[engl] Groovy French Sounds from the 60s… Long before Britain started swinging in the mid-1960s, France was the bastion for cool European pop sounds. Sultry young French women, heavy on mascara and dreamy innocence, cast a spell with what became known as ‘Les Années Yé Yé’. The Yé Yé girls took a firm grip on American and British pop and gave it a sparkly Gallic twist, resulting in a vibrant sound that has effortlessly stood the test of time. This collection features many rare and sought-after tracks from the languid sound of Jacqueline Taieb’s ‘7 Heures Du Matin’ and Katy David’s alluring take on Petula Clark’s standard ‘Call Me’ to Elizabeth’s precocious ‘Je Suis Sublime’.

[engl] A smörgåsbord of groovy 60s she-pop. 12-track LP version pressed on 180g white vinyl in heavy duty sleeve with sumptuously illustrated artist profiles on inner bag. The Ace Records A&R team has never shied away from venturing worldwide in their quest for good music, as evident most recently from our series of releases spotlighting the female vocalists of 1960s Japan, France and Italy. Now it’s the turn of Sweden. Strange as it might seem, there was a time in the early 1960s when Sweden was not yet a force in pop music. True, there was jazz – Alice Babs, famously, sang with Duke Ellington, and Monica Zetterlund with Bill Evans – and the Spotnicks, an instrumental group who topped the Australian charts and enjoyed minor hits in the UK. And there was Siw Malmkvist! Between 1960 and 1969 she notched up 20 hits in Germany, one of them, ‘Liebeskummer Lohnt Sich Nicht’, sitting at the top of the charts for 12 weeks in 1964. Also that year, in tandem with Umberto Marcato, and singing in Italian, she became the first Swedish vocalist to chart in the US, when ‘Sole, Sole, Sole’ reached the Hot 100. As ‘Sole, Sole, Sole’ and the German connection indicate, pop music in Sweden, at least before the advent of rock’n’roll and Beatlemania, drew largely on the schlager tradition, sprinkled with a canzone or two via the Italian San Remo festival. (Benny Andersson, when awarded an honorary doctorate in 2008, cited Caterina Valente, Mantovani and schlagers as his biggest influences; no doubt, he could have spoken for many Swedes.) “The Girls Want The Boys!” opens with early solo tracks by the lead singers of the country’s greatest pop music export: Agnetha Fältskog with ‘Ge Dej Till Tåls’, a peppy number first recorded by Gloria Hunniford; and Anni-Frid Lyngstad’s recording of the Euro-chic ‘Så Synd Du Måste Gå’, a song popularised by Françoise Hardy as ‘Comment Te Dire Adieu’. Other well-known names include national treasure Lill-Babs with her version of Dusty Springfield’s ‘Little By Little’ and chart star Mona Wessman’s cover of bachelor pad classic ‘Music To Watch Girls By’, both performed in Swedish. But it wasn’t all cover versions in 1960s Sweden. Dig, for example, ‘Don’t’ by cult favourite Doris, who also appears as lead singer and bass guitarist of the group Plums; Eleanor Bodel’s terrific title track; au pair duo Bella & Me’s groovy ‘Help Me Break This Habit’; Britt Bergström’s Ivy League-penned ‘You Really Have Started Something’; and multi-lingual Suzie’s fan favourite ‘Det Får Ej Hända Igen’, a number she recorded in five languages. Cherry-picked sides by the guitar-toting Plommons, Angeliques, Sunnygirls and cover stars MAK Les Soeurs illustrate the country also produced its share of all-girl groups. There have been a number of explanations as to why Sweden is so good at making pop music – among them bad weather, good language skills, an openness to foreign cultures, and supportive public policies. Homogenous, and for a long time at some remove from the action – although with an eye (and an ear) to the world –Sweden in the 60s was a markedly different place from the multicultural society it is today. With new blood continuously being added to its already heady mix of writers and performers, there’s every chance the country’s influence on pop music will continue. This compilation, from the point of view of 1960s beat girls, shows us where it all began.

[engl] 16 Kiwi freakbeat nuggets from 1966 to 1968 !!! Redux 25th Anniversary 'Wild Things' collection of out of control, filthy, & fuzzy mayhem from the 'bottom' of the world (Just ask Keith Richard & Viv Prince - both NZ tourists in 1965). Kiwi teens out 'prettying' the Pretty Things with the Mod-ish ferocity of the Who and strong doses of Beck & Page-ish rave up isms. Armed with locally manufactured guitars and amplifiers through home-made fuzz boxes. These 16 skullbusting mashers were recorded under basic conditions in primitive studios. All in mono, transferred from master tape. Insert included.

