'Yé-Yé'

 

[As most readers of Rick On Theater know by now, I lived in Europe for some years from my mid-teens till my early 20’s.  (See “An American Teen in Germany,” posted on ROT on 9 and 12 March 2013.)  My dad was a U.S. Foreign Service Officer posted in Germany from September 1962 to October 1967, and my brother and I made our first visit to Europe at Christmastime 1962—which was my 16th birthday—and we went to live with our parents the following summer when I finished my sophomore (and my brother his eighth-grade) year at boarding school in the States. 

[I began to learn German that summer—my father hired a young woman to tutor my brother and me and I got quite proficient by the time I started my junior year at an international school near Geneva, Switzerland.  (See “Going to a Swiss International School,” 9 April and 2, 5, 8, and 11 May 2021.) 

[Geneva and the Swiss Canton of Genève are in the French-speaking part of Switzerland, so, although my classes were in English, most of the rest of my school life was conducted in French.  I had only taken a year of American high school French before coming to Europe, so my introduction to conversational French started when I arrived at school that fall.  With the benefit of becoming close friends with a French teenager in Germany—his father was the military doctor with a contingent of the French army in Germany—I became increasingly fluent in French as well. 

[(The city in which both my family and the Humiliens were stationed, Koblenz, had been part of the French Zone of Occupation after World War II; France still maintained a small presence there.  The Humiliens and my folks had become friendly in the few months since Dad arrived in Koblenz, and their son, Marc, was my age.  The two of us and Marc’s younger sister Marion, who was my brother’s age, all became close friends.  Eventually, my French became more fluent than Marc’s or Marion’s English, so our conversations were mostly in French. 

[(While I spoke English at home and in class—and with my English-speaking schoolmates in the dorm and dining hall—and German around town in Koblenz, I spoke French in Switzerland with the school staff and off campus and whenever I was hanging out with Marc or his sister.)

[Living in Koblenz was different from living in Bonn, the capital then of the Federal Republic of Germany (that is, West Germany), the location of the U.S. Embassy where my father was later transferred.  There, we lived in an embassy residence compound where everyone spoke English and Dad’s office was mostly staffed by Americans (with a number of German employees, but they all spoke English as well).  But in Koblenz, where we lived until 1965, we lived in a completely German community—Dad was the only diplomatic official from the United States in the region; his small staff at his office was all German (explained in “An American Teen”), though most of them spoke excellent English.

[My family’s life in Koblenz was just about as German as it could be: we shopped in German stores, rode German busses, ate in German restaurants, went to German movie theaters (where, even if we saw an American movie, it was dubbed into German).  As far as I was concerned, this was part of the greatest adventure of my life up to that point!  I reveled in the whole experience.

[My parallel life as a student at a Swiss international school was much the same . . . except it was mostly in French instead of German—and the culture I was absorbing was French (well, French Swiss—but the distinction’s pretty much a quibble).  So, at one and the same time, I was being enculturated into German customs and French customs.  Not just the languages, but the ways of doing things—almost everything.

[I was very successful at it, as it turned out.

[Of course, we made a point of exploring—and adopting—the cuisines of the cultures around us.  While we continued to eat our favorite foods and dishes from home—Mom was a great cook—we also ate (and drank) what the Germans, Swiss, and French did, as well as other foods from places we visited.  (Mom made a terrific paella after an extended trip through Spain!)]

In the years my family lived in Europe, among the cultural aspects that we—well, I—dipped into avidly was music.  I was already a Rock ’n’ Roll fan from its beginnings in the mid-1950s (when I was about to turn 9), and when I got to Europe, the Beatles were just bursting forth in Britain and on the Continent.  I was infected with Beatlemania right off, followed by the music of the groups that came after the Fab Four. 

Not only are my first Beatles albums and 45’s European pressings—my first Beatles LP, With the Beatles, released in Europe in 1963, is a German pressing I bought in Koblenz and my Rubber Soul is French because it was a gift from Marc Humilien, both with 14 cuts instead of the usual 12 for American albums—but I still have the 45 of the German-language versions of “I Want to Hold Your Hand” and “She Loves You” (“Komm, gib mir deine Hand” and “Sie liebt dich”) the Boys recorded in 1964.

