Tous les garçons et les filles (song)

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Françoise Hardy (1969)

Tous les garçons et les filles is a 3:08 minute long, French-language chanson by Françoise Hardy , for which she wrote both the text and the music herself. It was released in France in June 1962 on a single as the B-side of J'suis d'accord and as an EP (with the additional songs Oh oh chérie and Il est parti un jour ) on Disques Vogue , and a little later on an eponymous LP . As was not uncommon in the early 1960s, Hardy also has this song in English (Find Me a Boy) , Italian (Quelli della mia età) and - in the translation by Ernst Bader and under the title Peter and Lou  - in German recorded.

The chanson became her first big success and was partly responsible for the image that the singer had for a long time: charming, fascinating, a bit lost between all the other extroverted rock 'n' roll and Yéyé performers in France. For the music journalist and author Fabien LECOEUVRE it is up to the present a "great classics" of French popular music .

Text and music

The chanson is about the complaint of a female adolescent who - in contrast to "all other boys and girls of the same age", as the literal translation of the title means - is still alone. In their perception, everyone else is walking together, holding hands and looking in love in each other's eyes. They only feel happiness and are not afraid of tomorrow, but forge future plans together because they know what love means.

The protagonist, on the other hand, walks alone through the streets, grieved that nobody loves her; her days and nights are alike , joyless and dreary (sans joies et pleins d'ennuis) because no one whispers “I love you” in her ear. She wonders if and when the day will come when the sun will shine for her too, because she has finally found someone who loves her so that she - like everyone else - can feel happy.

The structure of the song is also quite simple. It consists of three six-line stanzas ( rhyme scheme : ababcc), each followed by the four-line chorus . After each stanza plus refrain there is a “final verse” ( coda ), also a quatrain; the coda is missing after the last verse-chorus combination. Couple rhymes are used in the refrain and coda.

Musically, the "casual but haunting voice that hovers over a waltz rhythm" is characteristic. The singer is accompanied by electric guitar and drums .

Emergence

The chanson that Françoise Hardy wrote after listening to Paul Anka's 1959 number one hit Lonely Boy on radio almost never got released. When she sang it in a Pathé-Marconi studio at the end of 1961 at an audition that record companies occasionally organized to discover new talent - and accompanied herself on the guitar - the employee there waved him off. He thought she was too similar to Marie-Josée Neuville ("The High Priestess of Twist "), who was under contract with the company. Hardy was not discouraged and next offered the song to the record company Vogue because she hoped “you would be a little less demanding there, because after all, Johnny Hallyday recorded songs there that I found worse than other things you got to hear . "

But Vogue wasn't convinced of her either - at least not at first. Three months later, however, they remembered her because they needed a replacement for Petula Clark , who had refused to record Oh oh chérie . Hardy took on this task, and the three other titles that were required for an EP were allowed to include Tous les garçons et les filles on the B-side - as well as on the single  - as the only piece with a melancholy impression. During the recordings on April 25, 1962, her singing voice was accompanied by studio musicians. The radio station Europe 1 preferred this title to Oh oh chérie , but the breakthrough for the song came six months later, after she had performed it twice on Radiodiffusion-Télévision Française : in September 1962 live and again only with her own guitar accompaniment in the series Le petit Conservatoire de la chanson and as a “pause filler” on the evening of the referendum on the future direct election of the President , October 28, 1962.

reception

At first glance, the plot may seem simple, if not flat. Jérôme Pintoux describes it as “gloomy and banal”, Frank Laufenberg puts the chanson in a series of “almost meaningless, monotonously performed little songs” that Françoise Hardy “trilled” at the time. The artist herself also rejected the songs from her early career, the so-called Vogue phase (les années Vogue) after her record company at the time , for many years and, for example, refused to agree to a re-release until the mid-1990s. She found the success of this special title "bothersome and burdensome" for her further career. But at the time of its first publication, Tous les garçons et les filles struck the nerve of every pubescent listener, who also just “didn't go with anyone”. It was therefore in France to three-minute " snapshot " and a "cult song of a whole generation," about the Claude Lelouch with her in the Jardin des Tuileries a movie - forerunner of today's video clips  - for the performance on the 1960 in the years in addition to the jukeboxes very popular Scopitones . The chanson is also one of the few French-language titles that Robert Dimery has included in his book “1001 Songs You Should Hear Before Life Is Over”.

Chart successes and cover versions

The single was released in November 1962, sold more than two million copies within five months and became number one in France in early 1963 . The other side of this record (J'suis d'accord) was the biggest competitor for the top position in the charts; Together, the two titles were ranked first for a total of 13 weeks between December 1962 and April 1963. It was also very successful in multilingual Belgium and also made it to the top hit in Wallonia (number one in a total of 36 weeks in the charts), and in the Flemish part of the country to eleventh place (represented there for twelve weeks).
Hardy's French-language version was also successful outside of the Francophone world . In 1963 it made it to 20th place in the Federal Republic of Germany ; in addition, the German-language version (Peter and Lou) came in 26th place in the same year . In the Netherlands , it reached fourth place in December 1963 and was in the top ten for six weeks. In the United Kingdom , the chart entry took place in June 1964; there the highest position was place 36, and the chanson stayed in the hit list for seven weeks.

