Je t'aime: The Story of French Song with Petula Clark

'This programme contains some strong language'

Our guest is popular at home and on the Continent,

where she is the top lady of song in France.

Please welcome to our programme Miss Petula Clark.

# Boum

# Quand notre coeur fait boum... #

That's me in the 1960s singing Boum,

one of the great French songs of the 1930s.

I doubt whether more than a handful of the television audience

knew the background of that song,

just as very few of the people who bought My Way

knew that was originally a French song.

In fact, French popular music is remarkably little known in the UK,

even though everyone has a powerful cliche image of Left Bank cabarets

full of Gitanes smoke, accordions and black polo-necked singers,

but there is more to it than that.

Gaining popularity in the 1920s and '30s,

it reached its golden age after the Second World War.

It was revolutionised in the '60s and is still thriving today.

This is the legendary Olympia in Paris.

Anyone who's anyone has played here, including me.

I first sang here in 1957.

I went out on that stage,

sang a few songs in English

and the Parisienne crowd loved it.

There began my career in France.

# ..I only know that I can't let you go

# Your effect upon me is terrific

# Boum... #

It was also here that I saw Edith Piaf in one of her final concerts.

It was an amazing experience for me.

# Quand il me prend dans ses bras... #

And, on that stage, was this tiny woman

in her not-really-chic black dress,

hardly moving,

just a few discreet hand movements and singing...

# ..Il me dit des mots d'amour

# Des mots de tous les jours

# Et ca me fait quelque chose... #

..but singing with her whole being.

Of course, she sang about love.

She also sang about hate, betrayal,

sex, life and death,

not to a handful of intellectuals

but here, to a real-life down-to-earth audience.

I was spellbound.

Well, that was a world away from what I did.

You see, performing, as I knew it, meant coming on in a flashy dress,

starting off with a bright and cheerful number, nothing too heavy.

Then a few more songs, maybe a bit of comedy,

and finishing with a big ballad to bring the house down.

Piaf was different. She used to say, "Have you found a new idea where,

"I don't know, somebody's dying and I can sing it?'

She wanted to have dramatic stories.

She was a human person on stage,

not a singer.

She used to sing what was your life, my life,

almost not her life.

She sings the true songs.

The songs spoke of the lively, poor people of Paris of popular cliche,

but she took them into a much more plaintiff portrayal

of human emotion.

Piaf pulled them down because she stayed with the popular song.

"Whaa-aaa," the thing from the gut.

And, finally, all those...

SHE IMITATES PIAF

Pow! Pow!

She was one of the most wonderful interpretes of that sort of drama,

songs with drama in it

and being a loser.

She was wonderful.

Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien

is among the best-known French songs of all time

and a great example of Piaf as interprete,

that is a singer of other people's songs.

So what is la chanson francaise?

Well, it's not traditional French music,

it's not folk music,

it's la musique populaire.

The way to sing in France come from the troubadours.

The middle-aged troubadours that are telling stories,

poetical stories with music.

There's celebrations of life and death and love and the street.

The thing about la chanson francaise

is that it combines poetry and music,

though, in general, it's the language

that is more important than the melody.

La chanson francaise is good lyric and, if possible, good music.

Chanson anglaise, the Americans say,

"Good music and, if it's possible, good lyric."

That's the real difference is there.

The music, very often, is not very sophisticated in France.

They're not singers' songs, they're kind of performers' songs,

they're actors' songs.

People who use their bodies, who use their face, their eyes,

the way they move to express the lyrical meaning of these songs.

I heard, once, Mick Jagger on the radio. He said,

"Well, in England and in America, we make rock and roll

"and, in France, they better make wine. It's OK for wine."

And I understood why he said that

because, if you just hear the music, I mean, it's nice but it...

But, in fact, if you understand the lyrics

of Serge Gainsbourg or Claude Nougaro,

you understand it's magical.

The language is very rich and you can do a lot of things.

You can evoke a lot of images. It's very subtle.

There is always more mystery, I think, in French writing.

You play a lot with the form.

The form brings you the story.

This poster shop in Paris

probably seems a world away from French music,

but this famous Toulouse-Lautrec image from 1893

is where our story starts.

The black-clad figure in the red scarf

is the great chansonnier Aristide Bruant,

one of the pioneers of la chanson realiste.

They made chansons realistes which is about a prostitute,

prostitute, prostitute!

Sailors and prostitute!

Singing about prostitutes, the sailors, the street.

A very kind of profound, kind of, very deeply...

And the kind of romance of the street.

