Merde !

The most difficult part when you're trying to catch up musically with everybody else is you're not quite sure if the artists you're discovering are brand new or whether they had a rich past (again, remember: no Google). When I saw in the charts a song named "Merde in France" I thought it was another silly song by some up and coming young artist who would soon go away. How wrong I was! Jacques Dutronc, I was to find out later, was an established and well-respected artist since the 60s. Still, hard to take this song seriously:




Then there was this other one that I really liked (very "planant") but that unfortunately didn't get much airplay or leave much of a trace, and again it turned out it was by a famous muse of the 60s: Francois Hardy.



I embedded the above version first because the recorded version has that "spacey" quality that I wanted you to discover if you didn't know the song. Here's Francois singing it "semi-live":



It's much, much later that I found out that Dutronc and Hardy had been a couple for the longest time. If all you know about these artists are the two songs above it's hard to see how they paired up...