Song ‘adaptations’ and the globalisation of French pop,1960–1970

‘Fanciful’ hit parades

But if adapting foreign hits was already common practice in French pop, the explosion of rock and twist music, coincident with the discovery of a vast and relatively prosperous cohort of young consumers, took it to unprecedented levels. Just what proportion of record sales and airplay belonged to American and British songs in the form of French remakes? Reliable statistics are difficult to compile, due to the ‘multitude of fanciful hit parades produced in France’ as one record executive lamented in 1971 (Masson-Forestier, 1971: F25). ⁶ To make matters worse, pop charts during the 1960s sometimes presented French and foreign hits in separate lists, obviating a comparison between them: such a segregation renders the monthly rankings of the magazine Salut les copains mostly useless for the following study. So, given the variety of charts in France, some contemporary and some retrospective, covering different eras and established for various audiences on the basis of diverse criteria, the best one might do is to examine those that appear the most reliable for the given period, in this case the years 1960 to 1970, and to hope for a high degree of congruence between them.

In 40 Ans de tubes 1960–2000 (2001), Ferment, who had access to record company archives, establishes a barometer based on overall sales for each year, and then lists, in no particular order, all records having reached that level. I used the total number of hits he cites for each year to calculate a percentage for each category (‘sung in English’, ‘sung in French’, ‘adapted from English’, ‘original French composition’). Ferment is the only compiler to have worked from actual sales figures: had he begun with 1960 instead of 1962, one could probably disregard the other sources. ⁷

In his Hit-Parades, Lesueur, after rightly forewarning readers that ‘Le hit-parade n’est pas une science précise’ (1999: 6), provides monthly lists of the top 20 or 30 songs based on a compilation of all the information available to him, although he does not specify the sources of those data or how he weighted them, and his results contain numerous errors and inconsistencies. So as to make these lists comparable to Ferment’s, I disregarded the relative rankings (i.e. it does not matter whether a song appears at the top of the list or the bottom) and combined monthly figures into annual totals.

On the web, Dominic Durand’s infodisc.com provides, in addition to the artist ranking cited at the start of this article, a trove of information on French popular music over the past five decades, and notably a list of the top 100 songs for each year, ranked according to a points system that variously weights the sources these lists are drawn from.

Having identified three sources for 1960s pop charts – Ferment, Lesueur and Infodisc – I sorted each song cited into one or more categories according to the language of the lyrics and, in the case of adaptations, the language of the original version. The process required extensive detective work: song titles do not reliably indicate the language sung (Michel Polnareff’s ‘Love Me Please Love Me’ is in French), nor do they always reveal their status as an adaptation (‘Black is Black’ became ‘Noir c’est noir’, but ‘Paint it Black’ became ‘Marie-douceur, Marie-colère’). Moreover numerous adaptations were based on songs in English that never reached the charts, and in a few cases were never even recorded. In the process, I compiled a table of more than 800 French songs adapted from English-language originals during the 1960s, both those that were hits and those that were not: the tip of an iceberg.

Recently asked what makes a good adaptation, Eddy Mitchell replied that he aims to ‘donner l’impression que c’est une originale, justement’ (Mitchell, 2009). In the 1960s, adaptations and French originals in the same style were generally indistinguishable to listeners, few of whom had any reason to read the composer credits on the record label or sleeve. My inventory of songs originally composed in English or sung in English only partially accounts for the proliferation of Anglo-American music in France, since so many French songwriters adopted the new styles. Nevertheless, it provides a basis for diachronic comparison, without my having to determine arbitrarily which songs are ‘rock’ and which are not, for example.

Taken together, Ferment, Lesueur and Infodisc provide a consistent picture. Hit songs sung in French that had originally been in English make up less than a quarter of the total in 1960, then increase to one-half in 1963, and then taper off to less than 15 per cent by the end of the decade (see Figure 1). In the abstract, one might imagine the decline as good news for French songwriters, but as we will see, they had little cause to rejoice.

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Figure 1.

Songs in the French hit parade adapted from English.