I also have 45’s of recordings by Sheila (b. 1945), Sylvie Vartan (b. 1944), Françoise Hardy (1944-2024), Claude François (1939-78), Richard Anthony (1938-2015), and Guy Mardel (b. 1944) I bought in Geneva.  These were the yé-yé singers of France in the early and middle 1960s—at the start of their popularity just as I arrived in Switzerland.

Though the French gave precedence to their own language, which made the French pop scene different from those of other Continental musical movements, there were several foreign yé-yé singers.  Jane Birkin (1922-2016), an English actress and singer, had a role in Slogan, a 1969 French comedy-drama film co-written and directed by Pierre Grimblat (1922-2016).  She met Serge Gainsbourg (1928-91), a singer-songwriter who had a part in the film, in 1968.  They began a relationship and Birkin moved to Paris and established her career as an actress and singer.

Gillian Hills (b. 1944) is another British actress who established a singing career in France.  She made a movie for Roger Vadim (1928-2000), Les liaisons dangereuses 1960, in 1959, and then made her first recording in 1960.  In 1963, she collaborated with Gainsbourg on his first yé-yé duet, “Une petite tasse d’anxiété” (‘A little cup of anxiety’), which Gainsbourg sang with her on French TV.

Nancy Holloway (1932-2019), one of the few Black and American yé-yé singers, arrived in Paris in 1954.  She made a tour of Europe as a dancer and settled in Paris in 1960.  She made her first record, the single of the chanson “Le boogie du bébé” in 1961 while she was making feature films, one of which was Cherche l’idole (‘Look for the idol’) by Michel Boisrond (1921-2002); Holloway played herself alongside singers Sylvie Vartan, Johnny Hallyday (1943-2017), Charles Aznavour (1924-2018), and Eddy Mitchell (b. 1942)

Françoise Hardy (whose family name was pronounced ar-DEE) and her yé-yé companions were part of my immersion into French culture when I was at school in Geneva.  Hardy, arguably the best-known “Yé-Yé Girl" of the era (she was also a fashion icon and made a few movies), died at 80 on 11 June 2024.

Her obituary appeared in the New York Times on the 14th.  Though the obit was fairly long, it never even mentioned the yé-yé singers or the European musical style of which she was an icon.  I began to wonder if the pop movement might be worthy of an ROT post.  It’s not well known, though it had influence on the Continent, in Spain, Italy, Portugal, and several other countries in Western Europe—not so much in Germany. 

(Yé-yé’s influence went beyond Europe as well.  Not only was it immensely popular with Quebeckers—whom, I’ve been known to say, are more French than the French!—but the Japanese got into the act as well.)

It wasn’t a movement in England, either (except for Petula Clark, b. 1932, a sort of honorary Yé-Yé Girl).  The Beatles were starting up at the same time, and then the other Brit Rock bands, so I don't think yé-yé had a chance to take hold there.  

(Clark was a kind of special case.  She sang in both English and French—as well as several other languages—and after her 1964 international hit “Downtown” topped charts all over the world, she also released a French version, “Dans le temps” [‘In the old days’] the next year.  In the United Kingdom, the French version charted alongside the English original, but I don’t know if it was even released in the U.S., though it was a hit in Quebec, where Clark was popular.)

I don't think yé-yé penetrated into the United States—which would account for the failure to mention it in Hardy’s Times obituary.  With Pet Clark, for instance, her connection to the pop music style was never mentioned in her PR here, I don't think.  I asked my friend Kirk Woodward, who’s a musician and songwriter himself, as well as a Rock ’n’ Roll and pop music fan, if he’d ever heard of yé-yé music.  “It’s definitely not a familiar subject for me,” he told me.

My judgment is that here in the U.S., yé-yé's not a familiar topic—even to Americans who were around (and cognizant) in the ’60s—y​et it was a significant part of my enculturation into living in Europe when I was a teenager.

The yé-yé movement was decidedly French, but it spread all over Western Europe and lasted about a decade, with influences that continued much longer.  Among its several influences and progenitors, yé-yé’s most prominent was the French chanson (la chanson française) of the 1950s and ’60s, already infused by American and British Rock ’n’ Roll.