[engl] For those who prefer to spin their music on vinyl, an eclectic and gorgeously packaged 14-track collection of girl group artefacts from the mid-60s. Compiled and annotated by Mick Patrick, this vinyl-only collection is housed in an eye-grabbing sleeve containing an inner bag featuring scarce photos and a 3000-word track commentary chronicling the often convoluted histories of the featured artists. Mary Saenz kicks off proceedings with the handclap-propelled title track from the catalogue of ‘Monster Mash’ producer Gary Paxton. This is followed by front cover stars the Ikettes’ magnificent dancer ‘(Never More) Lonely For You’, Paxton protégées the Fashionettes’ flute-driven ‘Earthquake’, Denita James’ simmering ‘I Have Feelings Too’, the Supremes-style ‘This Couldn’t Be Me’ by the Sweethearts and Tanya Marie’s Chiffons-like cover of Ann Kirk’s ‘It Kinda Picks Me Up’, another Paxton production. Doré Records’ trio the Puffs channel the Chantels on the dramatic closer ‘Moon Out There’. Side Two begins with another Doré act, the Shades Of Jade, with the effortlessly cool ‘Why Does It Feel So Right (Doing Wrong)’ and the Charmaines with the 1966 revamp of their earlier regional hit ‘G.I. Joe’. The Bermudas’ ethereal hit ‘Donnie’ leads seamlessly into an entrancing version of Dylan’s ‘He Belongs To Me’ by Carol Connors, aka Annette Kleinbard of the Teddy Bears, the 2 Of Clubs’ dynamic cover of Garnet Mimms’ ‘Look Away’ and Pat Powdrill & the Powerdrills’ semi-psychedelic ‘They Are Lonely’. The album concludes in high style with a recently uncovered recording by the Blossoms of the otherworldly ‘Moon Walking’ featuring celebrated arranger/guitarist Billy Strange. In conclusion, “Would She Do That For You?! Girl Group Sounds USA 1964-68” is a blast from start to finish. Dig it. IAN JOHNSTON

[engl] “Qui c’est celui-là?” Many French asked themselves this question (“Who’s that guy?”) when the song bearing this title began to smash the hit parade in 1975. Some others already had parts of the answer: it’s the guy who sang “Amour amitié”! The guy who sang “La femme du sergent”! The guy who sang “Armand” in “Le Petit Conservatoire de Mireille”! To all those French, Vassiliu had always been reduced. Few were the real fans, who had explored all angles and taken the measure of the man. Vassiliu was – awful word – a poet. Even worse, he was an wandering entertainer. He wandered the world, bringing back words, sounds, instruments and feelings. Maybe his rhymes weren’t that rich, the instrumentation not too lush, the production quite laid-back and the timbre rather little demanding, but you could be sure the song would be pampered. Had anyone else taken care of it, it would have been worse. To make a good Vassiliu song, you had to be Vassiliu. The problem is, all this was nothing but a succession of misunderstandings. Because he continuously tried to remodel his career, from a chansonnier to a cunning singer, from tender to comical, to a beatnik poet, to an ethno-artist, to a venue manager, to a showman, to a barfly. 1961. Pierre Vassiliu, a horserider and a war photographer, embarks with his brother Michel (lyricist) in the music business. Their department: comedy. Puns, a funny voice, honk-honk and oompahs. Lucky break, it works. A first misunderstanding gets him labeled as an agitator: his song about the military is censored on the radio, and only played past midnight. That’s all it takes to create a buzz. Georges Brassens champions him and writes a few laudatory lines on his first 45 – Vassiliu is launched. But enough with the smutty rhymes designed to make lowbrows laugh. The sassy man sets to putting sweet songs on his singles, such as “Le Manège désenchanté” on the B-side to “Ivanohé” in 1965. He also participates in the French-Brazilian adventure of Les Masques, with an album that has become a cult item thirty years later. Eddie Barclay once addresses him: “Your thing is gentleness, not bawdy joking. Deal with me and you’ll be able to do whatever you want.” Within a few weeks, it’s in the bag: three 45s are released by Barclay, along with a first LP, “Amour amitié”, on which he appears sensitive and very forthcoming with stories about himself. First-person lyrics have pride of place on most of the record. He fictionalizes his own life in “On imagine le soleil” with Catherine Philippe-Gérard in the singing role of his wife Marie, in which he weaves the thread of his couple’s memories, or in “Une fille et trois garçons”, a fantasy about a hippie threesome in their living room. Marie Vassiliu recalls: “At the time we had found an old crumbling farm in Gouverne which required a lot of renovation work. He had more peace and quiet to write better things, poems. There he started partying – a lot – and he took care of the Bilboquet (a café-concert). After that we lost a friend who died in a plane crash. Rough times. We settled in Apt, in a house where we made a swimming pool, constantly full of people: Barclay, Folon, Maria Schneider and her girlfriend… One day, Boby Lapointe dropped by to say hi, we asked him ‘How are you?’, he answered ‘Well, you know, I have cancer, I’m gonna die.’” Pierre befriends a band of musicians (Bloch-Lainé, Engel…), who are to appear on the records to come. He develops his taste for performing thanks to improvisation, and ends up on the other side, opening spots, venues, bars, restaurants – until the end of his life. This LP has little success, just like the following singles, including “Marie en Provence”; Marie, outraged by this one’s lyrics (in which she appears like a complete sucker), packs her bags. So Pierre creates “Ne me laisse pas” (Don’t leave me) for the flip-side, and Marie comes back. No success either for the second album “Attends”, which includes “En réponse à votre lettre du 2.11.72”, in which he salutes his buddies. He loses Barclay’s trust and now only has the right to record singles, on a quest for a hit. Among them, “Je suis un pingouin” or “Il était tard ce samedi soir” and its now-mythical B-side “En vadrouille à Montpellier”. Three more 45s and finally comes THE supreme misunderstanding: “Qui c’est celui-là”. As he sings it in his autobiographic song “Encore un jour qui passe”: “I made this record above all for its other side”. Namely “Film”, a disturbing boogie in which Pierre relates, in spoken words, a visit to the Bois de Boulogne with whores, trannies and cops, ending at daybreak with the radiant apparition of love, and cadenced by a mantra saying ”I’m still looking for a girl who would have me tonight for a quarter of an hour”. In addition to this gem, the band comes up with the idea of adapting, quick and dirty, a Brazilian song they brought back from a trip, with lyrics churned out somewhere with Marie’s help: “He initially wrote: ‘Who’s that girl’, and I prompted him towards ‘this guy’, which in French was closer to the original sonority.” Barclay sends the single to the radios. Surprise: two big radio stations give the same answer: the B-side is perfect, let’s go for it. Barclay gets the message: “Qui c’est celui-là” becomes the A-side, and Pierre Vassiliu, a funny guy. Millions will be sold, and the label improvises an album made up of the previous 45s. A dark period follows, during which he finds himself torn between the euphoria of success and its vanity, between the love he gets and the reasons given, between Paris and Provence, between his wife and other women. Marie, too often abandoned and sick of egocentricity, leaves for good; he flees to India, gets lost, reinvents himself and releases a series of three dark, light albums, singing about the decay of humanity, the ravage of alcohol, all-mighty banks, tourists trampling on misery in Africa, breaking up, loneliness, travels and moving houses. But also about his children, a dog, a bird, a pharaoh, and women. Thus his 1976 album features a tribute to his daughter, “Sophie”, and a sad poem about the Earth called “Alentour de lune”. A cracking LP, recorded as a duo at Georges Rodi’s – the top dog of synthesizer – barricaded and high on coke. These three records are commercial failures and put an end to his time at Barclay. In private, everything’s fine, his new wife rejuvenates him, even though he doesn’t lose touch with Marie: “Laura was already in the house when I left for real, he was finally free to live with her. But after every argument he would come back. With Eric [her second husband], they would talk for hours… but never about Eric’s problems.” This “Laura” period is marked by the singer’s decline of creativity, and by the irruption of Africa into his life. His son Clovis describes this end of a career: “He had written so much material that in the end he kinda went round and round in circles. He mostly earned his living through playing shows, like a real artist, not by selling records. He never sold that much. I have a childhood memory of him calling his impresario on the phone to get the sales figures of his latest record. He hung up looking sad. A thousand and five hundred copies. That was nothing. After the 1980s, that was it. And yet he played at least a hundred shows a year. One of his agents, whom he nicknamed “Miss Cleo”, told me: ‘Your father… I’ve never seen a guy try so hard to ruin his career.’” His 1981 album features “Est-ce qu’on peut voler”, based on a dialogue with then-child Clovis, who poses on the sleeve. “I can remember this conversation but I didn’t discover the song until listening to the album. Likewise, I remember when we took the photo, but he did not tell me this would be for the sleeve. Maybe it was his way of making me a gift. Plus the album’s title is ‘Le cadeau’ (The gift).’” During the 1990s, his music takes a South-American direction. He hardly releases anything until 2003. “He wanted to have fun. It had even become more important than songwriting. I have fewer and fewer memories of him playing music. Toward the end, he would rather screw around and get wasted. Yet he did ‘Pierres Précieuses’, with a run of only 5,000 copies, co-produced by fans through an association,” Clovis details. This is where “Dis-lui” appears, which we introduced to Marie, at her place in 2016. Paying close attention from start to finish, she commented emotionally: “He sounds all at sea, but of course he’s faking it. He uses anything, anytime, all that happens in his life, in his friends’ life, his children’s life, his wife’s, his women’s…. So it’s great, but… I didn’t expect that.” Pierre Vassiliu dies from Parkinson’s disease in 2015. Clovis: “He actually was a real artist. Even if I never wanted to admit it as a child. There’s something noble. This I didn’t discover before the age of 20. I didn’t see the creative side, the ‘artist’ side, well, the deep side.” A misunderstanding. Bien entendu.

