Another Motown song from one of the label’s lesser known artists.

I particularly like the Rachmaninov style piano introduction.

Despite the clanking bell on the intro (signalling we are probably to think of a paddle-driven river boat) and the reference to the boat leaking this always put me in mind of Science Fiction. It must have been the futuristic sounding name Reparata and that Delrons sound like something from Captain Scarlet.

Another Motown song. Is that a harpsichord in the intro? Unusual for Motown.

This builds up from a slow, quiet start to something rather more ostentatious.

Another Jimmy Webb song this was first recorded by the 5th Dimension in the US but it was The Johnny Mann Singers who had the UK hit.

This song’s lyric is surely the only pop song to include the word etcetera. Or at least to attempt to rhyme it.

Another song which has the word nonchalant in its lyric, When You Walk in the Room was written and performed by Jackie DeShannon but is more familiar to Britons via the cover version recorded by The Searchers which got to number 3 in the UK 1964. The song’s title is never actually sung in its entirety during its course; only its last four words.

Here also is Jackie DeShannon with the song on US TV:-

France Gall who has died recently won the Eurovision Song Contest for Luxembourg in 1965. She was French as was the song’s composer Serge Gainsbourg. I blieve this video is of her performance on the night.

Gall was apparently the subject of a particularly cruel trick by Gainsbourg when he persuaded her to record the song Les Sucettes (Lollipops) about whose double meaning Gall claims she was unaware. (Though the Guardian obituary linked to above says that when requested to lick one for a TV performance, she declined.) The film below makes the lyric’s inference obvious.

This video outlines the story, along with Gall’s viewpoint.

Isabelle Geneviève Marie Anne “France” Gall: 9/10/1947 – 7/1/2018. So it goes.

I mentioned the Cowsills a few weeks ago. They never had a hit in Britain but had more success in the US of which this song was the breakthrough single.

The group was apparently the inspiration for The Partridge Family.

Here’s a rather impressive live version recorded in 2013.

“A winter’s day/In a deep and dark December.”

Today is just about as deep and dark as December gets.

So here’s a song about darkness in the soul.

Johnny Hallyday is perhaps the biggest rock and roll star you’ll never have heard of. Huge in the Francophone world and beyond, but not in the Anglophone sphere. He died this week.

His first hits were in the early 1960s – two French no. 1s with a cover of Chubby Checker’s Let’s Twist Again under the French title Viens Danser Le Twist and Retiens La Nuit. They sound like early 1960 songs. The less said about Viens Danser Le Twist perhaps the better but here’s Retiens La Nuit.

A more typically French sound is Que Je T’aime from 1969 but it still has late 1960s hallmarks with Eurovision overtones.

Hallyday’s career was long but he had to wait till the 2000s for his next no 1s, two in 2002, one each in 2005, 2006 and 2007.

This is a montage of various live performances of Gabrielle showing he could rock it up with the best of them.

Johnny Hallyday (Jean-Philippe Léo Smet): 15/6/1943 – 6/12/2017. So it goes.