(Chanson is simply the French word for ‘song.’  When referring explicitly to the specific genre of the chanson descended from medieval times, however, the phrase ‘French chanson’ or chanson française is commonly used.  In this post, since I’m only referring to the particular genre, I won’t always make the verbal distinction.)

The modern chansons after World War II were cabaret songs performed by solo singer-songwriters who could accompany themselves.  Think of singers like Édith Piaf (1915-1963), Jacques Brel (1929-78), and Charles Aznavour as archetypes.  The chanson of the mid-20th century was in the tradition of songs that focused on the lyrics and vocals over the melody, creating an intimacy with the audience.

Spotlighting the lyrics of the French chanson, putting storytelling and vocalizing front and center, stresses the song’s message and invites listeners in so that they almost feel as if they’re intruding on a private moment.  Chanson lyricists often strive to convey messages of significance, sometimes political, in their songs.

Even as Rock ’n’ Roll dominated the pop music of the U.S. and the U.K., as well as much of Western Europe, in France, where American-style pop music translated into French was looked down on as imitative and derivative, the French chanson, which traces its heritage back to medieval France as far back as the late 11th century, continued to dominate French airwaves.

Some of the writers and singers of yé-yé were part of both worlds, such as Françoise Hardy and Serge Gainsbourg.  American and British pop influence on yé-yé, however, shifted the emphasis to catchy tunes, but lyrics that didn’t really mean very much, like 'yé yé,' ‘la la la,’ or ‘na na na na,’ and so on.  (After yé-yé passed from the music scene, a new form of French chanson emerged, dubbed the nouvelle chanson.)

By my own observation—admittedly, one formulated by an American teenager newly arrived in Europe—this accounts for a phenomenon of the European pop music scene.  The Brits had already absorbed American pop-musical influences and after essentially copying our early Rock ’n’ Roll of the ’50s until, by the early ’60s, they were launching their chart-busting counter-offensive.

In Germany, the radios and record stores were full of American and British pop groups and solos.  (The Beatles famously recorded those two early hits as a thank-you to their German fans who had welcomed them in early gigs in Hamburg before they became internationally famous.)  

The Germans, though, were hung up on “cowboy music” at that time—not what we call today country-western music, but old-time cowboy music: Gene Autry, Roy Rogers, Tex Ritter.  (The theme song from Bonanza was a special favorite.  See “‘Wild West Germany’” by Rivka Galchen, posted on ROT on 15 September 2012.)  Hence, I submit, the low popularity of yé-yé music there.

French Rock ’n’ Roll was largely French versions of American hits.  Hugues Aufray (b. 1929), for instance, had a hit with “Pends-moi” (1964; the French title means ‘hang me’), a cover of Roger Miller’s 1964 single “Dang Me.”  Petula Clark covered many American pop hits in French, including “Ceux qui ont un coeur” from 1964 (‘Those who have a heart’; Dionne Warwick’s “Anyone Who Had a Heart,” 1963) and 1966’s “La nuit n’en finit plus” (‘The night never ends’; Jackie de Shannon’s “Needles and Pins,” 1963).

In 1962, Yé-Yé Boy Claude François, known as “the prince of yé-yé” and “the king of disco,” had his first hit with “Belles! Belles! Belles!” (‘Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful’).  It was an adaptation of the Everly Brothers’ 1960 “(Girls, Girls, Girls) Made to Love.”

(Later, François experienced a turn-about.  He had a hit with “Comme d’habitude” (‘As usual’) in 1967 and then the English version became an even bigger hit in 1969 for Frank Sinatra—called “My Way.”  Does that make Sinatra a Yé-Yé Boy?)

Johnny Hallyday, a singer and actor who was married to Yé-Yé Girl Sylvie Vartan from 1965 to 1980, had hits with, among other covers, 1961’s “Viens danser le twist” (‘Come dance the twist’; “Let’s Twist Again” from Chubby Checker, 1961), which sold a million copies and got him a gold record; “Da dou ron ron” in 1963 (The Crystals’ “Da Doo Ron Ron,” 1963), which was no. 1 for eight weeks; and 1963’s “Quant je l'ai vue devant moi” (‘When I saw her before me’; The Beatles’ “When I Saw Her Standing There,” 1963).

