or for what he has got a French cultural order recently

 

In his voluminous oeuvre there are two albums with French connections: Préliminaires in 2009 and Après in 2012.

Préliminaires was inspired by Michel Houellebecq’s novel La Possibilité d’une île (The Possibility of an Island). There are three main characters. Daniel, a successful comedian who can’t seem to enjoy life despite his wealth. He gets bored with his hedonist lifestyle, but can’t escape from it. He is disgruntled with the state of current society.  He has two clones who live an uneventful life as hermits in the distant future after nuclear and climate catastrophes. They scattered around are the remnants of tourist resorts, cities, consumer items, and some natural humans living in small tribes without any knowledge of the past or any civilization.

Après is a cover album with five French chansons. His label (Virgin EMI) refused to release it. They would have preferred that he does a rock album with popular punk songs because the money is rather in it than in those old-fashioned melodies. This is a strange point of view because the original performers of his covers sold a vast number of records. Finally, the album was released by himself and on a French label Le Rat des Villes.

Now you can listen to all of his covers together with the original ones. The cover of Les feuilles mortes are from Préliminaires, like Je sais que tu sais (I Know That You Know,) which song is not a cover, and the French parts are sung by Lucie Aimé.

And also you can read about the songs and the artists, how their careers started in the chaotic years of the XX Century. And those stories are always strange.

So Mesdames and Messieurs please welcome

The second song Les feuilles mortes (The Dead Leaves) was composed by Joseph Kosma who was born in Budapest in 1905. He was a Hungarian composer and conductor. He took part in the avant-garde movement too. Fled from Berlin – where he lived by a scholarship – to Paris in 1933 with his German wife without money and French knowledge. There he got acquainted with the poet Jacques Prévert and then started a new era of the French chanson. His mother and brother were shot into the Danube during the siege of Budapest by Hungarian far-right wing party members in 1944.

„The virginity of my criminal record is still a mystery to me.” Jacques Prévert wrote this about his juvenile lifestyle.

He was born into a lower-middle-class family in Neuilly-sur-Seine in 1900. Quit school at his age of 15. After the end of WWI, he went to Istanbul as a French soldier together with the painter Tanguy to occupy it. After he was doing small businesses and joined the surrealist movement. In 1928 he wrote his first poem, broke with surrealist, and joined a performance company called Groupe Octobre to make communist propaganda. They also played in factories during strikes, and even in Moscow in 1932. After the experience he devoted himself entirely to the cinema.

He wrote the poem Les feuilles mortes. The song has appeared first time in the Marcel Carné film Les portes de la nuit (Gates of The Night) but just only snippets were hummed by Nathalie Nattier and Yves Montand, who was born as Ivo Livi in 1923 in Monsummano Terme, Italy.

His father was a militant communist who fled from the Mussolini regime with his family to France. In Marseille, he started a small broom factory which was swept away by the Great Depression in 1932. His son was hairdresser, waiter, dock and factory worker. His showbiz career started in a cabaret as a warm-up guy who turned into a singer at his age of 17. He was discovered by Edith Piaf in 1944.

She was born as Édith Giovanna Gassion in Paris in 1915. Her father was a street acrobat, her Italian-born mother a café singer. Her mother abandoned her at birth. She lived for a short time with her maternal grandmother, Emma (Aïcha) Saïd ben Mohammed, daughter of a Moroccan acrobat. When her father went to the war in 1916, he took her to his mother who ran a brothel in Normandy.

In 1929, at the age 14, she joined her father in his acrobatic street performances all over France, she first sang in public this time. At her age of 15 she met Simone „Mômone” Berteaut and started to tour together as street singers. She was discovered in Paris by a nightclub owner.

During the German occupation she performed in various nightclubs and brothels and lived in a luxury flat above a nightclub and bordello in Paris. But he sang also in POW camps, even she was invited to sing in Germany together with other French artists in 1943. But in December 1944, she went on stage for the Allied forces together with Montand in Marseille. And he wrote the song La Vie en rose (The Life in Pink) in 1945 on the top of a smoky debris, called Europe.

She died in 1963 at her age of 47. The funeral mass was denied by the archbishop of Paris Cardinal Maurice Feltin because of her lifestyle.

The song Syracuse was published first in this year. It was performed by Henri Salvador. He was born in French-Guyana in 1917 as a son of a native tax collector. The family moved to France in 1929. He gained reputation first in Medrano Circus through his laugh. He laughed so loudly that the clown asked him to come back every Sunday, and taught him gags in exchange for his influential laugh. He turned his back on school at his age of 15, started to work as a clown on terraces of Paris, and learned to play music. In 1935 Django Reinhardt saw him at a cabaret and asked him to join his band. During the occupation he toured with the band of French jazz king (or Napoleon?) Ray Ventura in South America.