Through the 1920s and '30s great women realist singers,

such as the glamorous Damia and the booze-steeped Frehel,

established the style of theatrical performance

that would reach its pinnacle with Edith Piaf.

Jean Sablon, known as the French Bing Crosby,

was the first French singer to rely on a microphone and croon.

# Un seul couvert, please James... #

Charles Trenet, nicknamed Le Fou Chantant,

also rocketed to stardom.

A bundle of zany energy with his trilby, top blond curls,

he wrote the most covered chanson ever - La Mer.

# La mer... #

La Mer was recorded much later by Bobby Darin as Beyond The Sea.

In an era in which it was unusual for singers

to write their own material, Trenet wrote prolifically

and declined to record any but his own songs.

He changed everything in the songs business.

Before that, we had writers only

or singers.

There is this line between the interprete,

the people who sing only other people's songs,

and what we would think of nowadays as the singer-songwriter,

and France was doing this very early.

He was very much a bright young, interesting, dynamic performer

with very good fresh songs.

He also wrote one of my personal favourites,

Que Reste-T-Il De Nos Amours.

In English, I Wish You Love.

Perfect.

# Que reste-t-il

# De nos amours... #

After the Nazi occupation,

the liberated Paris discovered itself anew.

Certainly, after the war,

Saint-Germain-des-Pres became the centre of the world.

Paris has always been a place where artists, film directors, actors,

American jazz men have mingled.

I mean, from the '20s through to now.

And, in that particular zone, Saint-Germain was where people met.

It was a village, really.

A church, a butcher,

little old ladies,

old men with a hat,

crazy poets.

I went one day to Saint-Germain-des-Pres,

to Flore and Les Deux Magots, and I sat down and, you know, I said,

"Well, this looks like I'm in the right place now,"

because everybody was cool and it was full of artists

and, you know, of fun and...

The best happened to pass through this little village.

Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Picasso,

Orson Welles, Jean Cocteau, Andre Gide.

It's a very long list.

In the mid '50s, the great trinity

of Leo Ferre, Georges Brassens and Jacques Brel were raising chanson

to its peak of intellectual prestige,

introducing a degree of poetic aspiration that was its golden age.

Leo Ferre has his own language.

He's a poet.

The voice of revolution, in a certain way.

At the end of the Algerian war, there is a song.

He says, "Tu vas parler, mon petit Youssef,

"ou j'te branch, sur l'EDF."

You don't have much songs that speak

so violently

of the situation.

It tells the truth, with a beautiful language.

Leo Ferre became a symbol for bohemian freedom.

He released over 40 albums in his career and is seen as the epitome

of the French protest singer,

combining revolt, love and melancholic lyrics.

Some of his songs, such as Avec Le Temps, C'est Extra

or Jolie Mome have become classics of the French chanson repertoire.

Jolie Mome? It's a very popular girl, it's a prostitute.

And it's, you know, saying this girl is wonderful

and she's generous for all men and that sort of thing.

The France of De Gaulle, you couldn't show the front hair

of a woman in a photo - it has to be repaint.

So...Jolie Mome was something of a scandal.

Leo Ferre, Jolie Mome.

He gave me the song and he said,

"I wrote something yesterday.

"I think it's a gift for you."

I heard that. It was...

a beautiful gift.

And it was the subversiveness of the songs that really, really

attracted me - how they were provocative and singing about...

I mean, Serge... There's a song called Les Glav -

he dreams of being in a cage like a dog, and a black slave will come

and basically...kind of make love to him. And, you know...

and this was kind of something that would be seen

on Saturday night television on a French variety show or something.

It was quite amazing.

Georges Brassens had a rather cosy image, with his pipe and moustache,

strumming away at his guitar, but he found his own way with words

and delivery, and was just as radical and bawdy as any of them.

The salacious comments on prudishness

and taking a pop at authority, all these things run through his songs.

But again, that's why he appeals to provincial as well as urban France,

cocking a snoot at authority.

It was a way to be...

-Different.

-Different, yes.

But it's never rude,

it's always funny.

You had the death penalty in France,

we had it longer after Great Britain.

He wrote a song called Gare au Gorille.

It's about a gorilla who goes away from his cage.

At the end of the song, the gorilla has fucked the judge!

The thing is...is how you attack respectability.

Brassens sung the attack... respectability.

Jacques Brel was in fact Belgian, and to me he seemed to be

the most percussive and passionate of these three great writers.

He started performing here at Le Trois Baudets in Pigalle

and he became a huge star by 1958.

A year later, he wrote one of the most famous of all French classics -

Ne Me Quitte Pas.

Ne Me Quitte Pas is a brilliant song,

but only when performed by Brel or somebody of his stature.

