AFP/GETTY
French singer France Gall, who has died aged 70, was a pop icon during the Swinging Sixties
France Gall, who died this week aged 70, inspired her jilted boyfriend Claude François to write a mournful ballad about lost love called Comme D’Habitude (As Usual, in English).
The Canadian songwriter Paul Anka heard the song during a trip to Paris in 1967 and was so taken by it that he bought the rights, rewrote the lyrics for Frank Sinatra and gave it a new title: My Way.
Ol’ Blue Eyes failed to get to No 1 with the song – after peaking at No 5 in the UK charts – but My Way went on to stay in the UK Top 40 for two and a half years, a record that has never been equalled.
It has since gone down in history as such a classic that it has been covered by more than 100 artists from Elvis Presley to Sid Vicious and is said to be requested for funerals more than any other track. No wonder French President Emmanuel Macron marked Gall’s passing with a heartfelt tweet and his culture minister described heras “a timeless icon of French song”.
The girl who was to embody the emancipation of French women in the post-war era was born into a musical family in Paris in 1947. Her father Robert was a lyricist who wrote for Edith Piaf and Charles Aznavour, while her mother was a singer.
Given this background it was no surprise that Gall was encouraged to exploit her own musical talent and she was just 15 when her father sent some recordings of her singing to music publisher Denis Bourgeois, who happened to be artistic director to Serge Gainsbourg.
After releasing her first hit record a year later Gall was selected to represent Luxembourg at the 1965 Eurovision Song Contest in Naples – with its tiny population, the landlocked Grand Duchy often had to rely on talent from outside. Presented with a choice of 10 songs Gall picked Poupee De Cire, Poupee De Son (Wax Doll, Rag Doll) penned by Gainsbourg.
REDFERNS
Frank Sinatra, whose song My Way started out as a ballad mourning a lost love
Her choice of a pop song in an era when Eurovision was accustomed to less jaunty fare did not go down well and she was booed by the audience during rehearsals.
By now Gall was in a relationship with Claude François whose English wife Janet Woollcott had left him for singer Gilbert Becaud – known as “Monsieur 100,000 Volts” thanks to his energetic stage act. Indeed, François had written a plaintive song about their break-up called Je Sais (I Know).
He was not in the auditorium when Gall sang her entry live – perhaps because he was 25 and still married and she was 17 – but he watched it on television.
When she called him straight after her performance he was appalled: “You sang off key,” he said. “You were terrible.” But the song impressed the jury and Gall carried off the grand prix ahead of the UK’s Kathy Kirby in second place.
Less than a month after her victory Billboard magazine carried a cryptic paragraph on its international news pages revealing that a French court had ordered the seizure of the weekly paper Ici Paris following a complaint by Robert Gall about a report on “the secret love affair between France Gall and the singer Claude François”.
AFP/GETTY
France Gall with singer-songwriter Serge Gainsbourg
Her relationship with François carried on for another two years but her partnership with Gainsbourg came to an abrupt end in 1966.
The success of their collaborations led Gall to trust him to a point that she would sing more or less whatever he presented her with. But that relationship broke down completely after the release of Les Sucettes (Lollipops), the story of a girl who is “in paradise” every time “that little stick is on her tongue”.
Upon discovering the double entendre, Gall refused to perform the suggestive song and never worked with or spoke to Gainsbourg again.
A year later she and François also parted company and true to form he penned another selfpitying cri de coeur, Comme D’Habitude, which includes the lines: “My hand is stroking your hair/ Almost in spite of myself/ As usual/ But you turn your back on me/ As usual.”
He went on to sell more than 70 million records and when he died in 1978 at the age of 39 after accidentally electrocuting himself president Valery Giscard d’Estaing described him as “the French equivalent of The Beatles”.
Gall, meanwhile, went on to marry the singer-songwriter Michel Berger and they had two children together. But tragedy struck in 1992 when he suffered a fatal heart attack at the age of 44. And just five years later their youngest child died of cystic fibrosis aged 19.
Gall spent her final years working on humanitarian projects and died in hospital of an infection after a two-year battle against cancer. But her name will live on thanks to her association with My Way.