Given this proliferation of musical remakes during the first half of the 1960s, one might assume that the original versions were simply unavailable, or that French songwriters could not, or would not, adopt the new style and create original rock and roll. Either statement would be inaccurate. First, French pressings of hits by Little Richard, Bill Haley, Fats Domino, Ray Charles and Elvis Presley had been available since 1957; the last two had even graced the French top 20. The original version of Johnny Hallyday’s first record, Floyd Robinson’s ‘Makin’ Love’ (1959), came out in France just weeks before Hallyday and a dozen other French artists issued their own. Through French subsidiaries, Capitol, Liberty, London and RCA released 45s by Gene Vincent, Eddie Cochran, Bill Haley and Elvis Presley as early as 1956, years before the rock and roll vogue launched by Hallyday, Richard Anthony, the Chaussettes noires, and the Chats sauvages, with considerable help from the radio broadcast Salut les copains. In Paris, fans intent on finding the original versions could often have done so. Relatively few did.

Second, original rock and roll songs had been written in French (see Portis, 2004: 123–8). In 1956, the year of Presley’s first number one single in the USA, composer Michel Legrand returned from New York with an armful of discs featuring the new sound. Soon after hearing them, his friends Boris Vian and Henri Salvador had created their own version. However, as jazz enthusiasts often do, they considered rock and roll an inferior, and ultimately silly, stepchild of the music they loved. ‘[P]our adapter un rock d’Elvis Presley’, wrote Vian before anyone in France had actually done so, ‘autant ne pas se gêner et confier le boulot à un illettré, ça aura l’avantage de respecter l’esprit du modèle’ (1966a: 57). Moreover, French audiences, Vian emphasised elsewhere, had no need of the sexual release that rock music provided their puritanical counterparts across the Atlantic. Consequently, French rock and roll songs succeeded only ‘dans la mesure où elles sont burlesques’ (1966b: 154). Note that Vian speaks here of aesthetic rather than commercial success: songs like his ‘Rock and Roll-mops’ and ‘Va t’faire cuire un œuf, man’ clearly fall into the ‘novelty’ category, their place in history guaranteed only by the subsequent prestige of their authors and the distinction of being among the very first rock and roll songs composed in Vian’s own tongue. Salvador’s choice of pseudonym for these performances, Henry Cording (a bilingual pun on the word ‘recording’), provided a superfluous caution against taking any of it seriously. Meanwhile, drummer Baptiste Reilles, despite his pseudonym ‘Mac-Kac’, evinced somewhat less contempt for the new musical fad on his Versailles Records release, also from early 1956, but ‘Et là-bas’, ‘J’en ai assez’, and ‘Great Big Bulging Eyes’ never reached the teen audience that would propel rock and roll beyond the jazz/novelty niche. ⁸ Nor were they intended to: it was still too early. The same holds true for the 16 songs on a recent CD compilation entitled ‘Rock: French Rock and Roll 1956–1959’ (Born Bad Records), by artists and groups only the most fanatical collector would recognise: Les Six Trognes or Chou Rave Hageur, for example. From 1959 onwards, though, young French composers perfectly capable of crafting songs in the new style (Georges Aber, Jil and Jan, Claude Nougaro, Danyel Gérard) confronted the opposite problem: the sudden emergence of a teenage market left them unable to keep up with the soaring demand. At this point, the first chapter of American rock had already drawn to a close, leaving a five-year catalogue of songs ripe for picking. Hallyday’s debut record nevertheless featured three original rock numbers and only one adaptation. In fact, despite his reputation as a wholesale recycler, half of his recorded output during the first 18 months of his career consisted of French compositions, and of those, according to the label credits, half were co-written by him.

‘Familiar myths’

The question of adaptations, even more so than that of same-language cover versions, remains vexed by what Simon Frith rightly calls ‘the familiar myths of authenticity and corruption’ (1988: 6). These myths – founded on notions such as spontaneity, art for art’s sake, genius, originality, inspiration and the unmediated outpouring of feeling – attest to the perseverance of nineteenth-century Romanticism. Rather than judge a recording on its own merits, critics and listeners with a bent for what they deem ‘authentic’ will set purely aesthetic criteria aside in favour of essentialist ones, choosing singer-songwriters over mere singers, solo artists over groups, acoustic instruments over electric, black artists over white, and, where jazz, R&B or rock are concerned, American artists over French.

