{"id":1197,"date":"2008-02-04T15:15:40","date_gmt":"2008-02-04T20:15:40","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2008-12-11T10:04:25","modified_gmt":"2008-12-11T10:04:25","slug":"the-look-france-gall","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/the-look-france-gall\/","title":{"rendered":"The Look: France Gall"},"content":{"rendered":"

It’s a simple enough question:<\/strong> Which artist that you first got to strictly on the basis of Look has turned out to have the most musical merit?<\/em><\/p>\n

My answer is easy enough: around 1996 or ’97, my French-Canadian buddy Rick sent me a cassette of hits by ’60s French pop starlet Francoise Hardy<\/strong>, who at the time was constantly getting namechecked in indie pop circles. I listened a few times, I said “eh,” I moved on. My musical mindset at the time, both in new stuff and older discoveries, was more in tune with the peppy, bouncy and bubblegummy than with Hardy’s more mature and low-key stuff, so after a couple of listens, the cassette migrated towards the bottom of the pile on my desk at my old job as an IT librarian. I’m not sure I listened to the b-side, a hits collection by a contemporary of Hardy’s named France Gall<\/strong>, at all.<\/p>\n

So a couple months later, I’m at the Albuquerque Best Buy with my friend Joyce, wandering around the CD section while she’s talking with a salesman about VCRs or something. Now remember, this was a period where Best Buy was trying very aggressively to corner the CD-sales market, complete with TV ads namedropping bands like Fugazi<\/strong> to make it clear how hip they were, so the CD section was both enormous and surprisingly well-stocked, and at popular prices to boot. I’m grazing through the less well-traveled sections — soundtracks, pop vocals and the amorphously-named “world” bin — looking for oddities or misfiled treasures, when I find a Polygram import greatest hits by France Gall. For all I know, this is exactly the same CD that Rick filled side two of that C90 with, but I was at the checkout with the CD in my hand immediately, because…well, how could I not?<\/p>\n

\"Ooo,
\n
\nFrance Gall, it turned out, looked like Brigitte Bardot<\/strong>‘s perky kid sister. She looked like she was the Gallic equivalent of Lesley Gore<\/strong>, whose Golden Hits<\/em> CD was high in my personal playlist at the time. Unlike the cool, soign\u00e9 Francoise Hardy, she looked like her music was fun, which was the main thing I looked for at the time. But mostly, she was just really frickin’ hot<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

What I learned when I listened to the CD is that indeed, France Gall’s 1962-’68 singles (the ones covered on this particular comp) owe a lot to US girl group pop. “Nous ne Sommes pas des Anges,” which it turned out I was already familiar with because Heavenly had covered it on their final album Operation Heavenly<\/em>, and Gall’s 1965 hit “Poupee de Cire, Poupee de Son” (which won the Eurovision Song Contest that year) are particularly indebted to that style. <\/p>\n