Today I'm starting off a week of SOTDs that will be completely comprised of French pop. There is a massive amount of brilliant stuff from the country, as you would expect - from the Ye-Ye of the mid-60s, through punk, right through to the electronica of today, they have a whole, completely seperate musical culture that really needs exploring. Only a very small amount of what has come out of France seems to have made it to mainstream British ears - Serge Gainsbourg is by far the most famous French rock star, but most British people would be hard pressed to name 3 songs by him. Considering how much closer we are to France than the US, it really is quite surprising. I'm going to be spending the next week trying to get to grips with some of it, and will try to share the results with you here.
The first song is, hilariously, not by a French band. Les Surfs were a family from Madagascar who had massive amounts of success in France, and over quite a lot of the rest of Western Europe, in the 1960s. Originally coming to France as cultural ambassadors at the behest of their own government, trying to spread the music of the newly-independent Madagascar, they fitted right in to the burgeoning Ye-Ye scene (that we might go into at some point later this week). This is my favourite song of theirs. The title translates to 'Now you can leave' and the song is about letting a lover go away, hoping that they will realise the error of their ways. I think. My French isn't exactly spectacular, running to little more than 'Je m'appelle Toby'. Thank you, Google Translate.
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