If in fact the songs of an inspired singer-songwriter are more ‘authentic’, then a case is easily built for the intrinsic value of a Brassens, a Serge Gainsbourg or a Dylan. On the other hand, the authenticity of Presley’s or Piaf’s records, which are the collaborative fruit of numerous arrangers, musicians, producers and songwriters, must be, by this criterion, dubious. And jazz or folk purists might have sensed Elvis’s ‘inauthenticity’ (i.e. whiteness), but to rock fans in France, many of whom were not indifferent to such concerns, his language and nationality trumped the rest. A simple question of perspective: Presley’s ‘Rip It Up’ might be considered ‘inauthentic’ when compared to Little Richard’s, but compared to Eddy Mitchell’s version, ‘C’est le soir’, there could be little contest. ⁹ In the October 1962 issue of Salut les copains, a reader complains that Johnny Hallyday and other French rockers ‘ne sont que des copieurs, des traducteurs, et des massacreurs de succès américains’. This represents a minority opinion among readers of the magazine (which doggedly promoted Hallyday), but not a rare one. ‘Quand pourrons-nous’, asks Jean-Pierre Dresti, ‘enfin applaudir un véritable compositeur-interprète de rock français?’ (‘Cher Daniel’, 1962: 69). The question might have drawn a smile from Boris Vian, Henri Salvador and Baptiste Reilles, though probably not from Hallyday himself, who had by then co-written more than a dozen of his own songs. Just over two years later, the ‘British invasion’ has begun and another Salut les copains reader is still waiting: ‘ce qui se passe en Grande-Bretagne peut très bien arriver demain en France et c’est ce que j’attends avec impatience. Il n’y a aucune raison pour que des Français ne puissent créer du rock original’ (Salut les copains: 1965: 45).

The first reader’s demand for a ‘véritable compositeur-interprète’ typifies a particular idea of authenticity best personified in 1962 by Bob Dylan, Chuck Berry, Jacques Brel, Barbara or Georges Brassens. But in the USA, the figure of the singer-songwriter did not yet occupy the central place in popular music that it would a few years later, or that it already did in France among chanson cognoscenti. Tin Pan Alley’s last practitioners still reassured themselves that ‘singers come and go, but songs are forever’ (Escott, 2010: 9) while supplying a steady provision of hits for the likes of the Shirelles, the Drifters, the Searchers, Gene Pitney, the Chiffons, the Ronettes, the Righteous Brothers, Dionne Warwick and of course Presley himself. ¹⁰ And songs were not then as strongly identified with their original singer, much less their composer: the hits adopted by French rockers had often been recorded by numerous artists in the US and Britain as well, Pat Boone’s apple-pie rendition of ‘Tutti Frutti’ being a notorious example. When Eddy Mitchell recorded Chuck Berry’s ‘Maybellene’, a dozen American versions had already been issued. Across the Atlantic, the Rolling Stones’ first LP featured only one Jagger/Richards song. Keith Richards recalls: ‘Mick and I considered songwriting to be some foreign job that somebody else did’ (Richards and Fox, 2010: 142). The debut album by the Beatles included six ‘covers’, two of which had already been interpreted in French by Sylvie Vartan – whose next album was ‘Twiste et chante’ (‘Twist and Shout’). So the call for an ‘authentic singer-songwriter’ suggests a particularly French preoccupation, belying cultural anxiety vis-à-vis both the American ‘originals’, real or imagined, and the Brel–Brassens–Ferré trinity who personified la Chanson with a capital C. ¹¹ It also identifies Jean-Pierre Destri as the sort of fan who was to applaud the arrival of Antoine, Michel Polnareff and Jacques Dutronc in early 1966.

