Eighth Wonder

  • Posted on 03/09/2010
  • /Under Musique

Patsy Kensit rose to fame thanks to her Bardot-ish looks and movies like Absolute Beginners and Lethal Weapon 2. She sang with the band Eighth Wonder, started by her brother Jamie. They released two albums and a set of remixes, but none of those cd’s included the French version of hitsingle I’m Not Scared. The song was written and produced by The Pet Shop Boys (Gainsbourg-fans, they did their own version of Je t’aime…).The English version is very catchy, while J’ai pas peur (b-side to the vinyl-single of I’m Not Scared) is a sighing-feast. Like it should be.

Eighth Wonder – J’ai pas peur

Bardot, Coppola, Dior

  • Posted on 03/09/2010
  • /Under Musique

Brigitte Bardot in a commercial shot by Sofia Coppola for a fragrance by Dior. Yep, it’s from 2008 but I never saw this ‘director’s cut’ before, and the song is a surprise too (though it’s from a Best Of cd by Bardot, I seem to have missed it completely).

Brigitte Bardot – Moi je joue

Five Years of Filles

  • Posted on 02/09/2010
  • /Under Musique

This month, FillesSourires.com celebrates it’s fifth anniversary, which means that I will post a lot of goodies, we will look back on legendary posts and I asked several musicians and a dj to come up with an extra special present for all ye faithful visitors. To kick off, here are two Gainsbourg-covers that were never issued on cd, and I never saw them posted before.

First off is Antoinette, a YeYe-singer who I know nothing about. It’s not the British singer of the same name, my guess is she’s Belgian, because the vinyl-single that I ripped was given away free with Belgian magazine Panorama. There was also this version, but the girl on the cover looks very different from the cover I have.
Trumpet Boy’s real name was Fernand Verstraete (born in 1925 in Rouen, died in 1992), who made several EP’s and albums with his ‘trompette-succès’. His version of Le claqueur des doigst stems from 1959 or ’60, and as you can hear my vinyl-copy isn’t in the best of shape. Which adds to the jazzy atmosphere, nonetheless.

Antoinette – Baby pop
Trumpet Boy – Le claqueur des doigts

La Patere Rose

  • Posted on 30/08/2010
  • /Under Musique

Summer’s over, so new records are coming up. One of Canada’s loveliest trio’s, La Patere Rose, will release their second album in September. An EP with four songs is out now. Less kooky then songs on their debut, like great single La Marelle. But the lack of weirdness is compensated by extra fragility. Which is nice. (On second thought, Décapote, in that ‘country beach remix’, is a pretty odd song)
The second LPR-album will be released by Naive, home of Biolay and Bruni, in France (and hopefully the rest of Europe).

La Patere Rose – Chocolove

French movies

  • Posted on 27/08/2010
  • /Under Video

Great video from Magnus (dEUS-frontman Tom Barman & DJ CJ Bolland), you’ll recognise dEUS-guitarist Mauro Pawlowski as ‘Le Fou’. Been a while since I saw this, still makes me smile.

Dorléac

  • Posted on 27/08/2010
  • /Under Musique
A lovely singing doll plus cinematic grooves, that sums up Dorléac rather nicely I think. The doll is Geike Arnaert, former siren of Belgian triphopstars Hooverphonic. The grooves are made by Dutch cut and paste meister Erik de Jong (aka Spinvis). They were brought together by Belgian filmdirector Hans van Nuffel, who asked them for a song for his new movie. Geike and Erik got along very well, and recorded a whole album. Erik said to Dutch site 3voor12: ‘Geike approaches English as a French singer, which I like.’ It’s a pity that there’s only one French song on the album, would’ve loved to hear more. The name Dorléac refers obviously to Catherine Deneuve’s sister Francoise Dorléac, who died in a carcrash but remains a cultfigure thanks to Les Demoiselles de Rochefort. The album is really beautiful, all kinds of references pop in my head, from Portishead to Postal Service.
Dorléac plays live only twice, here and here.

Dorleac – Disparu

Jane & Brett

  • Posted on 25/08/2010
  • /Under Musique
Brett Anderson duetting with Jane Birkin – I was re-reading Sylvie Simmons’ excellent Gainsbourg-biography (I’m writing an introduction to the Dutch translation, out in a few weeks), she mentions this duet in the last chapter. I can’t remember if I ever posted it before and can’t be bothered to look it up. So here it is. Watch the great, almost silent video above while listening (no relation to the song, btw).
The duet is from this compilation.

Jane Birkin & Brett Anderson – Les yeux fermés

Charlotte For Ever 2.0

  • Posted on 24/08/2010
  • /Under Musique

And I quote: ‘The record is swathed in the worst kind of 80s production stylings you can imagine: session muso slap-bass, extended synthesizer solos, show-off guitar licks at every turn, wailing saxophones everywhere … Despite this, Phil is convinced the record is a lost classic of genius songwriting, and my brief was to strip it of the badly dated 1980s production and re-record the whole album to reveal the hidden pop gems at the heart of it all.’
The record in question is Charlotte Gainsbourg’s Charlotte For Ever, written by Serge in the mid-80s. ‘Phil’ is Philip Ilson from the London Short Film Festival – a massive Gainsbourg fan. He wanted to do something to celebrate the premiere of Joann Sfar’s Gainsbourg film. So he commissioned Markus (formerly Their Hearts Were Full of Spring’s frontman) to update Charlotte For Ever, together with Charlotte McEwan (currently a film student at University of the Arts, London). Bold move.

Did Markus and Charlotte as Hige Club do a better job than Serge and Charlotte? McEwan has a voice as untrained as Charlotte Gainsbourg’s, but lacks the innocence that makes the original album such a perverted joy to listen to. Especially in Lemon Incest, a song one should never try to top.
That said, not having to listen to the slapping bass and the nasty synths certainly makes this update more enjoyable. Ouvertures Eclair for instance is a much better song in the cover version.
Listen to (and order) the brave effort by Markus and Charlotte HERE. Hige Club performs live on the Branchage Festival end of September.

Hige Club – Charlotte For Ever
Charlotte & Serge Gainsbourg – Charlotte For Ever

Cours lapin

  • Posted on 23/08/2010
  • /Under Musique

Denmark’s not really the first country you think of when you go look for French singing, fragile girls. That is probably why I missed the memo’s about Cours lapin, a Danish foursome consisting of three guys and one girl who make money making music for films and documentaries. The girl’s Louise Alenius, and if you’re a big Biolay-fan you know her babyvoice from a song on Benjamin’s Clara et Moi-soundtrack. Cours lapin’s first album is out now, sporting 11 songs that meander between Amélie-style chansons (like Mes larmes secretes) and darker, Portishead-ish stuff like Débutants. Cache Chache was kind of a hit in the blogosphere (see?), I’m posting end-song La Fin.

Cours lapin – La fin
Benjamin Biolay & Louise Alenius – The word

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