Articles Written By: Sky

Brouillard et Lumière: Thomas Fersen

  • Posted on 10/04/2011
  • /Under Musique

Bloodsuckers, ghosts, werewolves, witches, an Egyptian mummy and a pirate named Bluebeard: the new, eighth album by acclaimed Parisian singer/ songwriter Thomas Fersen is all about magic realism, and much less scary than the assembled nightmare characters suggest at first sight. In fact, Comte Dracula here features as a romantic fool, and the song also tells the story of „une fille dont le sourire pointu est plus cruel que celui de Nosferatu“. Full of rich imagery, laid-back irony, twisted tendresse and mature melancholy, Je Suis au Paradis might be Fersen’s most accomplished work since 1997’s Le Jour de Poisson. The after-hours frisson of Paradis teaches a simple, but effective lesson: You can’t have light without a darkness to illuminate.

Thomas Fersen – Dracula

Bonus: From the fine A Boris Vian compilation, Fersen’s heartbreaking rendition of Barcelone.

Thomas Fersen – Barcelone

FS Rerun: Radiah Frye

  • Posted on 09/04/2011
  • /Under Musique

When tormented Italian-French superstar Nino Ferrer met lovely Afro-American model, dancer, and singer Radiah Frye, he probably fell head over heels in love. On his 1966 single Je veux etre noir, Nino had already declared that he wanted to be black, and now he had a perfect companion to funk up his groove – exactly what he did on Nino and Radiah et Le Sud in 1974, a fine album with an even finer cover on which Radiah exposed her impeccable body to the public.

Before she pursued a brief career as an actress in Spermula, Madame Claude, and Goodbye Emmanuelle, Radiah uncovered herself on a record sleeve playmate-style again. Her hard-to-get solo 7“ Play-boy Scout (1975) features a strikingly sexy babefunk version of Nino’s Italian garage rock shouter from his 1970 album Rats and Roll’s.

Radiah is still around, but few people know where. Sadly, her MySpace page hasn’t been updated for ages, and her website has vanished from the web.

Nino and Radiah et Le Sud – Mint julep

Nino Ferrer – Je veux être noir

La Grande Sophie – Je veux être noir

Radiah – Play-boy Scout

Nino Ferrer – Playboy Scout

Pop Bâtard XVI: Never Mind, Serge

  • Posted on 09/04/2011
  • /Under Musique

Tom Haggen – despite the English name quite obviously a Frenchman – is relatively new to the Gallic mash-up scene. His sexy blogsite presents some pretty entertaining fusion experiments, among them an extravagant amalgam of Serge’s ironic 1966 yéyé classic Qui est in, qui est out and … well, the chords (F5–B♭5–A♭5–D♭5)  that changed the world for a few minutes 20 years ago – Teen Spirit being the anti-perspirant that Kurt’s then-girlfriend, Tobi Vail, used to wear at the time. Kurt always claimed that he had had no idea the brand even existed; so better check your spouse’s handbag before sloganizing the revolution.

Tom Haggen – Smells Like t’IN!!! Spir’OUT!!!

Lanu

  • Posted on 02/04/2011
  • /Under Musique

Roxy Music’s 1982 hit single More Than This easily qualifies as one of the most oily ballads of the New Wave, and the greasy karaoke performance by Bill Murray in Lost in Translation just served to prove the old Marx statement that history repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce. On his brand new album Her 12 Faces – a perfectly laid-back, positively eclectic and estival record with awesome guest singer Megan Washington on several tracks –, Australian pop entrepreneur Lance Ferguson alias Lanu does the trick: He transforms Roxy’s bathos into French-language electro tune raffinement – a jolie Gallic dot on an otherwise all-English, highly innovative early summer album.

Lanu – More Than This

Gorgeous hommage to Lanu’s grandfather, famous Hawaiian steel guitarist Bill Wolfgramm who recorded New Zealand’s first ever LP record back in 1956:

Lanu – The Coral Route

Where Martine Blooms and Bobbys Sing

  • Posted on 29/03/2011
  • /Under Musique

In spring 1968, countrypop schmaltzduke Bobby Goldsboro stormed the charts worldwide with the biggest hit of his career: Honey, a brilliant death disc weeper that was even more devastating than his haircut. The song, written by Acuff-Rose songsmith Bobby Russell, had already been recorded two months earlier by former Kingston Trio member Bob Shane – a version that obviously was a bit too down-to-earth for so much camp heaven. The same year, Texan ex-rockabilly semi princess Margaret Lewis even did an answer song, told from the perspective of the deceased spouse – #33 in the Cash Box country charts then –, and Quebecoise singer Martine Deno cashed in with a French language version about her long gone daddy … a remarkably sexy epitaph, and surely a record to die for.

Bob Shane – Honey

Bobby Goldsboro – Honey

Margaret Lewis – Honey (I Miss You Too)

Martine Deno – Mon Papa

Extra: The German version of Honey, provided by FS éminence grise Roy Black. Never before available on the net. Quelle horreur.

Gerhard Wendland – Honey

The Raw and the Smooth

  • Posted on 28/03/2011
  • /Under Musique

Buck 65’s Talkin’ Honky Blues was nothing less than a revelation in 2003: There was rap again, whitebread hip-hop even, thrown in a centrifuge together with folk flavour, reverbs of Cash-ified country and Salinger echoes of adolescent blues, refined with a hoarse, rusty voice that certainly didn’t come straight outta Compton, but out of Mt. Uniacke, some distant hicktown in Nova Scotia, Can. Rich Terfry/ Buck 65 was already a vet way back then, now celebrating 20 Odd Years with his aptly titled new record. Actually, it feels like a perfected roundup of his earlier efforts, a panopticon of sounds oscillating with a sleepwalker’s certainty between the raw and the smooth, the sharp strangehold of Zombie Delight, the sparse, solemn intensity of She Said Yes, or Stop, a duet pop gem with Canadian singer Hannah Georgas sounding like having been written by the new President of the Blondie fan club. Unquestionably a superior contender for album of 2011, 20 Odd Years also features two French language tunes – Final Approach, an amiable collaboration with Quebecoise chanteuse Marie-Pierre Arthur, and Tears of Your Heart, a gorgeous alliance with Parisian associate Olivia Ruiz: This is the nouveau western.

Buck 65 w/ Marie-Pierre Arthur – Final Approach

Buck 65 w/ Olivia Ruiz – Tears of Your Heart

Requiem pour un Twisteur 1

  • Posted on 02/03/2011
  • /Under Video

Exactly 20 years ago, Serge Gainsbourg bought the farm, as the Americans like to say. In 1962, he had written Requiem pour un twisteur, la danse du Twist being “the greatest ritual since circumcision” (Leonard Cohen) in those early Sixties. The song was, in Serge’s own words, “about a guy who twists himself to death”, but certainly it was also a song about life. A Gainsbourg one. Only the dance fashions had changed a bit through the years.

Requiem pour un Twisteur 2

  • Posted on 02/03/2011
  • /Under Video

Another recapturing of the un-twistable by Aurèle Salmon and Ludovic Hellet, also known as Vocalcordes. Like clockwork.

Requiem pour un Twisteur 3

  • Posted on 02/03/2011
  • /Under Video

Nice, if maybe a little too fast bar-jazz-trio version of the maybe coolest composition of the Gainsbourg repertoire by Sao-Paulo-based Les Serges. Wow bassman!

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