Meanwhile, the success of Vartan, Richard Anthony, Claude François, Sheila, Eddy Mitchell and many others is proof that scorn for adaptations was not the prevailing sentiment among record buyers and radio listeners in pre-Beatles France. The proportion of them on the pop charts and playlists nearly doubled between 1960 and 1963, even as overall sales of 45 rpm records also soared. Both increases attest to the emergence, and successful seduction, of teenage consumers. Some of them sought out records in English just to annoy their parents or impress their peers, but they amounted to a niche market. ¹² For the time being, although the words of a hit song did not have to be profound, original or poetic, they had to be in French. There had been notable exceptions such as the Platters’ ‘Only You’ and Paul Anka’s ‘Diana’. However, according to Ferment, whose lists are the most reliable, 95 per cent of the hits from 1962 to 1964 were sung in the national tongue.

The career of Vince Taylor affords a curious case study. Born in the UK and raised in New Jersey and California, Taylor enjoyed unimpeachable credentials as a rocker. His 1961 performance at the Olympia, the singer dressed in black leather from head to toe and swinging a chain to amplify the effect, brought him to the attention of record magnate Eddie Barclay, who signed him to a contract ‘en lui précisant’, recalls Barclay, ‘qu’il chanterait chez moi en français ou qu’il ne chanterait pas’ (1988: 83). Taylor’s next records were in English despite his boss’s threat. Their weak sales, however, probably made Barclay regret the compromise. Jouffa and Barsamian (1993: 97) argue that Taylor’s career foundered because he did not have the support of Salut les copains boss Daniel Filipacchi, or because Barclay released too many of his records too quickly. A more obvious explanation is that they were sung in the wrong language: Taylor resisted domestication. Rock & Folk editor Philippe Koechlin reminds us: ‘À l’époque [i.e. before 1965], l’idée est que le public ne supportera jamais que du ‘chanté en français’. À part les fondus du jazz et les secoués du rock, les gens veulent comprendre les paroles’ (2007: 22). The rule even applied to English speakers Richard Anthony, Gillian Hills, Nancy Holloway, Eddie Constantine and Petula Clark. Anthony, referring to his cover version of Lloyd Price’s ‘Personality’, recalls that making a record in English was, in those days, ‘risqué’ (Pasqualini, 1993: 36), and indeed Sacha Distel’s ‘Personnalités’ fared much better. As for Petula Clark, her discs, most of them in English, were available in France long before she became a star there in 1961, a breakthrough owing something to her marriage that year to Claude Wolff of Vogue Records but even more to sales of the adaptations ‘Roméo’ and ‘Marin’ (both originally in German).

Do the lyrics matter?

Salut les copains devoted several pages of each issue to reprinting the lyrics of current hits. And yet, only one in four of French respondents to a 1962 Gallup poll agreed that the lyrics were, for them, the most important element of a song (Gallup, 1976: 338). This result is confirmed by the experience of Angèle Guller, host of the radio show La vitrine aux chansons and fervent champion of the chanson tradition. In the early and mid 1960s, Guller would play the latest hit for a group of young listeners and then ask them to tell her what the song was about. ‘Ils en étaient incapables’, she reports, ‘déclarant eux-mêmes que les paroles ne les intéressaient pas’ (1978: 152). So teenagers remained understandably impervious to complaints from their elders about the inanity of the lyrics. Ultimately, one is left to wonder whether the resistance to songs in English came not so much from young fans as from those in the music business, eager to protect their artists from foreign competition. Critics of the time, Guller among them, routinely describe teenagers as the ingenuous pawns of a ruthless industry. In any event, this resistance, regardless of its source, could only swell the tide of adaptations, whose lyrics, though in French, were as far from the Left Bank chanson à texte ideal as one could imagine.

