FRANCE GALL & 'POUPÉE DE CIRE, POUPÉE DE SON'

France Gall, Eurovision, 1965

Today, The Grandma has been taking off Christmas ornaments. The festivity has finished and it is time to continue with working life. While she was putting some objects in a box, she has found a piece of newspaper that talked about France Gall, the French singer who won representing Luxembourg in the Eurovision Song Contest 1965 singing her popular song Poupée de cire, poupée de son.

France Gall died on a day like today only two years ago and The Grandma wants to homage her talking about her career.

Isabelle Geneviève Marie Anne Gall (9 October 1947-7 January 2018), better known by her stage name France Gall, was a French yé-yé singer. In 1965, aged 17, she won the Eurovision Song Contest. Between 1973 and 1992, she collaborated with singer-songwriter Michel Berger.

Gall was born in Paris on 9 October 1947, to a highly musical family. Her father, the lyricist Robert Gall, wrote songs for Édith Piaf and Charles Aznavour. Her mother, Cécileh Berthier, was a singer as well and the daughter of Paul Berthier, the co-founder of Les Petits Chanteurs à la Croix de Bois. The only daughter of her family, she had two brothers: Patrice and Claude.

In spring 1963, Robert Gall encouraged his daughter to record songs and send the demos to the music publisher Denis Bourgeois. That July, she auditioned for Bourgeois at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris, after which Bourgeois wanted to sign her immediately. France was subsequently signed to Philips.

More information: Baby Languages

At the time, Bourgeois was working for the label as artistic director for Serge Gainsbourg and assumed this role for Gall as well. He encouraged her to record four tracks with the French jazz musician, arranger and composer Alain Goraguer.

The first airplay of France's first single Ne sois pas si bête, occurred on her 16th birthday. It was released in November and became a hit, selling 200,000 copies. Gainsbourg, who had released several albums and written songs for singers including Michèle Arnaud and Juliette Gréco, was asked by Bourgeois to write songs for Gall. Gainsbourg's N'écoute pas les idoles was Gall's second single; it reached the top of the French charts in March 1964 and stayed there for three weeks.

At the same time, Gall made her live debut, opening for Sacha Distel in Belgium. She teamed up with Distel's business manager, Maurice Tézé, a lyricist, which allowed her to create an original repertoire, unlike the majority of her contemporaries who sang adaptations of Anglophone hits. Elaborate orchestrations by Alain Goraguer blended styles, permitting her to navigate between jazz, children's songs, and anything in between.

France Gall

Examples of this mixed-genre style included Jazz à gogo by Alain Goraguer and Robert Gall and Mes premières vraies vacances by Jacques Datin and Maurice Vidalin. 

Gall and Gainsbourg's association produced many popular singles, continuing through the summer of 1964 with the hit song Laisse tomber les filles followed by Christiansen by Datin-Vidalin. Gainsbourg also secretly recorded Gall's laughter to use on Pauvre Lola, a track on his 1964 album Gainsbourg Percussions.

Having previously resisted, Gall gave in to her managers at the end of 1964 and recorded a single intended for children. The song Sacré Charlemagne, written by her father, and set to the music of George Liferman, was a hit in 1965, peaking at number two in France and number five in Turkey.

Gall was then selected to represent Luxembourg in the Eurovision Song Contest 1965. From the ten songs proposed to her, she chose Gainsbourg's Poupée de cire, poupée de son.

On 20 March 1965, Gainsbourg, Gall, and Goraguer attended the finals of the song contest in Naples, where the song was allegedly booed in rehearsals for straying so far from the sort of song usually heard in the Contest at this point.

 

More information: Paroles Musique

Although the delivery during the live show may not have been Gall's strongest performance -one critic wrote that Gall's performance was far from perfect- another noted that her voice was out of tune and her complexion pale, and when Gall called Claude François, her lover at the time, immediately after the performance, he shouted at her, You sang off key. You were terrible! -the song impressed the jury and it took the Grand Prix.

Success at Eurovision ensured that Gall became even more known outside Europe and she recorded Poupée de cire, poupée de son in French, German, Italian and Japanese. There appears to be no English version released by France Gall, although there was an English cover version by the English 1960s star Twinkle.

France Gall

In 1965, Gall toured France for several months with Le Grand Cirque de France, a combination of radio show and live circus. Her singles continued to chart successfully, including the Gainsbourg-penned Attends ou va-t'en and Nous ne sommes pas des anges. She also had a hit with the song L'Amérique by Eddy Marnay and Guy Magenta.