I always think of him as a very early punk performer,

the way he used...the way he spat out his lyrics, the way he was...

the way he kind of was very aggressive and very tender.

And he was kind of very extreme.

I was fortunate to be on tour with Brel and so I got to see him

sing those fantastic songs live, every night.

At the end of the tour, he gave me a very special gift of a song,

which I treasure - Un Enfant.

However, this time wasn't exclusively a man's world

in French music.

'Paris's Left Bank cabaret scene was showcasing sultry new divas

'such as Juliette Greco,

'the bohemian beatnik muse of Jean Paul Sartre.'

Sartre said that Juliette Greco had a million poems in her voice.

They said...they thought I was...

..the image of the youth, at that time.

And everybody followed me, I don't know why.

She told a story with her body and a story with her eyes

and her face - she drew you in.

And so you didn't have to know this French language.

She sang Brel, she was a...

..a classy singer of very good songs and so she became very popular.

But she was essentially an interpreter of other people's songs.

And then there was Barbara, a great lady of song.

Strange, mystical, sensual.

She was able to allude to events in her own life

and events in France's history, but in her music.

In the early '60s, she had two albums - Barbara Chante Brassens,

Barbara Chante Brel.

But her next album was Barbara Chante Barbara,

so she became a singer-songwriter.

Barbara stood apart because she was actually writing

her own story in music.

Mon Enfance recounts her family's plights,

where, as Jews, they were hiding from the Nazis.

Nantes tells of her desperate attempt

to get to see her father before his death.

She was sexually abused by her father, at around age ten,

so during the Second World War, around 1940 here.

She spent the Second World War in hiding.

Her songs are very...they can be very mysterious

but they're very simple.

And it's great,

and it would take your heart.

She was...a completely instinctual and driven composer and performer,

also extremely dramatic.

It was so incredible. When you're on stage it was...

..it was amazing.

Every release by Barbara was eagerly awaited.

A particular high point for her happened in 1970,

when the release of L'Aigle Noir made history by selling

over a million copies in 24 hours.

It's the story of the black shadow of her father looming

over her throughout her life, the father that abused her.

I'm not sure, in British pop, we had albums that were that cutting,

that heartfelt, that real, that confessional,

exposing so much of your own life.

It could really drive you mad when you get into her world

and try to take the journey with her.

There was a lot of darkness to it.

But there is such a beautiful way of seeing things that could only

be hers, and that's her strength.

ROCK AND ROLL MUSIC

In the '60s, Anglo-American rock and pop, known as Ye-ye in France,

which comes from the "yeah-yeahs" of British bands,

forced la chanson to respond to this music.

Some, like Jacques Brel, Juliette Greco and Barbara

simply ignored it.

But the new singers with their pretend Anglo names,

such as Johnny Hallyday, Eddy Mitchell and Dick Rivers,

mimicked the new sound and were reviled for it.

In fact, some radio stations simply refused to play it.

Johnny Hallyday's status continued to grow

and nowadays, of course, he is fondly revered

and to date is the only French singer to fill the Stade de France.

While Hallyday may well be the biggest star in France,

the great Charles Aznavour is still one of France's

most enduring and beloved singers, who has survived

all the different trends through the years.

My songs are very solid. I write about everything.

I write about... Often my wife says,

"You're not going to say that in the song!"

I say, "Yes, I'm going to say it."

I'm not a realist singer,

I'm a realist writer.

I love Charles Aznavour.

Charles Aznavour is probably

my ultimate favourite artist

of all time.

Whatever it is an artist has, he has that something,

the way he can sing a French song to an English audience

and they will kind of eat it up and accept it.

He's written more than 1,200 songs, sung in seven languages

and sold more than 180 million records.

His song, She, was a number one hit in Britain,

though, strangely enough, not in his own country.

I sing it in English everywhere.

You don't want it in French, so I sing it in English,

even in France.

# She may be the face I can't forget

# A place of pleasure or regret

# May be my treasure or the price I have to pay

# She may be the song that summer sings

# May be the chill that autumn brings

# May be 100 different things

# Within the measure of a day. #

During the '50s and '60s, one of the greats was Gilbert Becaud,

a wonderfully charismatic mixture of well-crafted,

very popular songs with just a touch of rock and roll.

He wrote Je T'appartiens, which became Let It Be Me,

and Et Maintenant, which became What Now, My Love?

and many, many more.

The same month The Beatles burst onto the scene with Love Me Do,

across the Channel, 22-year-old Francoise Hardy

was charming the country with her wistful songs of love and loss.

'Here is somebody in 1962 who is the renewal of the young

'chanson francaise.'