But the language barrier eventually did erode, and with it the vogue for adaptations. In 1963, the peak year, they accounted for one-half of the songs on the hit parade. Two years later, it was only one-third, while the number of hits in English had increased from nearly none to about 12 per cent. This trend, which would continue throughout the decade, provides the context for a 1965 Salut les copains cover story, ‘Rock français ou rock anglo-saxon?’ consisting of a panel discussion among eight teenage listeners. When asked ‘Préférez-vous le rock chanté en français au rock chanté en anglais?’ their responses run the gamut. One complains:

Je ne comprends pas que l’on passe tant de disques américains à l’émission. Nous sommes en France, non? Les Français … chantent aussi bien que les Américains et au moins on comprend les paroles. Le plaisir d’une chanson réside pour moi autant dans le texte que dans la musique. (Salut les copains, 1965: 45)

Another counters that the French language ‘ne convient pas au rythme’, which is why few French singers are ‘capables d’interpréter un bon rock’ (1965: 45). A third complains about ‘ces Américains que personne ne comprend et qui font du tort à la musique française’ (1965: 109). Most of the group agree, however, that if rock music had never been sung in French, it could not have taken hold in France (1965: 109). The defenders of tradition rightfully viewed adaptation as a Trojan horse. ¹³

The principle transcends rock, as Hugues Aufray would prove later that same year by releasing ‘Aufray chante Dylan’, a collection of 11 pre-electric Dylan tunes adapted into French by Aufray and veteran lyricist Pierre Delanoë. ‘On a fait des adaptations et non des traductions’, the politically conservative Delanoë later claimed. ‘Nous avons même parfois dit le contraire de ce qu’il disait tout en gardant le climat de ses chansons’ (Jouffa and Barsamian, 1993: 191). Aufray himself recalled the process very differently: ‘Nous nous sommes efforcés de traduire son univers dans le contexte américain. Par exemple, nous n’avons pas voulu remplacer les brimades d’un Noir par celles d’un Algérien dans notre pays’ (Jouffa and Barsamian, 1993: 192). Comparing the French texts with Dylan’s corroborates Aufray’s statement; in fact some of them could fairly qualify as translations. Aufray’s decision not to acculturate the targets of Dylan’s indignation certainly made the songs more palatable in France, where stories of injustice in the United States ruffle very few feathers. Few doubt that Dylan’s success in France began with Aufray. In 1984 the master himself acknowledged as much by inviting Aufray to join him onstage in Paris for ‘The Times They are A-Changin’’.

A comparison of the fortune of specific British or American songs released in France with their French adaptations offers a slightly different perspective on the trend: as the decade advanced, the originals charted first and outsold their remakes more and more often. Occasionally, both versions sold well enough to appear on the hit parades. Sylvie Vartan’s ‘Est-ce que tu le sais?’ easily beat Ray Charles’s ‘What’d I Say’ in early 1962; Jimmy Gilmer’s ‘Sugar Shack’, Ricky Nelson’s ‘Teenage Idol’ and Trini Lopez’s ‘If I Had a Hammer’, though available in France, could not rival the success of their French counterparts. Hallyday’s ‘Le Pénitencier’ easily outstripped the Animals’ ‘House of the Rising Sun’, itself a cover version. Of course, foreign artists enjoyed little promotion and made fewer public appearances in France, but the language barrier was real. An anecdotal example: despite their successful 18-day run at the Olympia and nearly two years of worldwide Beatlemania, the Beatles failed to release a number one single in France until early 1966, with ‘Michelle’, a song not even released as a single in the US or the UK, but whose opening couplet is sung in French. (Nine years previous, Doris Day’s ‘Que sera’, in English but for the title phrase, had enjoyed the same success.) By this time, however, prospects for English-language recordings in France were improving. Tom Jones’s ‘What’s New Pussycat?’ had sold as well as the subsequent Richard Anthony adaption, while the Rolling Stones’ ‘Satisfaction’ easily eclipsed Eddy Mitchell’s ‘Rien qu’un seul mot (Satisfaction)’. Until the middle of the decade, English-language records often came out after the native versions, the latter having created a (limited) demand for the song, and never caught up; now, with a few exceptions such as Hallyday’s ‘Noir c’est noir’, the situation was reversed. It would be years before Eddy Mitchell realised what had happened:

La grosse erreur, aussi, c’est que lorsque je chantais des adaptations de certains Rhythm’n blues, les gens connaissaient l’original, puisque ça marchait bien en France. Et il était probablement plus intéressant d’acheter l’original … Le Rock and Roll, dix ans avant, avait au contraire été découvert après nos adaptations. Dans les deux cas, vous pouvez me croire, j’étais aussi sincère, mais le mécanisme ne fonctionnait pas de la même façon. (1979: 103–4)

