Still Learning the lingo /Awkward in Translation

French Coldwave, mispronunciations, and Franco-British cross Channel punk

We’re in the UK this month, hiding from the worst of the French heat and floating between Sainsbury’s beer aisle and regional rail delays, of which there are many.

Today’s playlist is maybe more like a moodboard of songs where language doesn’t quite land right. Music from an awkward linguistic middle space: French artists singing in broken English, Brits leaning into stiff Franglais, vocals that seem to leave things a bit confused.

mistranslation as atmosphere.

Visage’s Fade to Grey (1980)

This song might have been my own first introduction to any songs in French. This whole playlist kind of bounces off of what Visage did here.

Fade to Grey was a touchstone of Franco-British synth culture. Fronted by Steve Strange, Visage was a flagship act of the UK’s New Romantic scene, backed musically by Ultravox’s Midge Ure. The track’s cold, glacial synths and eerie rhythm are made hauntingly intimate by the bilingual layering—spoken French over an English chorus. It was one of the first major UK synth-pop hits to succeed on French radio, and its emotional detachment paired with theatrical presentation set the blueprint for others trying to blend gloss with gloom. So we wound up with a lot of similar sounds after this one.

And the video is wonderful, lightly bizarre.

Lizzy Mercier Descloux Fire (1979)

Lizzy Mercier Descloux’s version of “Fire” (1979) hits like a disco-punk transmission from a noisier planet. A French expat embedded in NYC’s no wave scene, Lizzy was part zine editor, part art freak. This is her rendition of “Fire” on French TV, with Serge Gainsbourg visibly watching, either confused or enchanted. She had… soemthing.

She’s loose but precise, cocky in a way that overrides her own awkward phrasing. She sings in English, sort of, but it’s more gesture than grammar, but it works.

Taxi Girl Mannequin (1980)

Taxi Girl’s Mannequin comes across like a Bowie b-side (from a lesser single). Taxi Girl was a kind of French post-punk band & produced by Jean-Jacques Burnel of The Stranglers. Lead singer Daniel Darc seems viusible uncomfortable, as opposed to Descloux’s impressive confidence. In this video, he seems to be teaching a master class in on-camera anxiety.

I do love the beginning, even though it seems to devolve into a pretty standard 1980s electronic march later on – it would have been good montage music for any number of wacky 80s movies.

Trop Tard [the whole album] or just Why Not? (1987)

The whole album from Trop Tard’s “Why Not?” from their 1987 cult album Photodrame. Based in Limoges, Trop Tard operated like a provincial Joy Division, recording tape-looped despair in deliberately clumsy English. Their whole album sounds like it’s coming from a musty basement. It feels like static and nouse and claustrophobia – in the best way it can. These guys take a little digging - they’re not on Spotify after some dispute about rights and payment, which is reasonable.

The vocals are monotone, the drum machine is, well, doing its thing, and it works. “Why Not?” and its awkward English delivery isn’t a flaw. It’s the texture.

Anything to add to this list? Let me know!

I love finding new music.