Comme Si, Comme Ça
Yé-yé gets dismissed as novelty — cute girls in miniskirts doing watered-down British Invasion. That reading is wrong. At its best it was genuinely weird, genuinely catchy, and genuinely French in a way that nothing before or since has been. This is ten tracks that make the case.
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01
Jacqueline Taïeb — “7 heures du matin”
The song starts with a girl talking herself out of bed, grumbling, flipping through radio stations, and gradually arriving at something like consciousness. It’s half spoken word, half bubblegum, and completely its own thing. Taïeb wrote it herself, which was not what was expected of a nineteen-year-old yé-yé singer in 1967. The melody is almost an afterthought but it sticks anyway. Strange and wonderful.
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02
Clothilde — “Fallait pas écraser la queue du chat”
The title translates to “You shouldn’t have stepped on the cat’s tail,” which tells you roughly everything and nothing at all. Clothilde delivered this with a completely blank expression — on record, on television, everywhere — and the result is one of the most unsettling pieces of pop music France ever produced. It’s catchy in the way that something is catchy when you can’t decide if you like it or not. Cult item doesn’t begin to cover it.
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03
Gillian Hills — “Zou Bisou Bisou”
Before there was yé-yé there was this — an English teenager recording in French for a Parisian label, producing something that sounds like the entire genre arriving fully formed in a single three-minute burst. Gillian Hills was fifteen when she cut it. George Martin produced an English version for Sophia Loren the same year, which is one of those facts that makes the world feel very small and very strange. The Hills original is the one to know.
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04
Michel Polnareff — “La Poupée qui fait non”
Polnareff was twenty when this came out and it sounds like someone who had absorbed every good pop record made in the previous five years and figured out how to do it better. “La Poupée qui fait non” — the doll that says no — is one of those debut singles that makes you wonder why the rest of a career ever needed to happen. Saint Etienne covered it with Edwyn Collins producing in 1994, which is a strong endorsement from people who know their stuff.
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05
Ronnie Bird — “Hey Girl!”
Ronnie Bird was the French kid who actually got it — not just the melodies but the grit underneath them. “Hey Girl!” is his French take on the Small Faces, and where most yé-yé covers polished the rough edges off their source material, Bird went the other direction. There’s real teeth here. He recorded it the same year the original came out. This is what happens when the right person hears the right record at the right moment.
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06
France Gall — “Attends ou va-t’en”
Everyone knows France Gall from the Eurovision song and the Gainsbourg scandal. This is from the Baby Pop album period, after the scandal, when things got genuinely interesting. Gainsbourg wrote it and it shows — there’s an edge under the sweetness that the earlier stuff didn’t have. “Wait or leave” is one of the better ultimatums in pop music. She sounds like she means it.
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07
Jacques Dutronc — “Les Playboys”
Not “Et moi et moi et moi,” which is what everyone plays. This is Dutronc’s actual debut single and it has something the hits sometimes lack — a slight menace, a little more snarl. He’s cataloguing the professional seducers of Paris with the detached amusement of someone who knows exactly what he’s describing because he is one. Serge Gainsbourg wrote it for him and you can feel that collaboration figuring itself out in real time.
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08
Annie Philippe — “Pas de taxi”
Annie Philippe recorded about fifty songs between 1966 and 1968 and somehow remained almost entirely unknown outside of France. “Pas de taxi” is the one that gets passed around among people who love this stuff — seventeen thousand YouTube views is practically nothing for a track this good. She sounds completely at ease doing something genuinely difficult: being funny and sad and catchy all at once. The kind of record that makes you wonder what else you’ve been missing.
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09
Marie Laforêt — “Marie-Douceur, Marie-Colère”
The Rolling Stones released “Paint It Black” in May 1966. Marie Laforêt had this on shelves within months. Where the Stones version is all forward momentum and dread, Laforêt’s is stranger — slower in places, more hypnotic, the French lyrics turning it into something almost private. It became one of the best-known French covers of an English rock song, and the John Wick: Chapter 4 soundtrack introduced it to a whole new generation who had no idea what they were hearing. Their loss was actually their gain.
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10
Frank Alamo — “Biche oh ma biche”
Mort Shuman gave this song to The Searchers, who had a hit with it as “Sweets for My Sweet.” He also gave it to Frank Alamo, who turned it into something with a little more stomp. “Biche oh ma biche” hit number one in France and several other countries and it’s easy to hear why — the guitar jangles, the rhythm jumps, and Alamo sounds like he’s having the best possible time. A proper rock and roll record, no asterisk required. Good way to end a playlist.
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