Marianne Faithfull

Marianne Evelyn Faithfull (born 29 December 1946 in London) is an award winning English singer. She was born into a well-to-do family of aristocrats in the Hampstead district of London, England. Faithfull began her singing career in the mid-sixties, landing her first gigs as a folk music performer in coffeehouses around London. She was a very beautiful young woman with a lot of raw talent. It didn't take very long before she began attracting a lot of attention. She later had a very public relationship with Rolling Stone's (Who ever they are) lead singer Mick Jagger (whoever he is). Faithfull also had a very hard time struggling with heroin addiction and anorexia nervosa.

I personally think her laundry list of painful personal problems added a certain quality to her music. One of my favorite Marianne Faithful songs is "Sister Morphine" which was co-written by Mick Jagger. A song about Marianne's personal struggle with opiate addiction. Mick Jagger (that guy's name again) ended up taking credit for writing "Sister Morphine" with Keith Richards instead of Marianne but after a bit of a legal battle Marianne Faithfull was credited as co-writer. This wasn't the first time the Stones got rich off of Marrianne's talent. They also covered her first major release, "As Tears Go By", which became a chart success.

Marianne Faithfull does stray a little from your normal Yé-yé girl archetype and into the Rock and Roll genre. However, somehow she fits into the Yé-yé girl movement amongst fans. I have always enjoyed her music so I figured my blog could use a Marianne Faithfull post. Anyway, despite her problems, she has managed to have a very lucrative music and film career. After Four decades Marianne Faithfull is still active as an artist to this day.

More France Gall

I couldn't help but make another post about the lovely France Gall. This probably won't be the last either. France is by far my personal favorite Yé-yé girl. Just short of Five feet tall she is a petite vision of perfection with the voice of an angel. In the last post about France Gall she sang in her native French language. This post features two popular songs from her German singing career.

The first video is a song entitled "Der Computer Nr. 3" which is about people in the future using computers to find love. This really wasn't a widely considered idea among computer scientists in the early Seventies. I think they would have thought the idea of using computers for the prospect of finding love absurd. They thought computers would be the size of a house and be far to advanced and complex to handle such trivial matters. If only they knew. This just goes to show France Gall's amazing power of clairvoyance and firm grasp on what the future holds for Humanity.

The second song is about a car or some shit...

Sheila

Sheila (born Annie Chancel, 16 August 1945, Créteil, France) is a French pop singer, who became successful as a solo artist in the 1960s and 1970s. Sheila had numerous hits in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, playing the well-behaved young girl.

Chantal Goya

Chantal Goya (born Chantal Deguerre on June 10, 1942 in Saigon) is a French singer and actress. Chantal Goya started her career as a yé-yé girl, singing a catchy mid-'60s hybrid of girl-group pop and French chanson. She also enjoyed a career as a French New Wave actress; she had a starring role as Madeleine in the 1966 Jean-Luc Godard film Masculin, féminin and in Jean-Daniel Pollet's L'amour c'est gai, l'amour c'est triste (Love is joy, love is sad). Later in life Chantal became more well known as singer for children. Chantal is one of the lesser know yé-yé girl but still deserves a mention as she was and still is an important part of the music genre.

Françoise Hardy

Françoise Madeleine Hardy (born 17 January 1944) is a French singer, actress and astrologer. She grew up in the 9th arrondissement of Paris, the daughter of an unmarried mother. She received a guitar on her sixteenth birthday as a reward for passing her baccalaureat. After a year at the Sorbonne she answered a newspaper advertisement looking for young singers. Hardy signed her first contract with the record label Vogue in November 1961. In April 1962, shortly after finishing school, her first record "Oh Oh Chéri" appeared. Hardy is mentioned in a poem by Bob Dylan "Some other kinds of songs" on the cover of his album Another Side of Bob Dylan, released in 1964.

Yé-yé boys

While the yé-yé movement was led by female singers, it was not an exclusively female movement. The yé-yé masterminds (such as Serge Gainsbourg, who wrote several hits for France Gall, Petula Clark, and Brigitte Bardot, but was considerably older and came from a jazz background) were distinct from the actual yé-yé singers. These were harmless, romantic boys singing mostly ballads and love songs. Michel Polnareff, for example, played the tormented, hopeless lover in songs such as "Love Me Please Love Me", while Jacques Dutronc claimed to have seduced Father Christmas's daughter in "La Fille du Père Noël". One of the more popular male yé-yé singers was Claude François, notable for songs such as "Belles, Belles, Belles," a French-language adaptation of Eddie Hodges' "(Girls, Girls, Girls) Made to Love".

Sylvie Vartan

Sylvie Vartan (born 15 August 1944) is a French singer. She was one of the first rock girls in France. Vartan was the most productive and active of the yé-yé style artists, considered as the toughest-sounding of those. Her performance often featured elaborate show-dance choreography.Sylvie was one of the first rock girls in France. Before her, it was not common for a French pop artist to sing and dance at the same time. Sylvie Vartan was the most productive and active of the yé-yé girls. Having an average strength of voice, she used her sense of rhythm to sound as the toughest of the yé-yé girls.