Mathématiques Modernes

Mathématiques Modernes was a French synth-pop duo that was only active between 1980 and 1981. Edwige Braun-Belmore and Claude Arto hit the new-wave dancefloors with the amazing "Disco Rough", a nervous, angular synth-stomper that was just right for the time. Slightly chaotic and full of atonal bleeps, Edwige has full control over her detached and half-spoken lyrics. It sounds like The Normal with a super snotty attitude and/or French charm.

Their only full lengths album "Les Visiteurs du Soir", which shows them gazing over a post-apocalyptic Paris like they auditioned for a French re-make of "Village of the Damned" after they killed their Au-Pair, is full of short, hectic pop songs with titles like "Boy be my toy", "A+B+C" or "Athletical Mystery". I picked this up for small money many years ago and it seems to be a collectors item now.

Alor clicques le tiny arrow and get Disco Rough!

Rendez Vous a Paris

One day I´ll meet you in Paris. I promise.

This 8 minute Ferrari ride through Paris in the early morning hours is a fantastic short film by Claude Lelouch. "C'était un rendez-vous" was shot in 1976. Watch it quick because the copyFight holders are quick to erase all links.

Dreams of Saturday Night: Moi...Lolita

"Moi...Lolita" is the sound of a million beach nightclubs. From the Cote d´azur down to Italy and Greece; to Thailand and some suburban bar in Germany. It plays early in the night, when the dancefloor is almost empty, you can hear it blasting from some jukebox after the last orders have been made. It´s euphoric and endlessly sad.

Alizée: Moi...Lolita


Released in june of 2000 "Moi...Lolita" stayed a record-breaking 73 weeks in the French charts, and became the most successful foreign language single in the UK.

Written by Mylene Farmer and partner, it is a masterpiece of mind-reeling self reference, exploitation and liberation. In short: one of the best pop songs ever! Yes, EVER!

Farmer, decided to get somebody younger than her to sing it in order to make the song more believable. So they did a casting and found Alizée. Bam! Instant goosebump inducing, timeless classic! I can listen to this for hours on end and still be amazed by it.

This revised excerpt is sort of a re-post from a longer entry about French-Pop I made in July.

Goddess

I don´t know a thing about cars but I noticed that I automatically click "save image as" as soon as I see a nice pic of the Citroen DS. Obviously, there are countless great photos of the DS (La Déesse - The Goddess) since it is quite hard to shoot a bad picture of this iconoclastic car. A true StellaVista Ultramodel!

Darc Helicopter

Mireille Darc is one of the most iconic French actresses and models of the 60s and 70s. She always appeared to be incredibly mysterious and funny to me. The amazing backless dress she wore in "Le grande blonde avec une chaussure noire" caused gasps in audiences worldwide and turned her into a sexy icon of European cinema.


Despite living a very public and glitzy life as the partner of Alain Delon for 15 years, she never fell prey to the tabloids and kept an aura of dignity and sophistication.



There must have been a clause in every contract for French actresses to record at least one record with chansons by Serge Gainsbourg.
Her rendition of Helicoptere is certainly not my favourite song but hearing Mireille Darc sadly sing the words "dans mon helicoptere" is very haunting and evocative.



In France, Mireille Darc is still celebrated as a French icon and was awarded the prestigious Légion d´honneure-award in 2006. I hereby declare her a StellaVista Ultramodel.




Madame Darc also has a (somehow oldfashioned) Site officel.

Twiste et Chante

I was never a big fan of Sylvie Vartan - I am more of a Francoise Hardy Person myself.

Sylvie was always a bit too "Roque" for me. You know, this typical French interpretation of ROCK, which eternally resonates between Iggy Pop and Johnny Halliday (Sylvie´s husband).

Of course Sylvie did also some covers of contemporary hits in the sixties. I dare say that she didn´t know when to say "no" at times. Her versions of "Twist and Shout" and "Money" she did on Shindig! are pretty exotic.