After a TV film directed by Jean-Christophe Averty and dedicated to the songs of Gall was distributed in the United States in 1965, Gall was sought by Walt Disney to appear as Alice in a musical film version of Alice in Wonderland, after having already made Alice into a cartoon in 1951. Although Gall had insisted she did not want to become involved in film work, this was the only project which appealed to her. The project was cancelled after Disney's death in 1966.

In 1966, Gall appeared in the television film Viva Morandi, made in the same psychoanalytical mould as the (1965) Federico Fellini film Giulietta degli Spiriti. She played La Grâce alongside Christine Lebail, who played La Pureté, both singing Les Sucettes in a segment which was prominently labelled Fantasy, in a clear reference to the song's sexual undertones.

She considered appearing on screen in 1993 for a cinematographic collaboration with her best friend, screenwriter Telsche Boorman. This planned project was never completed due to Boorman's death in 1996. In a feature film, Gainsbourg Vie héroïque, released in France in January 2010, based on the graphic novel by writer-director Joann Sfar, Gall was portrayed by Sara Forestier. 

More information: All Music

In 1966, her children's song Les Leçons particulières was the subject of public notoriety and displeasure; the same occurred when Jean-Christophe Averty choreographed a troupe of men on all fours to illustrate another of her children's songs, J'ai retrouvé mon chien, on his television programme, Les Raisins verts.

Although struggling in her home country, Gall regularly recorded in Germany from 1966 to 1972, in particular with the composer and orchestrator Werner Müller. She had a successful German career with songs by Horst Buchholz and Giorgio Moroder. 

France Gall

Gall had several other releases in France in 1968, none of which aroused any great interest. At the end of 1968, on reaching the age of 21, Gall separated from Denis Bourgeois and spread her wings upon the expiration of her contract with Philips.

She moved to a new record label, La Compagnie, in 1969, with whom her father Robert signed a contract, where she made a number of recordings, but did not succeed in finding a coherent style with Norbert Saada as artistic director.

She went her own way in 1969 with two adaptations: one Italian and the other British: L'Orage/La Pioggia which she sang with Gigliola Cinquetti at the 1969 Sanremo Music Festival, and Les Années folles, created by Barbara Ruskin. Her songs Des gens bien élevés, La Manille et la révolution, Zozoï and Éléphants were largely ignored. La Compagnie went bankrupt within three years of its creation, co-founder and singer Hugues Aufray blaming the failure entirely on Norbert Saada.

The early seventies continued to be a barren period for Gall. Although she was the first artist to be recorded in France for Atlantic Records in 1971, her singles C'est cela l'amour (1971) and Chasse neige (1971), faltered in the charts.

In 1972, Gall, for the last time, recorded songs by Gainsbourg, Frankenstein and Les Petits ballons, but these also failed to chart. The results of her collaboration with Jean-Michel Rivat as artistic director, La Quatrieme chose (1972), Par plaisir and Plus haut que moi (1973) all failed to meet with commercial success. Gainsbourg invited France Gall on television to sing a medley of old songs from their time together, which included Poupee de cire, Poupee de son.

From the 1970s onwards, Gall started regularly visiting Senegal. She bought a hideaway there on the island of N'Gor, close to Dakar in 1990.

More information: DW

In 1985, Gall joined Chanteurs Sans Frontières, on the initiative of Valérie Lagrange. She also worked for S.O.S Ethiopie for the benefit of Ethiopia under the aegis of Renaud. At the same time, she gave a successful series of concerts lasting three weeks at the new venue Le Zénith in Paris, where she performed new songs like Débranche, Hong-Kong Star, and gave solid acoustic performances of Plus haut, Diego libre dans sa tête and Cézanne peint.

In 1985 and 1986, Gall worked with Berger, Richard Berry, Daniel Balavoine and Lionel Rotcage for the benefit of Action Écoles, an organisation of schoolboy volunteers which collects essential food products in France for African countries where famine and drought prevail.

On 14 January 1986, during a trip to Africa, Balavoine tragically perished in a helicopter crash.

In 1987, the song Évidemment, written by Berger and sung by Gall, was a moving homage to their lost friend. The song appeared on the album Babacar. Gall topped the pop charts in many countries in 1987 and 1988 with another song from the Babacar album, Ella, elle l'a, a Berger tribute to Ella Fitzgerald.

In 1996, Gall asked Jean-Luc Godard to produce the video clip of her song Plus haut, taken from her album France. Godard initially refused, but later agreed, and directed a dreamy, picturesque video titled Plus Oh! near his residence in Rolle, Switzerland.

A long-term breast cancer survivor, Gall died, aged 70, of an infection after a two-year battle with a cancer of undisclosed primary origin, at the American Hospital of Paris in Neuilly-sur-Seine on 7 January 2018.

More information: The Guardian

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France Gall