She's speaking for the young people, she's speaking with their voice.

And the existential lyrics of that first breakthrough record -

"I'm on my own, nobody understands me" -

it is a yearning song, that comes from chanson.

She has written some wonderful songs and they

tell frustrations coming from a girl's point of view.

And she was very young when she wrote some of these songs

and she had a very, very mature understanding of feelings.

She was so, so singular. To see this girl

standing in front of a microphone as if she couldn't care less

and not smile at all...

and wasn't sort of trying to make people feel good.

Just like that, and that was...

..that was Francoise and quite, quite beautiful.

Then came a deeply talented writer who had much to do with

redesigning of French rock -

Serge Gainsbourg.

Serge Gainsbourg was before David Bowie -

he was all things to all people,

he was all images and, perhaps, whatever people wanted him to be.

He had been writing wonderful songs before the Ye-ye era,

but was enamoured with the Anglo-American feel.

And between him and a young musician named Michel Berger,

changed the whole construction of French pop music.

He always had great taste

for clever lyrics.

So even his simplest pop songs, he at least liked to try

and put in something a bit classy.

There's a thing in France that we call "jeux de mots", which is,

like, word playing.

There were at least two meanings,

if not three, that for his rhyme he'd cut words in half

and put them on the other line, a bit like Cole Porter's things.

# Flying too high with some guy, is my I...DEA of nothing to do...#

Serge used to cut words into... Used a lot of English words

and was just an extraordinary writer.

He became very rich writing simple throwaway pop songs

for Eurovision stars and people like that - that's how he became a hit.

In 1965, Serge Gainsbourg wrote a French language entrant

for the Eurovision Song Contest, got in there by proxy,

it was for Luxembourg, but the performer was France Gall.

He'd already written songs for France Gall,

they were beat-y, jazz pop songs.

But this was his pop entrant.

"Poupee de cire, poupee de son" - "I'm a singing wax doll".

He completely subverted the idea of Eurovision,

before anyone was actually thinking of subversion in pop.

'And there is the writer, Serge Gainsbourg.'

Poupee De Cire, Poupee De Son, to me,

is the first of those boomity-bang Eurovision songs.

When you listen to songs which came later, like Boom Banga Bang or...

And it bleeds through later into Waterloo by Abba...

Serge Gainsbourg invented that martial beat Euro pop.

Serge Gainsbourg's speciality was writing for women -

beautiful, young women, like Brigitte Bardot, France Gall,

Jane Birkin, of course.

Francoise Hardy and later Vanessa Paradis and...

Oh, yes! He wrote five songs for me.

He loved women.

That was his...battle.

All he wanted was to be loved and admired.

Serge Gainsbourg was very well respected with...

..singers like Juliette Greco or people like that. But...

..the public didn't like him, you know?

He was very rejected. Like, people say, well...

that he was a drug addict,

an alcoholic, that he was dirty.

You know, they hated him.

It took a long time - until the '80s he wasn't

respected at all by, you know,

the "large" public, as he is now.

Gainsbourg's classically derived melodies,

his clever punning lyrics and the close-mic, murmured singing style

he both affected himself and imposed on many young female singers

he wrote for all marked him as one of the major forces

of pop-era chanson.

He had a technique that he told me to do,

which is sing very, very close to the microphone.

They mustn't project in any way,

like some of the kind of showbiz belters of the time,

they absolutely had to keep a natural, little-girl voice.

Lady singers that didn't knew well how to sings, and to make them

sing in the breath...

SHE SINGS BREATHILY IN FRENCH

You know, all that sort of things.

With Jane Birkin...

But when you've got ten who do like that.

When you've got 100 that do like that.

When you've got one thousand that...

SHE PANTS

We want voice back!

'It was revolutionary, because beyond the writing,

'beyond the poetry that he brought, he actually brought production.'

Until Serge Gainsbourg released his records, I can't put my finger

on any French artist that took that risk

within soundscapes.

In 1967, Serge Gainsbourg came up with another of his strange moves,

he writes a TV film to star Anna Karina -

John Luc Godard's former wife and the darling of the French new wave.

I was very excited. That musical - it was my dream, you know.

I always loved Judy Garland and, you know, all the...

all the singers and all that,

so I was very, very excited.

In what other country could somebody come up with an arty

fictional film,

starring somebody of this calibre

and coming up with music which is just not...normal?

The controversial Je T'aime...Moi Non Plus

was his most famous song, a duet with English actress

Jane Birkin, who had come to Paris to make a film with Gainsbourg.

They became lovers and Birkin made Paris her home.

