Wencke!

Look at this cutie & Marisa Tomei lookalike!

Wencke Myhre was a Norwegian singing and acting star. If you look up her name you’ll see she is still out there and has her own website.

She sang the song Ein Hoch der Liebe for Germany at Eurovision in 1968 and had a fulfilling career singing in Norwegian, Danish, German and Swedish. This album is from 1966 and was recorded with James Last’s orchestra; some of the songs on here are just spectacular, with full sound orchestra. Some people would call these Shlager but, damn you world, I call this purdy music.

Manana, Manana is catchy as all hell; Ola Ola, min eigne ugne is a beautiful traditional Scandinavian ballad and very Lee Hazlewood-ish; and finally, Vergessen und Vergeben is a fantastic, emotionally packed high drama ballad, just like I love’em.

Wencke Myhre – Manana, Manana
Wencke Myrhe – Ola Ola, min eigen unge
Wencke Myrhe – Vergessen und Vergeben

Barbara Lory

Ok so I’m on vacation and have some spare time to post a few more tracks on this new blog of mine! Hope you will enjoy!

Here is Italian cutie Barbara Lory, who is someone I don’t have much info on. Here’s what the back of her record cover says about her:

Real Name: Barbara Vittoria Lory
Born in: PieveEmanuele, in the province of Milan
Date of birth: March 1, 1946
Zodiac Sign: Pisces
Favorite sports: Swimming and riding*
Favorite colours: shocking pink, sicilian orange
Favorite singers: Barbara Streisand, Bessie Smith
Hobbies: Collecting picture postcards and beach pebbles from around the world

Here are my two favorite tracks from her LP “Holidays in Italy”!

Barbara Lory – In guesto mondo
Barbara Lory – Male di luna

* she didn’t specify what kind of riding. Ponies, surely.

Renée Martel sings The Beatles

Here’s someone I love dearly: Renée Martel. Daughter of Québec country star Marcel Martel, she has enjoyed a very respectable career in the 60s as a pop singer, doing quality covers in French of British or American hits, one of my faves being her beautiful cover of “Liverpool” (which was a hit for her in her home province.)

Unlike many other 60s singers trying to keep up with the times, she didn’t fall into the disco craze in the 70s, but rather followed in her father’s footsteps and her first love, country music.

This next track is quite possibly my favorite one. You will recognize the familiar Beatles melody, of course, but as much as I love it, my heart always sinks when I hear it, because the quality of the mix is just so bad, not to mention the pressing makes the whole record sound like a whisper. What should have been a grandiose sounding album was ruined, and whoever is responsible for this will die in “bad music engineer” hell!

Phew! Ok. And now, thanks to digital technology, I managed to crank it up a notch (just a little) so we can at least hear that Wurlitzer Electric Piano (same type used by Barry & The Remains.). Good Lord at least I think that’s what it’s called.

In any case, that’s the best I could do.

French lyrics are by Karo! –>

Renée Martel has suffered two car accidents in the last decade and has rarely appeared publicly since her father’s death in 1999. I hope she’ll come out to play more often.

Renée Martel – Un certain soira>

Tony Roman

Tony Roman and Nanette Workman

Last night a littly birdy flew in my house and said “I read a blog today and it lied to me”. Why, what did it say?”, I asked. “It said it would have a new post about Tony Roman later that day, but that was over a week ago”.

Oh…well what can I say, I’ve been busy. And to make matters worse, since my last post, another great Québec artist, Boule Noire, passed away, only last week. Tony Roman and Boule Noire (Georges Thurston) knew each other very well and Tony Roman was just about to organize a benefit party for Boule Noire, when he himself was told he had only a few weeks to live.

It’s very unfortunate how most people, the public and the media, have a very limited knowledge of Tony Roman’s contributions to Québec’s music history. For most, he was the guy who did that French cover of Manfred Mann’s “Do Wha Diddy” (with the exception of Jean-Christophe Laurence of Mucho Gusto, who wrote about him in La Presse and was invited to talk about him at Radio-Canada’s morning show. If you speak or understand French, you can hear this excellent interview here. – Jean-Christophe was one of the KEY players in the reissue of Les Maledictus Sounds – a Tony Roman and Jean-Pierre Massierra production from 1968.)

I was about to write a gigamantic post about Tony Roman, but a great francophile American blogger called “Tête carrée” has beat me to it. Please read his GREAT post about Tony Roman here.

In the meantime, here are two Tony Roman produced songs from a 45 single of mine. The “band” is called Les p’tites souris du Père-Noël (Santa Claus’s little mice), on the A1 label, but I don’t have much more info than that. I’ve had this for a while and used to only play Le Spa out at clubs, and only a few months ago did I realise that the song Moscou was just as good, if not better. That’s Tony yelling “hey!” at the beginning of Le Spa.

