Funny Little Frogs

It has recently come to my attention that there are land masses other than the Isle of Wight that are separated from London by water. Some of the larger of these are called "other countries" or "abroad". It has also come to my attention that in these places they sometimes speak unlike us. At first this speech may sound like gibberish or drunk people but if you pay close attention you will occasionally be able to pick out individual words or even phrases. One such language is called "The French".

Now, we take our responsibilities to you here at Tiny Dancing very seriously and so on discovering this I decided I needed to immediately investigate these speakers and see if they use these words for singing as well as talking. It appears that they do and I present my discoveries to you below.

Firstly we have La Chanson de Jacky. You may be familiar with the Scott Walker or Marc Almond versions of this song and know it for the work of genius that it is. Jacques Brel is the drunken madman who wrote this and many other great songs that the likes of Walker, Almond and Bowie have been plundering for decades. He was singing about prostitutes, sailors, STDs, drinking, puking and fucking years before The Beatles were even up to holding hands. In all honesty, he’s no singer, but that doesn’t stop this being utterly magnificent.



Jacques Brel - La Chanson de Jacky


I discovered the next song in a record shop in Brighton. A cd was playing that I enquired about and it turned out to be the shop manager’s personal compilation of Serge Gainsbourg songs. I spoke of my admiration for it and the gentleman promptly removed it from the cd player and proffered it to me as a gift. I left clutching it with a tear in my eye and joy in my heart; briefly feeling that maybe not all people who work in record shops are scum. Now Serge, like many of his countrymen, can be a bit of a filthy little man. In much of his output there is enough smut to keep an eighties ITV sitcom going for a million episodes. In the rest of his output there is more than enough beauty and greatness to paint the Sistine Chapel. This comes in the latter category and it will make you swoon.



Serge Gainsbourg - Ballade de Melody Nelson


The third offering of "The French" is from Luna. Now, Luna are a band from another land mass called Americas that we have had musical dealings with before as they sing in our London speak. It appears that singer Dean Wareham is something of an anthropologist himself and has studied The French people to the point where he can even miraculously speak like them. This may seem unlikely but to prove it he does so in a cover of another Gainsbourg song, Bonnie and Clyde. To aid him in this he is joined by real The French person Laetitia Sadler, she is known to us as a sometime backing vocalist for Blur and the High Llamas. I’ve heard she has her own weird little The French band called Stereolab as well, but I suspect this is a lie.



Luna - Bonnie and Clyde


Ricky Stardust