[engl] Garage and beat music fans are always fond of digging deep in the vaults of Latin American 60s labels in search for obscure bands to feed their appetite for rare recordings. While most of the unearthed stuff usually consists of cover versions of hits sung in their native Spanish/Portuguese language, we have a totally different case here. The members of The Walflower Complextion were actually American teenagers, children of US Government staff, attending high school in Bogotá, Colombia.Somehow they got a deal with local label Daro and released their first LP in 1966. The album shows an evident influence of the British Invasion bands, featuring four Stones covers and other classics such as 'Long Tall Shorty' via The Kinks, but it is in their own originals and instrumentals where the band showcases the best of their talent. 'Blue Bells', a druggy garage delight, or 'Chris's B's', leaning towards early surf music, display the raw sound of this bunch of teens: beautiful vocals, psych guitars, wild drums and tambourines shaken in the background.Although they recorded two albums (only distributed locally) and even appeared on Colombian TV, the band did not last long... They broke up in June 1967 after some of the members finished high school, and little else is known about the next steps in music of Fred and Rick Sampson, Chris Kryzs, Pat Sinex and Mark Lusk. Despite their short career, The Walflower Complextion have gained a cult status among those into Colombian bands such as Los Speakers or Los Young Beats. A must for garage collectors!

[engl] We present the amazing story of We The People, a 60s teen band from L.A (not to be confused with the other band with the same name from Florida) who created an amazing blend of garage, folk- rock & psychedelic sounds. Between 1967 and 1968, the band, comprised of four young kids, recorded a few 45s for the Reena label, two of them released under the American Zoo name. Despite their young age, the band members were accomplished musicians / songwriters. They debuted in 1967 with ''Feelings of my emptiness'' / ''For no one to see'', two amazing pieces of moody garage with superb vocal harmonies and arrangements. Their second 45, ''Back Street Thoughts'' / ''Who Am I?'' offered two pieces of introspective psychedelia with some over the top tape/echo effects courtesy of Dal Kacher, a session guitar player and sound engineer who had been part of early Mothers Of Invention. ''Who Am I?'' was included decades later in ''Diminishing Returns'', a famous psych mix by DJ Shadow. In 1968, the group released their third 45, this time under the American Zoo name: ''Mr. Brotherhood'' / ''Magdalena'' were another two examples of outstanding garage- psychedelia. A second pressing of the 45 was released featuring a new mix of ''Mr. Brotherhood'' losing one minute but incorporating some wild electronic effects. In the 1980's, the song was included on such legendary compilations as ''High All The Time'' and ''Psychedelic Unknowns''. That same year, American Zoo released their last 45: ''What Am I?'' was a reworking of ''Who Am I?'' with a more psychedelic production by Del Kacher. It was backed with the earlier recording of ''Back Street Thoughts. So, the story of four young kids playing and recording top- notch garage- psychedelia is in itself amazing?but even more amazing is what happened later to some of the We The People / American Zoo members: Guitar player Bill Bottrell became a Grammy award producer, working with Michael Jackson, Madonna and George Harrison among others. Drummer Jason ''Jasun'' Martz toured with Frank Zappa and recorded with Michael Jackson. Today, he's a well- known avant- garde artist and sculptor. Steve Zaillian, the first We The People drummer, became an Academy Award winning director, producer and screenwriter (''Schindler's List'' and ''Hannibal'' among others).This collection includes all the We The People / American Zoo 45 sides plus two previously unreleased tracks from 1967, taken from the only surviving copy of the band's 10'' demo acetate.