Piaf was also within the mandate of veneration for pop''s elder statespersons with a zest that other countries might have thought excessive, even corny--as instanced by Les Filles A Papa, a trio containing daughters of songwriting fathers, who finished performances by donning masks of their better-known parents'' faces. If unmentioned by Jones, they were reverberant too of the ''decent'' music that national radio programmers thought the public ought to like. This meant that there was little middle ground between nursery rhymes and Maurice Chevalier, illustrious to a wider world as an ''ow-yousay professional Gaul. Teenagers, therefore, had to put. up with the same artistes that their elders and younger siblings enjoyed--such as pipe-smoking and avuncular Bourvil--a sort of Norman George Formby, just as Franck Pourcel was a Marseilles-reared equivalent of Laurence Welk. Nevertheless, an instrumental version of the Platters'' "Only You" would be attributed to Franck Pourcel & his Rockin'' Strings after the first stirrings of rock ''n'' roll warranted cursory spins on the wireless before being brushed aside as another overseas fad as transient as the Cha-Cha-Cha or hula-hoops. Yet, if he "looked more like a wine waiter in some posh restaurant," Milou Duchamp''s "Tropical" from 1958--though very much in debt to Screamin'' Jay Hawkins'' ''Alligator Wine"--"managed to be simultaneously frightening and sensual." There was a tendency otherwise towards gimmick discs traceable from the same US source, exemplified by translations of "The Purple People Eater" (by Gabriel Dalar), "The Chipmunk Song" (the Alegrettes) and "Baby Sittin'' Boogie" from Sacha Distel, who''d been a prodigious jazz guitarist prior to focussing on vocals and penning "Great Big Bulging Eyes" and "Et La-Bas"--"the country''s first original rock ''n'' roll songs"--for Mac-Kac ("arguably the stupidest name ever used by a French rock ''n'' roll singer").

These were issued on an EP, more common a format in France than singles, and attractive as both a cheap device for wringing maximum financial blood from an artiste--and colourful artwork, particularly if it pictured, say, Brigitte Bardot who became as legitimate a pop icon in Europe as Elvis Presley a legitimate movie star in the United States. The Beryl Bainbridge to Brigitte''s Jackie Collins was Juliette Greco, the Thinking Man''s French actress whose EPs were as omnipresent in sock-smelling student bedsits as pictures of Johnny Hallyday would be on the walls of schoolgirl bedrooms. He''d left the runway as resident Elvis Presley impersonator in Le Golf Drouot, Paris''s foremost hangout of yé-yé ("a catch-all label for the whole of French teen pop"), becoming conspicuous among generally unexportable homegrown rockers after his bi-lingual cover of Chubby Checker''s "Let''s Twist Again" in 1961 convinced most then that this insipidly handsome youth was not so much France''s Elvis as its ''answer'' to Bobbies Rydell, Vee and Vinton. Johnny wasn''t the only one to cash in on the Twist as it lingered long sur le continent as "the biggest dance craze ever seen since the tango." Even Chevalier succumbed to a Twist 45 with Les Chausettes Noires (avec Eddie Mitchell), whose stock-in-trade tended to be xeroxes or translations of US and UK smashes for home consumers--as it was for the likes of Dalida, Richard Anthony, Les Chats Sauvages, Sylvie Vartan (Hallyday''s first wife, whose "I''m Watching You," a Number One sung in English was taped in London with Nero & the Gladiators), Sheila ("a gawky schoolgirl with a nauseatingly winsome smile") and Claude François, whose native reproduction of 1963''s "If I Had A Hammer" was behind counters a week after he heard Trini Lopez''s blueprint on Radio Luxembourg. In parenthesis, it sometimes cut both ways--as instanced by Jane Morgan using Dalida''s French version as a useful demo for her US million-seller, "The Day The Rains Came," an interpretation of a Gilbert Bécaud composition; Jacques Brel''s "Le Moribond"--about a dying man''s reconciliation to his wife''s routine adulteries--mutated by Rod McKuen into innocuous "Seasons In The Sun" (with as much resemblance to the original libretto as a Marx Brothers film to its screenplay) for the Kingston Trio, the first of many hit revivals of same. Lest we forget too, Soeur Sourire, the Singing Nun, topped charts in Australia and the USA with "Dominique, "which, if maddeningly catchy, demonstrated that "the chanson was alive and well, even as the barbarians gathered at the gates." Crucially, being enormous within French-speaking territories was enormous enough for Brel, Bécaud, Charles Trenet, Jean Sablon, Georges Brassens and like entertainers who had, in that bilious journalistic cliché, Grown Old With Their Audience.

The post-war period also witnessed the spectacular ascent of Charles Aznavour among members of a resistance movement against Anglo-American intrusion and the correlated acceptance of second-class status to "a host of foreign singers who chose to base themselves in France" such as Eddie Constantine (possessive of "American cool that underpinned his appeal"), Vince Taylor, and Doug Fowlkes & the Airedales, demobbed US marines, who wowed ''em at Le Club Drouot as the Beatles did at Hamburg''s Star-Club. Furthermore, though Hallyday was at odds with chart rivals "over his decision to record in French rather than English," too many of around five thousand pop acts across the republic by 1962 inclined towards the stiff earnestness of singing in a tongue not their own over accompaniment riven with complacent exactitude. Thus Richard Anthony''s arrangement of Cliff Richard''s "Move It" is deemed "strangely fascinating and unbelievably poor." I''d want to hear a record thus portrayed--though when I did, it wasn''t quite as bad as all that. The author''s prose also made it incumbent to search (mainly in vain) for Les Bingsters'' cover of "Rock Around the Clock" ("as far removed from rock ''n'' roll as it was possible to get"); Bordeaux''s Les Blousons Noirs, who "took amateurism to a new high (or low, depending on your point of view) years before The Legendary Stardust Cowboy or the Shaggs"--though they were actually more like Hasil Adkins--and Jacques Jay and his "banjo-powered reworking of Little Richard''s ''Tutti Frutti'' that has to be heard to be believed." -- Alan Clayson, Ugly Things (Summer 2022).