By 1969, according to a complaint by the Syndicat des auteurs et compositeurs, only half the songs on French national radio, and only one-third on Europe 1, were French (Dillaz, 1973: 117). And as Eddy Mitchell suspected, the increasing popularity of songs in English came at the expense of adaptations like his. So, a question implied by Figure 1, ‘Why did songs adapted from English succeed less and less often after 1963?’ finds one answer in Figure 2. ¹⁴ But of course this only raises another question: why did the language barrier erode so quickly? Why was it so much less important in 1968 than in 1962 that popular songs be sung in French?

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Figure 2.

Songs in the French hit parade sung in English.

The speed of this transformation suggests a confluence of factors. An earlier quotation by Philippe Koechlin points to a principal one: ‘les gens veulent comprendre les paroles. C’était avant les Beatles, avant les Rolling Stones’ (2007: 22). What Americans called the ‘British invasion’ effectively internationalised the pop music industry in the United States, where even UK artists had previously enjoyed little success. France’s experience differed in two ways. First, French songwriters, unlike their American counterparts, had already felt the squeeze of foreign competition for several years, due to the wholesale domestication of songs from Italy and Spain and then even more from Britain and the USA. In this sense the French market was already more permeable. Second, to French ears, the British groups sang in a foreign language. Evidence already cited, however, supports the hypothesis that, regardless of what the national record industry assumed, for young listeners this was not nearly the obstacle one might think. Some of them appreciated the exotic appeal and apparent authenticity of original recordings made in English, others had learned enough English to sing along, at least on the refrain, and many paid scant attention to the lyrics regardless of which language they were sung in. A Salut les copains reader declared that ‘les Beatles interprètent si parfaitement leurs morceaux qu’il est inutile, pour les chanteurs français, d’essayer d’en faire des copies plus ou moins conformes’, as if the intelligibility of the lyrics made no difference at all, corroborating Angèle Guller’s discovery (‘Cher Daniel’ 1964: 22). Chantal, a 17-year-old participant on the ‘Rock français ou rock anglo-saxon?’ panel, pointed out that her friends who listened to the broadcast ‘poussent des cris d’horreur chaque fois qu’un disque anglais passe, sauf peut-être s’il est des Beatles’ (Salut les copains, 1965: 108, emphasis mine). So even fans who objected to songs in English made an exception for the Beatles. And likewise the magazine’s editors: the September 1964 issue, in its ‘Les Chansons chouchous du mois’ section, printed the lyrics of ‘She Loves You’ in English, with no translation, and followed up with other Lennon/McCartney songs soon after.

In so doing, Salut les copains recognised the invincibility of the Beatles/Rolling Stones juggernaut and gave some readers an incentive to study their English: one fan recalls that:

pouvoir comprendre les paroles des chansons des Beatles, des Rolling Stones, de Petula Clark, Sandy Shaw et bien d’autres a été, pour moi, comme pour les ami(e)s, une forte motivation pour l’apprentissage de la langue anglaise! … Nous aimions passionnément cette musique rythmée, dansante, et comprendre les paroles qui se greffaient dessus nous était nécessaire. Et nous avons ainsi progressé en anglais, parce qu’en cours, nous retrouvions des phrases repérées dans des chansons et parce que pour mieux comprendre les textes des chansons anglaises, nous acceptions de consacrer à l’apprentissage de cette langue le temps nécessaire! Je ne suis pas sûre que nous aurions autant travaillé et cherché à progresser sans cette motivation, je suis même certaine du contraire. ¹⁵

By 1970, 58 per cent of teenagers (aged 15–19) claimed to speak or understand English ‘at least a little’, whereas the figure was only 22 per cent for the country at large (Gallup, 1976: 788). Once the British invasion had primed the pump, songs in English contributed to a trend that, in turn, made the audience yet more receptive to them in the years following.

