Vanessa Paradis turns 38 today. Happy birthday!
Perfect Black Christmas
Made a compilation with my favourite black (meaning jazzy, soulful, bluesy, funky etc) Christmas songs for the EHPO-blog. Go HERE to download. Nothing in French, but James, Otis, Marvin, Stevie, Donny and the like. If you want more (odd) Christmas songs, you should also check Christmas A Gogo (here), or festive friends like Stubby, BRCM and SWOT.
Happy holidays!
Mayra Andrade
The Sunday Times called her „voice from Cape Verde“, possibly due to the fact that Mayra Andrade sings a lot of songs in Cape Verdean Creole, though she’s born in Cuba and grew up in Senegal, Angola, and Germany. Her records smell a bit of the well-designed eau de toilette of all those other industry working girls mixing world music with those certain hints of Brazilian folklore, body lotion fado, and authentic leather sofa jazz/ethno feel that probably will earn her a guest job on Charlie Haden’s next „Sophisticated Ladies“ volume. She’s got taste anyway: Her new live album, Studio 105, features also Serge’s La Javanaise, written originally for Juliette Gréco in 1959, in a kind of worn-out sugardaddy’s club version, definitely not as intimate as it tries to be, but actually quite a winning one.
Mayra Andrade – La Javanaise
Fay Lovsky
Everyone dreams about writing a classic Christmas song, very few achieve this goal. Multi-instrumentalist, theremin-enthusiast and singer Fay Lovsky wrote her claim to fame in 1981. Since then, Christmas was a Friend of Mine is on the radio every season. It has the bells, the nostalgic atmosphere and the lyrics about friendship that all good Christmas songs have. For the compilation A Catchy Christmas, she recorded an updated French version. Which is nice. You can buy and/or listen to A Catchy Christmas HERE.
Fay Lovsky – Noël quand on est petit
Sylvia Kristel, Gainsbourg and me
If you go HERE, you can see a radioshow (yes, see a radioshow, in Dutch) with me talking about Gainsbourg, plus guests singer Rick de Leeuw, pianist Jan Robijns and actress Sylvia Kristel sharing stories about Serge. She told that she went to partouses with Serge, Ian McShane and Jane Birkin. And that she immediatly had a bond with Gainsbourg, ‘alcoholics recognise each other straight away’. Near the end of the show, Sylvia and Rick sing their Dutch translation of Serge & Catherine’s Dieu fumeur des Havanes.
Peau Douce
All-too-short perfume spot, but eyecandy all the way, plus the right bedroom sound.
X-mas with Alizée (and others)
Xmas Tonite is a Band Aid-like team-up of mostly French artists, singing a Northern Soul-style Christmas song. We hear Alizée along with Loane, Hugh Coltman and members of Tahiti 80, Jamaica and a whole bunch of other artists.
Sylvie Vartan
Legendary ye-ye singer Sylvie Vartan returns with a very strong album, produced by Keren Ann & Doriand, who also wrote a couple of songs. Others who contributed are Benjamin Biolay (La Vanité, great song), David Hallyday (her son), La Grande Sophie and Etienne Daho. The production is very sixties, with plush keys, loads of strings and guitars drowning in echo. Duet-partners are Doriand, Julien Doré and Arthur H. Vartan isn’t the world’s best singer anymore – then again, she never was. This album is way better than the rehashes on Nouvele Vague. See the duet with Doré here. Read an English interview with Sylvie here.
Sylvie Vartan & Doriand – Je me détacherai
L’amour à la Gainsbourg
Adjani lookalike Caroline Grimm recorded this one, an élastiquely carribean-ized disco-pop number that made my sister buy her first dessous on Ibiza in 1988.
FS Rerun: Sarah Nixey
Though Sarah Nixey is British, she’s a fille to boot, levitating effortlessly between the realms of innocence and lasciviousness, the subversive and the sublime. With Black Box Recorder – assisted by Luke Haines of Auteurs fame and John Moore, ex-Jesus & Marychain –, she recorded three of the smartest, though too much neglected pop CDs of the last decade. French Rock’n’Roll from Recorder’s brilliant second record Facts of Life echoes the spirit of Jane & Serge, London-style, and features even a few lines in French:
Black Box Recorder – French Rock’n’Roll
Solo, Sarah also did a trippy club cover of Francoise Hardy’s hit Le temps de l’amour, written by Hardy’s future husband Jacques Dutronc in 1962, and Ici avec toi, a gauloised-up translation of her original song When I’m Here With You.
Sarah Nixey – Le temps de l’amour
Last not least, another of Sarah’s French connections from the compilation The Worst of Black Box Recorder: Her version of Terry Jacks’ weeper superhit Seasons of the Sun – cover of Jacques Brel’s classic chanson Le Moribond – reverberating an entirely different quality: the dizzy state when awakening from a already half-forgotten dream.
Black Box Recorder – Seasons in the Sun