Les P’tites souris du Père-Noël – Le Spa
Les P’tites souris du Père-Noël – Moscou

Gainsbourg covers, part deux

Let’s take a swingin’ breather, shall we? Here are two great Gainsbourg songs by Nana and Pierre, for you to listen to on a rainy Sunday evening. Or whenever.

Alright so Nana Mouskouri and Pierre Lalonde are probably the last names you’d expect to hear when talking about Gainsbourg, but there you go.

I have to say, I’ve only recently discovered Nana Mouskouri’s early Jazz répertoire…what an amazing artist. On this album, she sings Aznavour, Gilbert Bécaud and Eddie Marnay under the direction of Jacques Denjean and it’s divine. Gainsbourg wrote the song “Les yeux pour pleurer” for her. I have no idea how available this is or if it’s been reissued, I just thought I’d share it regardless.

And finally, Pierre Lalonde, a popular crooner type singer who started his career in the late 50′s as a radio announcer in Montreal. He recorded popular French and English hits for the Québec market and even tried his hand at a career in da States by recording an album in English, under the more American name “Peter Martin” (sheesh.)

The album “Jet…Première classe” was an attempt to be taken a bit more seriously (I’m not making this up, it is blatantly written as such in the back cover’s liner notes.). On this album Peter Mar…Pierre Lalonde sings Bécaud, Charles Trenet all under the fine direction of the legendary Georges Tremblayand his orchestra. How the hell a Gainsbourg song (“Quand le soleil est au soleil”) found its way in there is BEYOND me, but it is a nice one!

Pierre Lalonde later established himself as the québécois “Dick Clark” and hosted popular tv music shows for teens in the 60′s like “Jeunesse Oblige”on Radio-Canada.

And I never thought I would say this about a Pierre Lalonde album, but it’s friggin’ good!

Nana Mouskouri – Les yeux pour pleurer
Pierre Lalonde – Le soleil est au soleil

Le Mew!

I’ve noticed some info about 60′s girl group The Pussycats have started popping up on the
web here and there, which is great but it’s still amazing that so little info is
available on these girls. Of course, there are no photos of the group to be found! So here’s our pussycat heroine Babette instead to the rescue:

Here’s what I already knew, and what I could find out:

This single was their first release in 1965, on Columbia records. It’s quite possibly my favorite 45 of all my collection. Both these two songs have been comped (“The Rider” on Girls in The Garage vol 7 and “I Want Your Love” on Where The Girls Are vol 5 – their 2nd single, a cover of the Shangri-La’s “Dressed in Black”, is available on GITG vol 5) but the comps are not what you’d call widespread and/or available, so here they are for your downloading pleasure. My apologies for the scratchy-scratches at the beginning (meow).

Something else of note: they were produced by Shangri-Las guru Artie Butler.

“I Want Your Love” is just mind blowing, and I’ve always been fascinated by the abrupt ending on “The Rider”. So strange. Both these songs are just so fantastic.

Have a listen!

The Pussycats – The Rider
The Pussycats – I Want Your Love

Nanette

Mississippi born Nanette Workman was more than just a session singer with a good set of uh…pipes and good looks (she’s the strong female voice you hear in the background on the Rolling Stones’ “Honky Tonk Woman”). Her story is one that I find fascinating: in 1964 Nanette moved to New York City and was appearing in off Broadway musicals. She was discovered by 19 year old Québec singing star Tony Roman (later to become a Kim Fowley-esque type producer in the province), who pleaded with her to come back to Montreal with him and promised her a singing career and stardom. In love, she followed him and soon enough, became Quebec’s little sweetheart. She learned French and recorded a few albums under Roman’s supervision, albums consisting mostly of English covers (including a pretty kick ass cover of “Paint it Black”). Her strong American accent and broken French brought that much more charm to the songs and she became an instant star. In the late 60′s she left Roman and Québec and moved to England, where she appeared on tv shows like “Not Only But Also” with Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, and became a session singer. She later met Johnny Hallyday, fell in love and toured with him. Hallyday made no secret of their affair and would famously introduce her on stage as “the love of my life”. According to Hallyday’s autobiography, their steamy affair directly led to his divorce with Sylvie Vartan. Nanette moved back to Québec in the mid 70′s and had a string of disco hits, including a French version of “Lady Marmelade”. She is still a loved public personality and continues to be a guest on Québec talk shows from time to time.

I had no idea that while working as a session singer in England in 1968, she recorded a whole album of her own songs. Here’s the album’s single release (I couldn’t take the price tag off without ripping off the cover, so I opted to leave it on!):

Nanette – Wastin’ Your Time<br />