Postcards from Paris: 3. Montmartre – Here lies Dalida…
A series of 4 Postcards from Paris by the brilliant Gareth Jones.
Postcards from Paris: 3. Montmartre – Here lies Dalida…
Gareth Jones is a music connoisseur and the author of the book “French Pop: from Music Hall to Yé-Yé”
I’ve been coming to Paris for more than 35 years. Enough times to know it well enough to find my way around without a map – and often enough to know that I don’t really know it all. This week, I wandered through Montmartre – as much a zoo of portrait painters, merchants and tourists as it ever was – on my way down the hill toward Opéra, and as I passed the cemetery, my mind drifted back 30 years ago to an earlier visit, when my eye had been caught by a rather spectacular looking grave. It was the kind of memorial one expects to see for royalty, or, perhaps, Hollywood stars, but while it did have a small epitaph, the eye was drawn instead to one name: Dalida.
At the time when I stumbled across it, the lady in question had been seven years within, but still, the tomb was bedecked with flowers and messages, and the image (icon?) flickered and flashed in the sunlight. I wondered, “Who the hell was she? And more to the point, what the hell had she done to warrant such an over the top memorial? And why, for that matter, had I never heard of her?”.
There were no smart phones back then – 1994 – and the information superhighway was still accessible only via tollgates known as cyber cafés (remember them?). So I have no idea whatsoever how I found out that she had been a singer, and something of a star in France. My knowledge of French pop back then pretty much began and ended with Johnny Hallyday, Edith Piaf, Françoise Hardy, Jacques Brel and Serge Gainsbourg, and I knew precious little about any of them anyway. Still, having established that Dalida had been a singer, I nipped into a record shop (remember them, too?) on the left bank, found a 2CD set and bought it. When I got back to London a few days later, I played it… and a new musical journey began.
Dalida was born in 1933 in Egypt, back when the Canal Zone was still an international affair. Her parents were Italian, and so that’s what she spoke. An aspiring actress, she did some modelling as a teenager, came second in a beauty pageant and eventually made her film debut in 1954. Seeking a bigger market, she moved to France at the end of the year but the doors to the film studios remained resolutely shut. Switching to singing, she made a living in cabaret before being spotted by Bruno Coquatrix, who ran the Olympia theatre, by bandleader and record mogul Eddie Barclay and by Lucien Morisse from radio station Europe No. 1. Intrigued by her Italian accent and undeniably attractive physique, all three were smitten. Together, they worked to make her a star – Barclay made the records, Morisse plugged them on radio and Coquatrix gave her a stage. The first two records flopped but the third, a cover of the Italian song “Guaglione” (retitled “Bambino”) exploded at the start of 1957, and a star was born. For the next thirty years, until her death, few, if any, would shine brighter.
So, what made her such a success? France at the time was awash with foreign accents – Gloria Lasso, Dario Moreno, even Petula Clark – but even by those standards, Dalida had something of the exotic about her. Women wanted to dress like her, and wore make up like her; men fancied her and responded to the sexiness and sensuality in her performances. Television performances, clips shown on Scopitone video jukeboxes and striking record sleeves fuelled the fire and by the end of the year, she was the undisputed queen of the country’s record business.
A diva before the concept was widely understood, she might have been expected to enjoy a short run of hits before being steamrollered by rock ‘n’ roll, but Dalida had something that almost none of her rivals had – a real sense of rhythm. Established stars like Jacqueline François might have been better singers, technically speaking, but to French teenagers, thry sounded as if they’d just disembarked from Noah’s Ark. Dalida however sounded new, young, different. She swung, she moved, she even rocked, with sincerity and a lightness of touch that made the older chanteuses sound staid and stuffy by comparison. So while adult men and women bought the records, it was teenagers who made her a star.
Johnny Hallyday was and is rightly known as the king of French rock ‘n’ roll, but he wasn’t the first to sing it (there’d been four years of earlier French attempts, some very good, some… well…) and he wasn’t the first teenage idol, either. Not by a long shot. From 1957 until the yé-yé revolution truly took hold in 1963, Dalida was the queen of the jukeboxes and the teen idol of the hour. Indeed, her sales success was so strong that she helped wrest power away from music publishers and instead invested it in record labels. Hitherto, a big hit song would be quickly recorded by a dozen or more performers – indeed, there are at least that many versions of “Bambino” – but when Dalida’s versions began outselling all others by as much as ten to one, the writing was on the wall. She was the country’s first modern pop star, launched by records, not by live performances, and her fans bought anything – anything – with her name on it. Chanson, Neapolitan song, South American favourites, American pop songs, you name it, she could sing it – at one point she had five of the top ten selling records in the country, and the rest of the market was left floundering in her wake. When rock ‘n’ roll finally hit France in 1960, she just kept on keeping on, her version of Brian Hyland’s “Itsy Bitsy…” bikini outselling both the original version and Johnny Hallyday’s cover.
All of which goes to explain why, almost alone of the pop singers of the pre-yé-yé era, Dalida kept on racking up chart hits through the sixties, on into the seventies and the well into the eighties too. Teenagers in the fifties adored her – she was theirs – and as they grew up, they carried her along with them, and they kept on buying her records. Folk pop, soul music, big orchestrated ballads, swirling pop symphonies, Greek fishing songs, singer-songwriter confessionals, bouncy Europop, disco extravaganzas, Dalida swept through it all, seemingly unstoppable, despite a life that brought the full range of drama and tragedy – two of her lovers died by suicide, as she would herself, at her second attempt, on that fateful day in 1987. But for millions of French men and women, she was and will always remain a star.
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