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FS Rerun: How Sad Venice Can Be

  • Posted on 27/04/2011
  • /Under Musique

Charles Aznavour? Wasn’t that the somewhat square old entertainer in the grey suit you saw on dozens of awful tv shows all those years ago? Maybe. Aznavour also was Charlie, the forlorn dude in Truffaut’s Tirez sur le pianiste (see pic) who smoked all those cigarettes like nobody had it done before, shared the bed with Michèle Mercier and Nicole Berger, and murmered some of the coolest lines ever to be uttered between love and loneliness („Silence is amorous complicity“). Sadness was also one of the keywords in his chansons, as well in Que c’est triste Venise, a sentimental kitsch masterpiece remade by the equally great Bobby Darin in 1965, U.S. grand scope showroom heartbreak style.
Charles Aznavour – Que c’est triste Venise
Bobby Darin – Venice Blue

Bonus: The Other Serge revealing where to find the gondolas of your mind.

Serge Reggiani – Venise n’est pas en Italie

Siobhan Wilson

  • Posted on 14/04/2011
  • /Under Video

Gee, those red fingernails moving along the strings. Two words: Forget Zaz.

Pop Bâtard XIX: Je veux te baiser

  • Posted on 12/04/2011
  • /Under Video

“He said: I’d like to offer you some flowers.” DJ Le Clown’s take on French TV’s most famous moment. Adults only, please.

Pop Bâtard XVII: Burn Da Funk

  • Posted on 12/04/2011
  • /Under Musique

French bootlegger Fissunix, who brought the world indispensable mash-ups like Gangsta Barbapapa, is surely an entrepreneur sauvage – see his website as well. His most daring, dubious and deranged venture to date might well be the fusion of Deep Purple’s 1974 bluntrocker Burn and Gallic house chefs Daft Punk’s 1997 club classic Da Funk. Recommended by FS powerbroker Roy Black with the following words: “Sick, and therefore somehow … erm, contagious.”

Fissunix – Burn Da Funk

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

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