From imitation to appropriation

Il est bien fini, le temps des adaptations

On écrit en France assez de jolies chansons.

(Stella, ‘Poésie ‘67’, Chorenslup/Zelcer, 1967)

As original versions of US and UK recordings appeared on French airwaves and hit parades with increasing frequency, artists specialising in adaptations also encountered competition of a new sort from compatriots who wrote their own songs. Michel Polnareff, Nino Ferrer, Antoine and Jacques Dutronc, all of whom broke through in early 1966, refused to adopt American-sounding names, but their success represented neither a return to the traditional chanson nor a rejection of British/American rhythms and sounds. This ‘furieux vent de changement et d’innovation’, in the words of one of Serge Gainsbourg’s biographers (Verlant et al., 2000: 406), paid transparent tribute to American soul (Ferrer), to Bob Dylan (Antoine, Dutronc), and even to doo-wop (Polnareff) through a sensibility that, with humour, irony and linguistic invention, skirted the ersatz stigma that makes Johnny Hallyday a subject of mirth in Presley’s country and occasional embarrassment in his own. In fact former Left Bank jazzman Gainsbourg himself, having cast his lot with pop music a year earlier by composing Eurovision winner ‘Poupée de cire, poupée de son’ for France Gall, reached the Europe 1 hit parade for the first time in 1966 with ‘Qui est “in”, qui est “out”’, a typically ironic slice of bilingual psychedelic rock, recorded in London with English musicians. ¹⁶ Looseley identifies ‘a drive to experiment by appropriating rather than imitating Anglo-American styles and rooting them in French experience’ (2003: 39), but dates it from the early 1970s; it strikes me as a felicitous description of shifting tides in 1966. A thorough consideration of the new dynamic between French artists and their US and UK contemporaries after 1965 is (alas) beyond the scope of this study. Suffice it here to second Eddy Mitchell’s observation that ‘le mécanisme ne fonctionnait pas de la même façon’ (1979: 104).

En guise d’épilogue

Jack Lang, then Minister of Culture, suggested in 1991 that private radio stations in France be required to broadcast a minimum percentage of music in French – a straw in the wind. As of January 1996, by the ‘Pelchat Amendment’, these approximately 1300 stations risked a fine for devoting less than 40 per cent of their musical programming to ‘œuvres musicales créées ou interprétées par des auteurs et artistes français ou francophones’. Elsewhere, legislation refers to the required category as ‘œuvres musicales d’expression française ou interprétées dans une langue régionale en usage en France’. The Conseil supérieur de l’audiovisuel, which bore responsibility for enforcement, defined the terms more precisely: the phrase ‘d’expression française’ describes any song in French, regardless of the singer and composer (Briet, 1996). The director of Radio Nova complained that if Bruce Springsteen recorded a song in French, it would count, while most songs by the French group Mano Negra, being sung in English, do not (Briet and Esquirou, 1996). Three decades earlier, when French artists very rarely recorded in English, the criterion would have seemed less arbitrary. But would a distinction founded instead on the nationality of the songwriter, considering Brel’s songs ‘Belgian’ for instance, make more sense (see Borowice, 2007)? To support quotas in any form raises a fundamental and insoluble question: what makes a song French?

Fifty years ago, those hostile to French adaptations of American rock and roll routinely declared that the rhythms of the French language were incompatible with those of this new and foreign music. The argument gets resurrected today, paradoxically, in interviews with young French songwriters, as more and more of them – despite the radio quota – compose only in English. ¹⁷ One would have to ignore the whole legacy of commercially and artistically successful rock music in French, not to mention French punk and rap, in order to agree about the unsuitability of the language. After all, the quotas helped to launch a chanson néo-réaliste style in the 1990s (Négresses Vertes, Têtes Raides, Pigalle) and then Bénabar, Vincent Delerm, and Dominique A in the early 2000s. Today, however, the international popularity of Daft Punk, Phoenix and Air does give credence to a different claim: music sung in English, debates about its Frenchness aside, exports more easily. And so, from importing American and British songs to exporting songs in English, it would seem that, as one figure of globalisation, France’s pop music pendulum has swung as far as it can.