Over at Salut! Live, I've been enjoying posting a song a day, well nearly every day.
The series is up to 14, now that I have decided to revisit Françoise Hardy's Tous Les Garçons et Les Filles.
Although Salut! Live has the great deterrent of being about folk music and folk-rock, it does make the occasional deviation.
Among the Songs of the Day, there have been clips of Eric Clapton and Del Shannon jostling with Sharon Shannon, the Unthanks, Kate Rusby, Joan Baez, Richard Thompson, Steeleye Span, Christy Moore ... already more infortmation than you necessarily wanted.
Many Salut! readers know the history of my connection with Françoise Hardy's Tous les garçons et Les Filles. I interviewed her while in Paris for The Daily Telegraph and was horrified by her insistence that she had always loathed the song. Yes, iIt is light and frothy, but - to these English ears - it is also irresistible, as much now as when I first encountered it half a century ago.
But no to Françoise, who originally relegated it to the flipside of Oh Oh Chéri, her first single, in 1962.
This is how I reported on my bitter disappointment in Paris:
Françoise Hardy was the embodiment of the Sixties pop creation "Girl on Stool", the pretty, long-haired and slightly mysterious singer seated on a TV-prop perch and strumming a basic guitar accompaniment.She was also, fleetingly, the voice of a generation. For fans in the English-speaking world, it helped to be doing French at school. Nothing too demanding, just enough to know what she meant when lamenting in seductive tones about all her contemporaries – Tous les Garçons et les filles de mon age – having boyfriends and girlfriends while she had no one.
Two million copies of the record were sold on either side of the Channel. When Hardy repeated the trick with the lost love simplicity of All Over the World, even the modest linguistic hurdle was removed. In French or in English, the sentiments spoke for anyone who felt tinges of discomfort in a swinging decade dominated by hordes of beautiful people.
Sullen teenagers could sing along morosely, somehow forgetting the striking looks and model-girl slimness that made Hardy far too gorgeous a creature to be sounding so sad and self-pitying in the first place.
At her convent school in provincial France, my wife identified with every word. So, reflecting on patchy successes with girls in small-town northern England, did I.
The magic lingers; a friend in Paris tells me she often hears 1960s Hardy, and probably that song, three times on Radio Nostalgie, the French golden oldies' station, during a two-hour drive back from the country each Sunday evening.
Yet, when you have to wait nearly 40 years to meet a woman you briefly worshipped, it is realistic to be prepared for disillusionment.
In Hardy's case, this has nothing to do with unkindnesses inflicted by advancing years. She complains of physical decline, of feeling "fragile" but does so while bounding around her spacious, split-level flat in Paris's 16th arrondissement not far from the Arc de Triomphe.
For a woman who will this month be 61, she remains handsome, elegant and thoroughly Parisian, with meticulously coiffured hair, the familiar angular frame and not an ounce of fat.
But invited to wallow in pride at memories of those angst-ridden anthems of long ago, she produces the most disdainful of Gallic shrugs. "Tous les Garçons?" she exclaims in horror. "Tiny voice, trite little melody, inconsequential song. Of course, I am pleased with what it did for me, but I am not remotely proud of it." At least she approves of All Over the World: "Much better, much more interesting".
The full Telegraph feature from 2005 can be seen here. And at YouTube you can even find a live version by the Eurythmics. If you wish to know more about the Song of the Day series, and its origins, an explanation may be found at this link.
"Oh Oh Chéri"
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