Read Something to Declare: Essays on France and French Culture for Free Online

Boris Vian on 23 June 1959, Jacques Brel on 9 October 1978, and finally Georges Brassens on 29 October 1981 at 23:15 precisely. That was the moment at which French song— Francophone song, to be exact, since Brel was Belgian—died for me; or at least stopped being interesting.
    I spent the academic year of 1966–7 teaching as a lecteur d'anglais (the slightly posher term for assistant) at the Collège Saint-Martin in Rennes. My task was to instruct my pupils in “English conversation and English civilization,” which in effect meant devising various strategies to keep them quiet and avoid the glowering irruption into the classroom of the surveillant général, an ex–Algerian War veteran who terrified me even more than he did the boys. Some of my pupils, by means of diligently failing the baccalauréat and being sent back to retake it, were almost the same age as me, and certainly more sophisticated. I'm not sure how reliably English civilization was depicted in our conversations—I remember being grilled about London night-clubs (I bluffed tremendously) and London girls (ditto); though I would become more plausibly authoritative on the key cultural question of that time, whether or not the Beatles would break up. More benefit probably flowed in the opposite direction. Living among priests I became familiar with the kindlier side of the Catholic religion; eating at the school I found that roast beef came in other hues than field-marshal grey; and in my solitude I was enriched and consoled by the discovery of French song.
    For about two-thirds of that year the top of the French hitparade was squatted on by “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” that haunting confection from Procul Harum. But the singers who roared from my squeaky French player with a stylus-weight of about two kilos were all local: Brassens and Brel, Vian and Reggiani; high-boho Léo Ferré, pointedly engagé Jean Ferrat, soufflée-voiced Ingénieur des Ponts et Chaussées Guy Béart, lugubrious Anne Vanderlove, bouncy Georges Chelon, yearning Barbara, chubbily smutty Pierre Perret, winsome Anne Sylvestre, and promising Rennes-born débutant Jacques Bertin. I gave a polite nod to earlier generations (Piaf, Trenet, Rossi), a shrug to the international cabaret artists (Aznavour, Distel, the ear-cupping Bécaud), a pained smile to that Hayley Mills of chanson, Françoise Hardy, and a sneer to the home-grown yéyé-mongers, Hallyday, Claude François and Eddy Mitchell. (“Clo-Clo” had at least kept his own name. Mitchell began life as the priestly sounding Claude Moine, Hallyday as the distinctly unrockerish Jean-Philippe Smet. On the other hand, “Clo-Clo” made up for this with a spectacularly unstylish death, involving the bath, electricity and, it was rumoured, a minority sexual practice.)
    Procul Harum's line-up changed even before their song became a hit, and its less than cogent words were penned by Nobody Remembers Whom. Most of the singers I admired, by contrast, were individualists who wrote or co-wrote their own stuff; while some owned the whole aesthetic means of production and were badged with the lordly initials “ACI”— auteur-compositeur-interprète. The three who have accompanied me most down the years, their poppy, fizzing vinyl surfaces finally traded up to CD, are Boris Vian, Jacques Brel, and Georges Brassens. All three had emerged during the early Fifties, when they were first recorded by Jacques Canetti, brother of the Nobel-winning Elias. Vian, wry and urbane, sang at the world with a cutting edge of sardonic disbelief. Brel, urgent and impassioned, sang at the world as if it could have sense shaken into it by music, could be saved from its follies and brutalities by his vocal embrace. Brassens, intimate and formal, sang at the world as if it were an old lover whose ways are teasingly familiar and from whom not too much is expected. Vian died at thirty-nine; Brel at forty-nine; Brassens, in a final act of non-conformity, just managed