For the most part, though, the French not only preferred their own singers—but their own musical traditions.  Hence, yé-yé!

The Yé-Yé Girls, as you’ve probably gathered by now, weren’t a girl group, but a musical movement.  There were Yé-Yé Boys, too, like Hallyday and Claude François—in addition to the other singers I named earlier—but the girls, young, pretty, and stylish, were the best known and most popular.  (It probably didn’t hurt matters that the “boys” were all older than the girls by as much as a half a decade.  Hallyday was a notable exception—and he was extremely popular both as a French pop singer—dubbed “the French Elvis”—and as a movie actor.)

(The label was somewhat elastic.  Some of Aufray’s songs, for instance, are labeled yé-yé while others aren’t.  Singer Alain Barrière, 1935-2019, was sometimes considered yé-yé, but seemed to have eschewed the tag and music reviewers mostly found he wasn’t influenced by the musical style even when it was extremely popular in France.)

Okay, but what is yé-yé?

First the name.  In case you hadn’t twigged to it on your own by now, yé-yé (or, as the French write it, yéyé) is an approximation of the English ‘yeah yeah,’ a common interjection in American (as early as the ’50s) and British (by the ’60s) Rock ’n’ Roll.  (Someone counted: in the Beatles’ 1963 pop hit “She Loves You,” in which the refrain “Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!” proliferates, the word “yeah” is sung 29 times.)

In February 1962, Françoise Hardy, who’d just turned 19, sang her own composition, “La fille avec toi” (‘The girl with you’), on Mireille Hartuch’s Sunday television show, Le Petit Conservatoire de la chanson.  The song, which tells the story of a woman who revisits a place filled with memories of a past relationship and encounters her former boyfriend with a new girl, begins and ends with “Yeah yeah yeah yeah.”

(In the written lyrics, the line is spelled that way, that is, in the English spelling—but Hardy sings it as “yé yé yé yé.)

After Hardy finished, Mireille (1906-96; a well-known singer of French chansons, she went by one name) asked her what the “yé yé” lyrics meant.  I couldn’t find a record of Hardy’s reply, but the term went on to refer to “a young person’s exuberance, optimism, and enthusiasm for current trends.”  Yé-yé wasn’t just a musical style, it was also a way of dressing, dancing, and wearing one’s hair—and an attitude. 

In France, it was emblematic of the Swinging Sixties.  The yé-yé artists inspired a youth culture in France, much as the Brit rockers did in the English-speaking world.  It spawned a sexual revolution and, in the words of philosopher and sociologist Edgar Morin (who would help establish the new cultural influence), “a festive, playful hedonism.”

On 22 June 1963, a free concert at the Place de la Nation in Paris was organized by the French radio station Europe No. 1 (now Europe 1) and Salut les copains (loosely translated as ‘Hello, pals’ or ‘Hello, mates’), a popular music radio show.  It was expected to draw 20,000 people, but attracted 150,000 young people, who came to see yé-yé stars that included Richard Anthony, Sylvie Vartan, and Johnny Hallyday, but the unanticipated crowd degenerated into a riot known as “la Folle Nuit de la Nation” (‘the Crazy Night of the Nation’).

In an article on 7 July 1963 in the Paris newspaper Le Monde, just 15 days later, Morin (b. 1921) christened these young performers “les Yéyés,” the first time that term was used in the press, and blamed them for the blow-up at the Nuit de la Nation.  He further designated the entertainers harbingers of a coming revolt (which, in a way, came in May 1968 with the student revolt—though I don’t think the yé-yé singers had much to do with that).

(Salut les copains was started on Europe No. 1 in 1959—going off the air in 1968—and aired daily from 5 to 7 p.m., Monday through Friday.  It was a huge hit with teens and pre-teens, especially with 12- to 15-year-olds, who rushed home after school to catch the show.  Once yé-yé caught on, most of its reigning stars appeared on the program, many of them more than once and some many times.  It was sort of the American Bandstand of French radio.

Yé-yé, which arose in 1962, the year before the Beatles released their first record, was quickly dismissed as what we anglophones would call “bubblegum” because of the supposed shallow and youthful focus of their music.  The baby-boomers, though, saw that their square elders thought that the music was a facile imitation of music from abroad because they didn’t bother to listen to the originality and sophistication of the songs.

