I, my lovelies, have a confession. A secret passion, if you’d like.
I am in love with yé-yé.
Yé-yé literally means “young, innocent and cute.” To me yé-yé is fun, French-femme pop, which is catchier than the plague when bathing in fleas. Emerging in the late 1950’s/early 1960’s you may wonder how someone who likes their music with a tang became infatuated with these little pop pixies, but the story is insanely simple, and more contemporary that seems fitting.
I stumbled across a jewel of an album when going on a massive downloading spree (tut tut, slap my knuckles and all that!). Scrolling down a page of various bog standard indie albums I came across one called “Femmes De Paris”, considering myself lacking in culture I happily downloaded and unzipped it and forgot about it was there.
As you can imagine it would have quite happily mouldered away in the depths of my hard drive until, my Media Player being on shuffle, Marie Laforet’s cover of Paint It Black first assaulted my ears. For those of you who’ve seen Talladega Nights you’ll be familiar with it as the song playing during Jean Girard’s “rise to fame” montage. Here it is for those of you who aren’t though:
So after hearing this cover - which I know it is blasphemy to say it – I prefer to the original, I decided to sniff out the rest of the album.
Turns out, Femme De Paris is the perfect introductory album to the yé-yé style, as the various artists involved cover some classic, well loved songs, including These Boots Are Made For Walking (Ces Bottes Sont Faites Pour Marcher), Nights In White Satin(Mes Reves de Satin), You’re So Good To Me (Les Framboises) and Baby Love (bizarrely, Baby Love).
All this is very informative, but tells you nothing about the charm of the music that initially captured me. Firstly, the French language, it’s such a beautiful language that seems destined to make beautiful pop songs - the words seem to roll on the respective singers’ tongues like breaths, with the music being fairly similar to that of the of your standard 60’s pop. There’s just a certain charm to this album that left me craving more, and more, and more. From the first listen I became hooked, the music is like an opiate, leaving you with an innate sense of joy. Cheestastic as this is, it’s true.
After some deliberation, I decided that my initial love for Marie Laforet would be a safe bet to begin with on my further exploration of the genre. I hunted high and low before finally finding some of her albums, which were much more folk music orientated than the Stones cover I’d initially loved.
In fact, many of the more famous yé-yé girls were serious musicians, who wanted to make folk and alternative music, yet were confined by their beauty into the stereotypical femme pop they became famous for. Trapped by their gender many of their most famous, and accessible songs were covers of famous British songs.
It was as I stumbled onto Francoise Hardy that I really struck gold. A voice softer than a whisper, with quite possibly the most beautiful face I’ve ever seen. I find her and her voice hypnotic:
It would turn out to me that the innocent little yé-yé girls were the more angular, mysterious, sexy/innocent cousins of our own Sandy Shaw and Dusty Spingfield. Music that we may not understand through the lyrics alone, but music that you feel through the music, emotive voices and sheer humanity, listen, become addicted, and feel your heart be touched.
