Old Fogey’s Favourites

One of Charles Trenet’s most famous songs, full of nostalgia for his childhood in rural France - La France profonde that every Frenchman and woman yearns for, but which never existed. When it was recorded, in 1943, France was defeated and much of it occupied.

The song has a strange double signification. It is the dream of an innocent France, one untainted by defeat; the dream of a purer France that he yearns to recover, a dream he is keeping alive for the days when he will be free again.

It is also the dream of that ideal France which underpinned the philosophy of the collaborationist Vichy Regime, where ’Liberty, Equality and Fraternity’ was replaced with ‘Work, Family and Homeland’.

‘Sweet France, dear land of my childhood, sleepy, gentle, free from care. I have kept you in my heart. My village, church steeple, modest houses where children of my own age shared my happiness, I offer you this poem. Yes, I love you, in joy and in sadness. Sweet France.’

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When I first heard this song, written and sung by the incomparable French chanteuse, Barbara, I thought it was about a woman, who after years of separation, is returning to see her long lost lover in the last moments of his life. Till almost the end, there is nothing in the song to make us us think otherwise. Then, just before the close,  Barbara stops and, in a light high voice filled with anguish pronounces the words “Mon père. Mon père.” It is not a lost lover she has come to find again but someone deeper-buried in her heart – her father. What has been touching and sad to this point now becomes tragic. The song could only have this tragic quality carried on the voice of a woman, invoking the special quality of a daughter’s relationship with her father, that no other can share.  Here’s the final verse.

‘He came back one evening. It was his last journey, it was his last resting place. Before dying he wanted to warm himself again in my smile but he died the same night without saying farewell or “I love you”. By the road that runs by the sea, sleeping in the garden of stones I saw him to his rest. I laid him to rest under the roses.

My father. My father.

It is raining over Nantes. And I remember. The sky over Nantes pains my heart.’

There is something in the flat way Barbara delivers the words, as if struggling to show no emotion, that makes it so compelling.

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Another French song much loved by the English, not because we understand it, but because it somehow captures what we want the French to be like. It is Jean Sablon’s Le Fiacre. I have it in my collection of 78rpm records and it was regularly played on the BBC’s Sunday record request programme Two Way Family Favourites in the 1950s and 60s. It was almost as popular as Charles Trenet’s La Mer.

The song is a rather risqué lyric about amorous doings in the back of horse drawn cab. Sounds of delight from within. But Madame’s husband passes by and recognises her voice. Indignant he rushes forward into the road to confront the adulterous pair. Sadly(?) the road surface is wet and he slips, and is knocked down and run over by the very cab containing Madame and her young lover.

So, a happy ending.

French insouciance is so alien to literal minded Englishmen like me. We can’t understand it. Perhaps that’s why we love it so.

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I have a collection of old 78rpm records. Mainly of jazz and dance music from the 1930s. But included are one or two of the more popular French songs, that ended up being played regularly on Two Way Family Favourites, a BBC record request programme which was very popular in the 1950s and 1960s.

This is Charles Trenet singing his own song “La Mer”, which he composed on toilet paper on a long train journey. Many other singers, in England and America (including Frank Sinatra) have sung and recorded “La Mer” in its English version “Beyond the Sea”. But none compares with Trenet’s version. Here are the opening words of the song.

La mer qu’on voit danser le long des golfes clairs a des reflets d’argent

La mer des reflets changeants sous la pluie

The chanson continues in this vein for four verses, all much the same. In the last verse, while Trenet is still declaiming how the sea dances along the bay like a love song and gently caresses his heart, the massed female choirs of Montmartre rise up like a school of matronly mermaids behind him, singing along with him in marching tempo at the tops of their voices. It is absolutely hilarious. No other version can begin to match it for its wonderful comic effect.

The French, of course, never notice it.

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Francis Cabrel is my favourite contemporary French singer. I like him in the same way I like Jackson Browne, whom he resembles in the quiet reflectivity of his songs.

The song ‘Hors saison’ from his album of the same name, is a man’s melancholy reflections on his surroundings while staying in a seaside town out of season. Seaside towns in the winter have a unique melancholy of their own. If you have stayed in Blackpool during February, as I have, you will know what I mean.

“It’s the silence you notice most,Shutters closed, Old plants still in their boxes on balconies. It must be out of season.

The sea at least carries on the same, Its rollers playing the same tune, Its empty, stubborn [têtue] song, For some stray ghosts huddling inside their hoods. It must be out of season.

The wind pierces these now too long avenues. Someone is looking for an unknown address. The mail overflows the doorsteps of summer houses. It must be out of season.

The town seems to fade behind its salty mists. The sea’s anger is too near. Its torments condemn it to screens of smoke. No-one is coming away from the quay.

You could take everything, walls, gardens, streets. You could put your names above the letter boxes Or perhaps one day people will come back. It must be out of season.

The sea at least carries on the same, Its rollers playing the same tune, Its empty song - where are you? [où es-tu?] - For some stray ghosts huddling inside their hoods. It must be out of season.

The town seems to fade behind its salty mists. The sea’s anger is too near. Its torments condemn it to screens of smoke. No-one is coming away from the quay.”

The song seems to be a sensitive rumination on the look of general sadness that pervades a seaside town in winter, when the holiday makers have gone. However Cabrel makes a small change in the repeat of the verse substituting “où es-tu?” (Where are you?)for “têtue” (stubborn) in the original. It is a small change transforms the meaning of the whole song.

No longer a simple reflection on an empty town in winter. It is a cry of anguish at separation. His “Where are you?” is like Jane Eyre’s anguished cry when she hears Rochester’s voice carried on the wind. From the general it has become specific and personal - and poetic

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Jacques Brel died thirty years ago this month, not yet 50 years old. Here in memory of that majestic talent is one of his gentlest songs - L’Enfance (Childhood). Brel was admirably unsentimental and even here, when you might expect some softening of feeling, he never lets us forget that childhood is a preparation for the sadness of being grown up.

‘Childhood - who can tell when it ends, when it begins. It is nothing, a rashness, all that cannot be written down……… Childhood - the right to dream and to dream still. My father once was a seeker of gold; care is what he found.’

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