French pop music. An oxymoron?
Actually j’adore a lot of
French pop, especially yéyé and freakbeat, from the 1960s, but by the mid 70s French
pop had seriously lost its way: there was nothing original, inspiring or
exciting about it at all. Everything is either boring ballads or derivative
disco. In the 60s we had Jacques Dutronc, Nino Ferrer, France Gall, Serge
Gainsbourg, Francoise Hardy, Brigitte Bardot and others. The 70s gave us Sheila and B. Devotion (admittedly Spacer is great, but that’s more down
to Bernard Edwards and Nile Rogers than to Sheila’s Gallic charm), and Charles
Aznovoice.
Laurent Voulzy was born in Paris. He originally led the
band Le Temple de Vénus, a
group heavily influenced by British psychedelia who were signed to RCA in
France, before he joined balladeer Pascal Danel. He worked as his guitarist from 1969 to
1974. More recently he’s recorded with Andrea Corr and Roger Daltrey (not at
the same time I hasten to add).
After leaving Danel, Voulzy went solo. And it’s here where
we meet him. A big star in la belle
France – not Jonny Halliday big, but still a major hit maker – in 1977 he
scored an international hit with Rockollection, a song about growing up listening to the
radio, which was sung in French (he later re-recorded the song in Spanish) but
featured lines, in English, from hit songs of the 1960s.
Split over two sides of a 45, as Rockollection Part 1 and
Rockollection Part 2, the grim nostalgia-fest
predated Stars on 45 by a couple of years, and is probably at least partly guilty
for unleashing the slew of medley discs that invaded the British charts in the
early 1980s.
It’s still horrible. The backing vocals are flat and out of
tune, and the whole thing is a dull, dreary waste of vinyl. Despite being a
perfect example of lazy writing, bizarrely the song proved incredibly popular;,
the single became a hit in several countries and sold over four million copies.
Voulzy has re-recorded and updated the song several times over the years, and
still performs it live to this day.
Here are both sides of his 1977 hit Rockollection. Enjoy!
Download Rockollection Part Two HERE
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ReplyDeleteIts not that bad, good beat and decent voice by the lead singer
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