georges Brassens and like entertainers who had, in that bilious journalistic cliché, Grown Old With Their Audience. The post-war period also witnessed the spectacular ascent of Charles Aznavour among members of a resistance movement against Anglo-American intrusion and the correlated acceptance of second-class status to "a host of foreign singers who chose to base themselves in France" such as Eddie Constantine (possessive of "American cool that underpinned his appeal"), Vince Taylor, and Doug Fowlkes & the Airedales, demobbed US marines, who wowed 'em at Le Club Drouot as the Beatles did at Hamburg's Star-Club. Furthermore, though Hallyday was at odds with chart rivals "over his decision to record in French rather than English," too many of around five thousand pop acts across the republic by 1962 inclined towards the stiff earnestness of singing in a tongue not their own over accompaniment riven with complacent exactitude.
Thus Richard Anthony's arrangement of Cliff Richard's "Move It" is deemed "strangely fascinating and unbelievably poor." I'd want to hear a record thus portrayed—though when I did, it wasn't quite as bad as all that. The author's prose also made it incumbent to search (mainly in vain) for Les Bingsters' cover of "Rock Around the Clock" ("as far removed from rock 'n' roll as it was possible to get"); Bordeaux's Les Blousons Noirs, who "took amateurism to a new high (or low, depending on your point of view) years before The Legendary Stardust Cowboy or the Shaggs"—though they were actually more like Hasil Adkins—and Jacques Jay and his "banjo-powered reworking of Little Richard's 'Tutti Frutti' that has to be heard to be believed."
Alan Clayson, Ugly Things (Summer 2022)
Few books can serve as both an enjoyable reading experience and a reference guide, with hundreds of side notes to complement it. This is the case of French Pop by Gareth Jones, a thorough investigation and documentation of the history of French Pop music, which is also the story of the modern music industry.
Jones travels back to the nineteenth century, where he discovers the foundations of Pop music through names that have become obscure to the general public over the years. It also provides insight into the socio-cultural historical context that aided in the popularity of several waves of new musical styles. These names had a significant influence and impact in the early twentieth century, gradually outlining a path that is still followed today.
The author focuses on the first half of the twentieth century, ending in the early 1960s (where he promises to continue in two more volumes,) when the Pop and Rock music revolution was in full swing, giving birth to the Yé-Yé movement, which led up to names like Françoise Hardy, Johnny Hallyday, and Claude François, among many others, a path that was blazed by the 1950's names from the French chanson such as Jacques Brel, Gilbert Bécaud, Georges Brassens and going further back, Yves Montand, Édith Piaf, Juliette Gréco, Maurice Chevalier, Marianne Oswald (a "chanteuse réaliste") and Charles Trenet. among countless others. All of these names come together at some point when musical styles such as Jazz, Blues, and Rock N' Roll begin to germinate more intensely in Europe, each in their own time. Accurately, Gareth Jones explains in detail how sounds from the other side of the Atlantic reached France and the European continent in general, as well as the need for new generations of listeners to explore these sounds with which they increasingly identified, and the "resistance" of established names to the popularity of new musical waves such as Rock, which they ironically "accidentally" helped to impose throughout their careers. It is a period when poetry commences to merge with music, among various art movements, and the vibrant underground scene of the Saint-Germain-des-Prés bars and cafes, from the discomforting and impenetrable Serge Gainsbourg to the unexpectedly enchanting Juliette Gréco, two top names in French music who crossed borders all over the world.
But Jones does not overlook the "background players", to whom he devotes as much attention as the big names, thus building one of the most comprehensive Pop and Rock music books of all time.
French Pop, beautifully illustrated with rare photos, posters, album covers, and labels, includes also a valuable glossary of names that allows the reader to use this book as a reference when they want, as well as a rare guide to some of the key records in the history of French Pop, and a guide to French Pop songs covered by other artists across the globe.
A precious sharing of Gareth Jones' extensive enthusiast work, this is a book for any serious music fan and for anyone who wants to deepen their knowledge of music and history, not exclusively French. Over 500 pages of pure knowledge, French Pop: From Music Hall to Yé-Yé is an exceptional and indispensable book.
David Warren, popexpresso.com (November 2022)