The Syracuse was composed by Salvador, the lyrics were written by Bernard Dimey. In 1972 Dimey was awarded the Charles Cros Prize of the critics for his album Ivrogne Et Pourquoi Pas (Drunk and Why Not) which he claimed to be a profession of faith.

A devotee of this credo Serge Gainsbourg was born as Lucien Ginzburg in Paris in 1928. His parents fled from the horror of the Russian civil war. His father worked as a pianist at bars and clubs in Paris and the casinos and hotels of Deauville during the summertime. From his age of 8 he went with him to play songs. Scarlatti, Bach, Vivaldi, Chopin. And there is the Jazz. Cole Porter, Gershwin, Fred Adison. And there is the radio. Ray Ventura, Charles Trenet, Maurice Chevalier, Edith Piaf, Jean Gabin, Fernandel. But there just was the radio. Because no radio for the Jewish. And no telephone, coffeehouse, restaurant, theatre, cinema, concert, library, museum, swimming pool and nothing. Jewish stay at home and can buy food just between 3-4 pm. If it need can use the last carriage of the metro train only. And they were awarded Yellow Star.

In 1944 he learned to play guitar by a gypsy and started to play at bars and balls. He was discovered by the writer and musician Boris Vian in 1957.

The song Javanaise was written in 1962 and was recorded and published by him and Juliette Greco almost the same time in 1963. But in this playlist I put the reggae version titled Javanaise Remake from the Gainsbourg album Enregistrement public au Théâtre Le Palace from 1980.

Georges Brassens was born in 1921 in Sete, Southern France. His father was an open minded anticlerical bricklayer, his Italian mother was a devout catholic, but both were music lovers. He wrote his first poems as a pupil, but maybe he thought the crime pays better than the poetry because together with his friends he started to steal from their families and others. He was expelled from the school and after a trial he went to Paris, lived with his aunt, and work at a Renault factory, but it was bombed soon by Luftwaffe in 1940.

Then he spent the days in the library, read poetry and write. His first collection of poems was published in 1942 thanks to the money of his relatives and friends. Then he was forced to work in a labour camp at a BMW plant near Berlin in 1943. After one year he was given ten days’ leave in France and did not go back.

Jeanne Planche, a seamstress, who was a friend of his aunt hid him. She lived with her husband in relative poverty. „We wash in cold water, there is no gas, no electricity, so no radio, nor mains drainage. In the small yard, a real menagerie: dogs, cats, canaries, turtles, hawks.” And Brassens lived there for 22 years.

He started to write and compose songs. In the beginning he accompanied himself by and old banjo. Later with the help of Jeanne he bought a used guitar. At first he performed his songs in Parisian cinemas between the news and the film. After several unsuccessful auditions he got a contract in a cabaret in 1952. Later this year released his first album La Mauvaise Réputation, ie. Bad Reputation.

The song Le Passantes was published in 1972. The poem was written in the early 1910s by engineer and poet Antoine Pol, who worked as a company boss, but he was fell in love with poetry, books, and butterflies.

Joe Dassin was born in New York in 1938. His father was the film director Jules Dassin who was blacklisted in 1950 during the communist hysteria because long before he was the member of the Communist Party USA (but left it after the Molotov – Ribbentrop Pact in 1939). He moved to France with his family. Joe got an MA in Anthropology and became actor and singer.

The song Et si tu n’existais pas (And if you didn’t exist) was published first in 1975. The music is by Salvatore „Toto” Cutugno and Pasquale Losito. The lyrics are by Claude Lemesle and Pierre Delanoë – who originally was a tax inspector, but later Elvis Presley, Frank Sinatra, Barbra Streisand, Bob Dylan, Willie Nelson, Nina Simone also sang his lyrics. And Iggy Pop

a son of former high school English teacher and baseball coach. He was born as James Newell Osterberg, Jr. in Muskegon, Michigan, 1947. He is German, English and Irish descent on his father’s side and Norwegian and Danish ancestry on his mother’s side. Moreover his father was adopted by a Swedish American family. He was raised in a trailer park in Ypsilanti, Michigan. He got a lot of care. His parents helped him explore anything he was interested in. This culminated in their evacuation from their bedroom in the trailer, because that was the only room big enough for his drum kit. He has begun his music career as a drummer in various high school bands in Ann Arbor, including the Iguanas in the early 60s…