Part of the enduring appeal of yé-yé music was its subtle irreverence. Yé-yé songs weren’t as overtly political or revolutionary as, say, some of the chansons of Jacques Brel, but the composers found ways to assert the newfound independence of the young generation, though often with jingly melodies and danceable beats.

Ostensibly, the songs were about love, of course, but the teens took to them because they were also about the mundanities of life, like school and loneliness.  One of Françoise Hardy’s first and biggest hits was the self-penned “Tous les garçons et les filles” (‘All the boys and girls,’ 1962, a beautiful and melancholy song about loneliness—something of a signature theme of hers.  One of her songs from the same album, “La fille avec toi,” is a poignant exploration of heartache, nostalgia, and the painful realization of unrequited love.  Jacqueline Taïeb (b. 1948) looked and sounded like the teenage girl she was and sang about everyday subjects such as looking for her toothbrush and crushing on Paul McCartney.

The ordinariness of these subjects, however, often employed double-entendres to lead the listener to the intersection of innocence and sensuality, while allowing them to choose which path to interpret and enjoy the music.

Perhaps the best known and most blatant example of this—also the cruelest—was a song written by Serge Gainsbourg, the most prolific yé-yé songwriter of the period.  He was the composer of most of the songs recorded by France Gall (1947-2018), one of the youngest of the Yé-Yé Girls in the scene.  She released a song entitled “Les Sucettes” (‘Lollipops,’ 1966), when she was 19.

On its surface, the song is about a girl named Annie who likes anise-flavored lollipops; however, the lyrics are almost all double-entendres for oral sex, such as a line about barley sugar running down Annie’s throat.  The French word for lollipop, sucette, is derived from the verb sucer, which means ‘to suck.’  So, to a French ear, the title would be more like “Suckers” and the refrain “Annie aime les sucettes” would be “Annie loves suckers.”

Gall was a very naïve and innocent girl—France at the time was a very conservative and repressed society—and said after the song’s release that she had no idea about the double meanings.  She was mortified—and her collaboration with Gainsbourg ended.

Gainsbourg was only one of the yé-yé composer-lyricists.  (He also wrote for sometime-actress Brigitte Bardot, b. 1934, a part-time Yé-Yé Girl.)  Other notable arrangers and songwriters included Jean Bouchéty (1920-2006), Michel Colombier (1939-2004), Mickey Baker (1925-2012), and Germinal Tenas (b. ca. 1948).  While the female singers were mostly young, often teenagers, and the Yé-Yé Boys were five-to-ten years older, the writers and arrangers were mostly considerably older. 

Perhaps needless to say, while the singers, especially the girls, were criticized by yé-yé‘s detractors for the shallowness of the lyrics, the older men were not subjected to the same opprobrium.  It was surely a matter of sexism and ageism—and the fact that the writers were either the same generation as the complaining parents, or nearly so helped indemnify them, I’d guess.

The songwriters were inspired by Phil Spector’s “Wall of Sound” that was the backtrack for the era’s girl groups in the States, and the Beach Boys.  They added a French sensibility to the American rock and pop with elements of baroque music, exotica, pop, jazz and, as already noted, the French chanson.  This mix was all presented with swinging, catchy rhythms and carefree, escapist, and playfully risqué lyrics. Voilà, yé-yé!

The chanson’s emphasis on the lyrics and the vocalizing was retained, even though the words no longer contained the importance they had in the chansons of the earlier decades.  The meter of the French chanson takes account of the rhythms of the French spoken language and demands precise and clear enunciation and pronunciation, and this remained as part of yé-yé.  As a result, when a yé-yé singer sang one of the pop tunes the composers put out, unlike many British and American Rock ’n’ Roll singers, all the words were clear and audible over the instrumentation.

The sound of French music during the yé-yé period was irresistible, blending infectious melodies with heartfelt lyrics that resonated with a young generation seeking freedom and self-expression.  The songs were filled with youthful energy, reflecting the changing times and the desire to break out of conventional norms.  Yé-yé became a soundtrack of liberation, empowering a generation to embrace their individuality and dance to their own tune.