80s French Pop Gems

Back to my recent obsession with the mid-80s! This time I want to talk about a mini-wave of French pop bands who had some minor yet excellent hits around 1985-86 then disappeared. Let's start with the bigger of the three, Taxi Girl, who actually had a very big hit in 1980 with "Cherchez le Garcon":



But this blog is about obscure stuff and we're supposed to be talking about the mid-80s today, so I want to point to the band's last single released in 1985, "Aussi belle qu'une balle", that didn't have the same success as "Cherchez le garcon" yet is just as great (and bonus point if you can name the actresses in the background photos) :



What happened to them? Daniel Darc (the singer) went solo and has become somewhat of a cult pop figure in France, and Mirwais (the guitarist and co-composer) went on to become Madonna's hot-shot producer!

Another great band was Gamine, who managed a couple of hit singles and released a couple of albums. Amateurs of French pop probably remember "Voila les anges" which could even be heard on dance floors at the time, but I want to single out "Le Voyage", which is truly a little pop marvel.



Doesn't this song make you want to fall in love with some unattainable woman?

Gamine was a champion of good pop taste, but the mistake they probably made was to sing their second album in English. By trying to go global they lost their local support and were soon forgotten.

Let's finish off with the more obscure of the three, a band called Pijon. I think this song deserved much more success (despite its video):



Jerome Pigeon, the singer, tried a solo career, but wasn't successful either...

Other French pop one-hit wonders of the mid-80s: Les Innocents, Les Ablettes, Les Calamites, Luna Parker, etc. Check them out! These bands may not have had much staying power, but they probably planted the seeds of bigger things to come: Noir Desir, Mano Negra, Negresses Vertes, all bands with a harder edge and who persisted to sing in French and still managed to have some success beyond French borders.

Vancouver Psychedelia!

(Editorial note: looks like we've more or less survived Blogger's Big Outage of 2011. I say more or less since the cool/lame/kitsch votes seem to have disappeared for the time being, or... or... maybe forever!)


In the late 60s, Vancouver's hippie scene was probably as buoyant as that of San Francisco. I can imagine that it attracted US kids who objected to the war in Vietnam. Also, the local winter weather was good and the weed potent... And, last but not least, the Afterthought on 4th Avenue hosted many great live acts such as Jefferson Airplane. Yet, I'd never heard of a corresponding local music scene. Of course it turns out that there was one, it's just that they never managed to have a commercial breakthrough like their Californian counterparts. So here's a few things I've managed to find.

I'll start with my favorite one. It's a song from a band called Mother Tucker (oh well). This song was included in a compilation that was made in 1970 in support of Cool-Aid House, which was some sort of hippie shelter in Kitsilano (these days some traces of counter-culture in that area can be found at the excellent Zulu Records). The original vinyl is extremely rare and could fetch you some decent amount of skunk. Luckily, it has been reissued by Regenerator Records, a cool bunch of music preservationists.



Another name from that scene is Seeds of Time. I don't know anything about them, but I just was lucky to find something on YouTube and I'm sharing... It's just cool that they performed on CBC at the time!



And here's another one for the road. Apparently this one was quite successful at the time, but to be quite honest I don't see why. However, the vintage photos of Vancouver in the 60s make the video well worth watching:



If you're curious about Vancouver's hippie scene, there's an entire book dedicated to it. If you like psychedelic concert posters like the one I included at the top of this post, pay a visit to BC artist Bob Masse's web site.

Vancouver's indie music scene has come a long way since. Black Mountain or New Pornographers (and offshoots thereof) ring a bell?

Degrees of Separation

So lately I've been reminiscing of the years 1985-86, trying to think of pop songs that I really liked back then and that still sound good to me now. It just seems to me that 1984 was a better year for pop. Anyway, one song that definitely makes the grade is Thought I'd Never See You Again by a British band called Working Week. It's just the perfect mix of wistful pop and jazz, with some wonderful female vocals:



It's actually quite interesting how many 80s pop bands used to include jazz influences in their music at the time. Remember Matt Bianco, Joe Jackson, Sade, Hong-Kong Syndikat? (Well, maybe you don't remember the latter, but then check them out, or maybe it's a topic for another blog post?) So after mentally sending a thousand thanks to YouTube (and whoever shared that song with the rest of us) for instantly playing that great yet relatively obscure song for me, I wanted to find out who Working Week were. According to their Wikipedia entry, they were formed by guitarist Simon Booth and saxophonist Larry Stabbins, with vocal contributions ranging from Julie Tippets (better known as 60s hippie Julie Driscoll) to good old Robert Wyatt and then up-and-coming singer Tracey Thorn (Everything But The Girl!). On the song above though, it is a certain Julie Roberts singing.

Still according to the Wikipedia article, Booth and Stabbins were previously in a band called Weekend, which had apparently had great critical acclaim. Naturally, I had to check them out. Here is one of the many gems I found (listen to the very end: the initial gentle bossa nova breaks out into full blown samba):





"But... but...", the diligent and knowledgeable EasyTV viewer interjects, "the vocals sound familiar!" Right you are. It turns out the singer is Allison Statton, mostly known as a the voice of Young Marble Giants, whose minimalist and spooky sound combined with the plain female vocals was really fresh when it came out in the early 80s, and it hasn't aged one bit to this day. I used to use one of their songs as the intro to my little radio show back in the day. Here's a little sample, a song called N.I.T.A., from their Colossal Youth album:





After a couple of albums, Young Marble Giants split. So now we know where Statton ended up (she had further musical adventures, including a partnership in the late 80s with guitarist Ian Devine, in a band aptly named Devine & Statton). As for Stuart Moxham, he formed the Gist, whose song 'Love At First Sight' is better known as "Cafe de Flore" as adapted in French by Etienne Daho. But here's the original version (and the superior one, in my opinion):



So a quick lookup of band Working Week yielded all these other interesting names and bands. Who knew?