But she did hit the nail on the head with a French version of "I can´t help myself. The Four Tops hit becomes "Garde moi dans ta poche" and La Vartan almost invents a new style of twist-dancing in this "Scopitone"-clip. Check also the other dancers! It´s great fun.




Here is "Twist and Shout".

Loud Nights in Clichy - Fred Chichin 1954-2007

While I was compiling a post about French-Pop from the 80s onward I learned that Fred Chichin of Les Rita Mitsouko died last November. Even in times of information overload you can miss these things. Fred was born in 1954 in Clichy and started working with Catherine Ringer in 1979. By the mid-80s they became the bonafide French avant-pop-band, which could do no wrong.

I was never a huge fan of the band (I only own the album "Marc & Robert"), but I always adored their videos and their full on OTT-style.
Looking back it is easy to see how truly fantastic and forward looking Les Rita were, especially if you compare them to the other stuff that was out at the time.
Fred Chichin was a great musician and arrangeur! He was also a great dancer. He holds his own next to Catherine Ringer, who really is one of the best dancers on pop!

When Les Rita Mitsouko stormed the charts with "Marcia Baila" and "C´est comme ca" in the mid-80s they appeared to be a surreal French version of The Eurythmics, the B-52s, the Associates and the Sparks. Their videos were frantic and chaotic and their music was overdoing their "french-ness" to an hysterical extreme.

I don´t know how popular they were in North America (if at all) but they have clearly inspired Deee-Lite, Madonna and other nineties artists with their interest in outrageous fashion and stylized music.

They also did a record with the Sparks, who they quite obviously adored.

Despite disappearing slightly from the international stage, they went on recording and touring until a few days before Fred fell victim of cancer.

Check out some of their truly great and imaginative clips:

"Marcia Baila" started their career. It was originally released in 1984. It became an international hit in 1986. Now watch this and then look up some pics of Madonna from that time.


"C´est comme ca" Their second hit. A great dancefloor burner which would be played from exclusive big-floor clubs to underground discos.


"Andy". Check out her Minnie Mouse shoes!


"Le Petit Train". One of my favourites. Funky, hysterical and the video is a scream!


"Singing in the Shower" with the Sparks. A perfect match!


"Y´a d´la haine" I think this is definately their best video and one of the best of all time. Seen once, never forgotten! This won the MTV best Video award in 1994 and is probably one of the two Rita-Videos which are filed at the MoMA.


"Meme Si". The last one. A beautiful ballad taken from "Variety", their 2007 album. Fred, who was always pencil thin looks even more fragile than usual and Catherine´s eyes are heartbreaking in this.

Frederic Chichin died while the band was touring Europe. Catherine Ringer, who was also his partner off stage and mother of his three children, continued performing soon after his death. It was his wish.

The Degeneration of Mylene Farmer

"Degeneration" (it sounds so much better in French), the new video for Mylene Farmer´s new single is currently causing a stir in France.
Compared to the calculated controversy of Justice´s "Stress" from a few weeks ago, you´d expect at least something really shocking. I mean really shocking this time!

Well, see for yourself! However, don´t be disappointed when it turns out to be another "Waking-up-naked-in-a-lab-and-causing-a-
multisexual-orgy"-sort of scandal. It´s pretty stupid, actually and doesn´t hold a candle to the epic sex-dramas she did twenty years ago

I stumbled across this while looking up her older stuff for a bigger post on international French pop-hits, which can be found below.

Solitaire dans les autres...Pop Musique from France

Make a list of French pop songs of the last twenty years, which are not classic chansons or post-Daft Punk House and you will pobably come up with the videos below. All of them have been international hits and they sound as if they were designed exactly for this purpose.

I actually remember every moment when I heard these hits for the first time. I immediately felt amused and intrigued, slightly embarrassed to fall for the obvious commercial production and the Lolita-cliché of it all. I also knew from the first moment that there would be no escape from these songs as they had "Instant Mega Holiday Hit and Future Classic" written all over them. Well except one...

