Francoise Hardy

Today, I seem to have been travelling around with a background of Francoise Hardy. What brought this on?
Well I was watching the disappointingly poor Sea of Souls on telly last night, and frankly, by the end I was channel surfing. You really know that a supposedly thrilling drama hasn’t grabbed you if you’re seeing what else is on. I stumbled across a documentary that BBC 4 were screening as part of a Bernardo Bertolucci season they’re airing in “celebration” of his new film, The Dreamers.
I only caught a little of the programme (taped the late night repeat), but they showed a scene in which one of the characters has to put Tous Les Garcons et Les Filles by Francoise Hardy on the jukebox. I just love that song. I spent a large part of the evening turning my CD collection upside down looking for a compilation that I bought on a whim a couple of years ago, as I visited one of those parts of HMV that others dare not.
Why should I do that? Well she must be one of the few musical influences I inherited from my parents. I was brought up in the seventies and eighties, and theoretically, my parents should have had a record collection to kill for. Well they didn’t. It wasn’t that they didn’t like music, but their album collection was quite limited. I think that by the time my brother and I had reached our teens, we’d easily doubled their entire lifetime collections. It might be the fragile nature of vinyl, and the fact that my parents had travelled to the US and back so probably didn’t absorb clutter like I do now, but I was generally disappointed with the music available. Of course there were some Beatles albums, a fair sprinkling of Simon & Garfunkel, and even some Monkies. But the rest was made up of musicals (my dad), and some popular European singers from the late sixties and early seventies like Nana Mouskouri and Hardy.
It’s incredibly easy listening music, and while I can get reasonably excited by some of the new music coming through at work, you can always return to this sort of stuff to relieve stress, particularly when Blair and Bush are just about admitting that there was bugger all reason for going to war. [Calm deep breath] It’s just a shame that my French is not up to much, and I don’t really understand the lyrics. Still, I rarely listen to the lyrics of English language songs so that’s not the biggest issue in the world. I do sometimes think that I’m the only person in the world utterly oblivious to the written meaning of songs. I guess it’s a voice against a melody that makes me like them. A discussion for another day.


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