Les Calamités — Toutes Les Nuits
from A Bride Abattue (1984)
This song always pumps me up.. and has one of the best rawk guitar solos ever. Everything does sound better in French, you know.
‘With A Boy Like You,’ from the same album, is also pop bliss.
Les Calamités - Vélomoteur (1987)
This is where the Dum Dum Girls come from. Maybe with a touch more summer, a bit more beach. Not that Dee Dee has explicitly mentioned Les Calamités as an influence. Amazing girl-group singing on the chorus…
Niagara — L’amour a la plage
from Encore Un Dernier Baiser (Still One Last Kiss) (1986)
Amazing. Just her starfish earrings alone would be enough to carry the video…but there’s so much more.
Elégance — Vacances j’oublie tout (1982)
Here’s the video for the original.
Yamasuki — Yama Yama
from Le Monde Fabuleax Des Yamasuki (1971) [BUY THIS!]
This is such a weird tune, I love it. Take two French pop producers tasked with creating a cross-cultural East-meets-West dance concept album, add a Japanese children’s choir and a Judo master, and this is what you get.
The drums/blues slide guitar breakdown around 50 seconds in is amazing. Even better with the Judo instructor yelling over it.
From the label Finders Keepers:
For those in need of epic, exotic, metronomic, and dare I say it - proto-psychedelic hip hop that defies categorization - you need look and listen no further. An educational bubblegum multicultural psych-rock opera with lavish choral arrangements and triple-fat beats and basslines is the only way to describe this 1971 French/Japanese choreography LP which was designed to bridge the European and Eastern-Asian culture gap through the power of deep and funky music.