The Italian version Quelli della mia età (with a text by Vito Pallavicini ) reached second place on the M&D charts in Italy , where it stayed for 25 weeks and finally also topped the annual charts . In West Germany, Peter and Lou was also on the 1965 long-playing record Françoise Hardy: Portrait in Music , which is based on a television show of the same name by Truck Branss .

Numerous other interpreters have covered the song , partly in other languages ​​or instrumentally (like the accordionist Aimable ) and partly only in the 21st century. These include Gigliola Cinquetti , The Dresden Dolls , Timi Yuro , Marie Myriam , the Eurythmics , Catherine Spaak , Carla Bruni and Laurent Voulzy (1995 with the Enfoirés ), the Canadian singer and actress Ginette Reno , Free Souffriau , Saint Etienne and that Belgian music project Vitor Hublot around Guy Clerbois and Jacques Duvall .

literature

  • Christian-Louis Eclimont (Ed.): 1000 Chansons françaises de 1920 à nos jours. Flammarion, Paris 2012, ISBN 978-2-0812-5078-9
  • Fabien Lecœuvre: 1001 histoires secrètes de chansons. Ed. du Rocher, Monaco 2017, ISBN 978-2-2680-9672-8
  • Jérôme Pintoux: Les chanteurs français des années 60. You côté de chez les yéyés et sur la Rive Gauche. Camion Blanc, Rosières-en-Haye 2015, ISBN 978-2-35779-778-9
  • Pierre Saka: La Grande Anthologie de la chanson française. Le Livre de Poche, Paris 2001, ISBN 978-2-253-13027-7 (lyrics on p. 647f.)

Web links

Evidence and Notes

  1. ↑ The producer and arranger Roger Samyn is also indicated as the author of the credits on the record label; this was necessary because Hardy had not yet taken an exam as a composer at SACEM - Christian-Louis Eclimont (ed.), 1000 Chansons françaises, 2012, p. 215.
  2. ↑ In France in the 1960s, record companies released new releases in two 45- rpm formats.
  3. ↑ Jérôme Pintoux, Les chanteurs français des années 60, 2015, p. 623
  4. ↑ a b c d Fabien Lecœuvre, 1001 histoires, 2017, p. 538
  5. ↑ French-language text at paroles2chansons.lemonde.fr
  6. ↑ a b Robert Dimery (Ed.): 1001 Songs You Should Hear Before Life Is Over. Ed. Olms, Zurich 2015, 2nd edition, ISBN 978-3-283-01248-9 , p. 122
  7. ↑ Pierre Saka: 50 ans de chanson française. France Loisirs, Paris 1994, ISBN 2-7242-5790-1 , p. 35
  8. ↑ a b c Christian-Louis Eclimont (ed.), 1000 Chansons françaises, 2012, p. 215
  9. ↑ The television appearance of September 21, 1962 is available on the website of the INA French radio and television archive .
  10. ↑ Jérôme Pintoux, Les chanteurs français des années 60, 2015, p. 625
  11. ↑ Frank and Ingrid Laufenberg: Hit Lexicon of Rock and Pop. 3 volumes, Ullstein, Berlin 2007, ISBN 3-548-36920-4 , volume 2, p. 955
  12. ↑ Gilles Verlant (ed.): L'encyclopédie de la Chanson française. Des années 40 à nos jours. Ed. Hors Collection, Paris 1997, ISBN 2-258-04635-1 , p. 71
  13. ↑ Gilles Verlant: L'Odyssée de la chanson française. Ed. Hors Collection, Paris 2006, ISBN 978-2-258-07087-5 , p. 86. The Lelouch film can be found in the holdings of the Institut National de l'Audiovisuel (there from 12'14 '' to 15'18 '' ).
  14. ↑ In France itself, according to infodisc.fr, around 700,000 records were sold.
  15. ↑ a b according to the information on the song at hitparade.ch
  16. ^ Julia Edenhofer: The great oldie lexicon. Bastei-Lübbe, Bergisch Gladbach 1992, 2nd edition, ISBN 3-404-60288-9 , p. 273
  17. ↑ to dutchcharts.nl
  18. ^ Paul Gambaccini / Tim Rice / Jonathan Rice: British Hit Singles. Guinness Publishing, Enfield 1993, 9th edition, ISBN 0-85112-526-3 , p. 130.
  19. ↑ Françoise Hardy - Ci STO / Quelli Della Mia Età (vinyl, 7 ", 45 RPM, mono, Single) at Discogs
  20. ↑ Guido Racca: M&D Borsa Singoli 1960–2019 . Self-published, 2019, ISBN 978-1-09-326490-6 , pp. 238 .
  21. ↑ Guido Racca: M&D Top 100 Year-End: Singoli & Album 1960–2018 . Self-published, 2019, ISBN 978-1-980329-12-1 , pp. 25 .