"Voyage, Voyage" by Desireless appeared in 1986 and there was no getting away from it. Boy/Girl, they did everything right! It combined Italo-Disco production, a Modern Talking-beat with French flair, ridiculous and late new-wave hair and clothes on a sexless, gender-bending singer. It was a bit like an update of Visage, catering to the secretary-set. I even saw goth-kids dancing to it. Talk about cross-over.


The same year saw a royal trainwreck crashing on the international stage. Princess Stephanie of Monaco, bored from being herself, she took the stagename Stephanie, hired expensive songwriters, stylists and Helicopters, and tried to form her image of being a just your everyday popstar.

Sadly, Stephanie could not sing one note and at times looked like an unfinished sex-change in the video of "Ouragan" ("Irresitable" for the rest of the world).

Speaking of the video: It´s fantastic! Filmed on Mauritius with a budget that was probably twice their domestic product, it throws every thinkable video-cliché at us and invented a bunch of new ones in the process! I wish it was in 3-D! You want slo-mo shots of running down stairs in a castle? Falling slo-mo glasses filled with jetons? Royal crotch-shots next to the ocean (in slo-mo)? Seedy gigolos? A princess being hunted by a Helicopter? It´s all here! The video that inspired every HipHop-promo of the 90s.


Another 1986 French export was of course the mighty Les Rita Mistsouko. Since their output was too flashy for one post, they will get their own.

The next smash from France was the great Mylene Farmer.
Her "Desenchantee" is another one of those slightly melancholic, but instantly gripping summer-hits. One thing Mylene Farmer became famous for were her ridiculously overproduced video-clips. Her promo for "Pourvu Qu'Elles Soient Douces" is a 16-minute cross between "Caligula" and "Barry Lyndon" (with equal production values and failed ambitions). It´s an overblown, totally humorless mini-drama. You don´t want to see this!
Instead take a look at the cover-version by the totally bland Kate Ryan, who would make a carreer out of "trancing-up" every single french hit of the past twenty years (and possibly every song featured in this post).

The production and the melody are perfect. You just need to know a few words of French to get the gist of it: "Je sui generation desenchantee". Watching her hang around some overlit "europe moderne"-architecture in Brussels is total science-fiction!


Another Mylene Farmer masterpiece is probably one of the best pop songs ever! Yes, EVER! Farmer and her partner wrote a song called "Moi...Lolita". This alone sounds perfect. They decided to get somebody younger to sing it (Mylene was born in 1961) so they did a casting and found Alizée. Bam! Instant goosebump inducing, timeless classic! I can listen to this for hours on end and still be amazed by it.

Released in june of 2000 "Moi...Lolita" stayed a record-breaking 73 weeks in the French charts, and became the most successful foreign language single in the UK.
"Lolita" is the sound of a million beach nightclubs. From the Cote d´azur down to Italy and Greece; to Thailand and some suburban bar in Germany. It plays early in the night, when the dancefloor is almost empty, you can hear it blasting from some jukebox after the last orders have been made. It´s euphoric and endlessly sad.

One year later saw the release of yet another of those hits which seemed to concentrate every available French cliché into a slice of 3:30 pop perfection: "Tou est Foutu" by In Grid has got it all! Cheesy accordeon, a blunt trance-beat, sexy vocals and -the creme de la creme - an insanely memorably cut-up effect. "tü tü tü di tü tü". This alone makes the whole song.


All of these hits share an equal sound, which I call the "lost-in-the-crowd-sound". While the production techniques are always up to date, there is a certain melancholy encapsuled within the melodies. The sound is always a bit removed from the typical dime-a-dozen euro-disco.

I did not include Trans-X´ "Living on Video", since they were from Canada. Although they had that sound down to perfection. Also missing is Plastic Bertrand and the instrumental band Space. Did I miss anything significant? Drop a message!