Serge wrote it for Bardot, who said that she wanted the most

beautiful love song, the most erotic song. But she was married

to Gunter Sachs and she pleaded with Serge not to bring it out.

So the gentlemen always, Serge said OK, so that her marriage worked.

SINGING IN FRENCH

A year later, when I popped up, then I sang our version of it,

which is the well-known version,

an octave higher than Brigitte, just because I thought that if

I sung high that was what Serge wanted.

I think the Vatican and the BBC banned it

just because of the heavy breathing, without realising

the beauty of Serge's text,

which was, "I love you, nor do I."

Je T'aime...Moi Non Plus came from a quote by Salvador Dali,

relating to a conversation he'd had with Picasso.

Picasso said, "I'm Spanish,"

and Dali replies, "Me too" - "Moi aussi".

Picasso - "I'm a genius," Dali - "Moi aussi."

Picasso - "I'm a communist." Dali - "Moi non plus" - "Neither am I".

And that was, you know...it was indicative of the kind

of things that Gainsbourg thought about to put into his pop songs.

I played it to my mother and father.

I used to do it jumping - the heavy breathing.

So, Ma said, "What a beautiful tune," and it was, of course.

Then my brother came by the house and put the whole thing on,

with the breathing.

So, Ma kept to her thing of saying it's a beautiful tune

and my father, too. They were stoic.

But can you imagine having your daughter

in such a scandalous thing, where it went up in the charts in England,

where everybody talked about it -

for them, it must have been a nightmare.

He obviously did realise that

well-judged...

..small outrages could work well, because he did...

he did kind of work that scene for the rest of his life.

He had Lemon Incest with his daughter Charlotte, which now,

I mean...I doubt whether he'd get away with doing that now.

Other artists emerged, keeping the essence of chanson

but modernising it.

In the 1970s, the French music business grew up a bit.

People like Alain Souchon,

who with his song-writing partner Laurent Voulzy

were actually dubbed at one point the Lennon and McCartney of France -

were actually more polished.

Their music was less edgy, ramshackled,

than the chanson performers of the 1960s.

The Foule Sentimentale is a song about the way the world

is obliging us

to buy things, to be happy.

It's about happiness, in fact.

And happiness the way our society proposes to be happy -

it's just to buy a lot of things. And...

I say no, we are better than that.

By the mid '80s, new performers such as Etiene Daho

were combining a chanson-imbued take on international pop

with the beginnings of a cult re-appraisal of the past.

Etiene Daho looked back to the history of chanson francaise,

took from it and turned it into a modern form

of slightly shiny pop.

The influence of the Ye-ye had for result that we all

started to want to... to work in a different way,

to consider that it was very important to have a good

rhythm track and a good sound, which was not the case before.

French language is difficult to sing,

because it's not rhythmic at all.

When I saw the Tetes Raides, I saw people that would mix up

their rock influence

with this great '30s music.

And then I was so happy, I was so happy.

Through the 1990s, a fresh set of artists started creating

distinctively French music for a new generation.

Singer-songwriter Philippe Katerine recorded with actress Anna Karina.

Around 11 o'clock in the morning, my phone rang and it said,

"It's Philippe Katerine and I just wrote a song."

And after a week, I had three songs

and after three weeks, I had 12, 15 songs, you know.

Singer-songwriter Stromae is one of the biggest names

in French music at the moment. He truly admires fellow Belgian

Jacques Brel, who he says was a huge influence on him.

If you sing in French - if you just have French lyrics,

this is chanson francaise. The music can be

inspired by Moroccan, African...

-South American.

-..South American or Brazilian, this is French...

This is chanson francaise.

Recently, a late contender, Zaz,

has invigorated the chanson of today

with a mix of jazz and soul.

Her album, Paris, takes classic songs about the city by Piaf, Ferre,

Aznavour and others and gives them a new twist.

Saint-Germain-des-Pres, it was in the three blocks.

Now, you have got little cabaret all over France.

People, they're devoted to music, because now I don't say

chanson francaise, I say chanson Francophone, say Francophone songs.

Why should I like chanson francaise?

The question is a no-go,

we all already like chanson francaise, we like My Way,

it's Comme D'habitude, it's a French song,

it was written by Claude Francois. You hear it in David Bowie

with My Death. You hear it in with Marc Almond.

French people love their own culture and they embrace their culture,

they have their own film stars, their own music, their own...

You know, there's no real room for British music.

French music, French films always come first.

Alors, as you can see, la chanson francaise is constantly

evolving and yet somehow still managing to stay,

well...

French.

Goodnight.

MUSIC: Boum by Georges Brassens and Charles Aznavour