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VIP 25022 (B), August 1965
B-side of I Don’t Know What To Do
(Written by Gilbert Becaud and Carl Sigman)
When paying for the rights to issue a 45 by French star Richard Anthony in the USA, Motown seems to have hedged its bets; raiding Anthony’s English-language LP Richard à Londres for material, they’d chosen the bouncy Beatles pastiche I Don’t Know What To Do for the A-side, while here on the flip, they went for a full-on MOR ballad, an English translation of Gilbert Becaud’s depressing French original made even more syrupy by a wearying mid-60s showbiz production that drains what little life the tune had left in it.
If the contrast between styles could hardly be greater, well, again we find that weird phenomenon where a bad B-side undoes much of the good work of the plug side, in this case highlighting the tendency towards cloying MOR glurge and overdone arrangements that I now see in hindsight were there all along in I Don’t Know What To Do; not only is What Now My Love a bad record, it’s a bad record that’s actually making me like the A-side less in the process.
In some ways, Motown’s choice of tracks from Richard à Londres (pictured left) is understandable enough. Trying to break a new face in the market, they wanted to show off all sides of his personality: he’s not just a pretty face, a French Paul McCartney who could do whistleable pop epics like Help!, he’s also a French Paul McCartney who could do doleful, portentous MOR epics like Yesterday. And sure enough, this turns out to be a much-beloved song, recorded many, many times by Anglo artists looking to add a dash of MOR sophistication and European culture to their palettes (including several of Anthony’s newfound labelmates here at Motown – the Temptations, Supremes and Vandellas all had a bash at it), but there isn’t a single version of this I’ve ever found to be anything other than pompous, bloated and empty.
Richard Anthony’s version as heard here is particularly dismal, a bolero turned into a deathly dirge, verging on the unlistenable in places; every time I start to soften my stance towards the record, it goes and does something that makes Tony Martin look like a model of subtle stoicism, or drops in a weird choice of chord progression that sounds like an accidental bum note. And Anthony himself is awful here; he was fluent in English, but you’d never know it from this, which makes him sound like some French guy Motown found at the bus stop and gave him a page of English text to read phonetically.
The whole thing is laughably bad, but the ending is especially ridiculous, a towering, “dramatic” big finish (after less than two and a half minutes of music!), positively sticky with sated, self-satisfied glee, Anthony sounding like Jacques Brel taking the piss on an epic scale but without the subtle wink to the audience: he’s playing this absolutely straight, even as we’re wetting ourselves at the strangulated, unwarranted ludicrousness of it all.
Genuinely terrible, the sort of thing that gives all French pop music a bad name (as well as leading directly to the likes of Peter Sarstedt), and completely unforgiveable.
MOTOWN JUNKIES VERDICT
(I’ve had MY say, now it’s your turn. Agree? Disagree? Leave a comment, or click the thumbs at the bottom there. Dissent is encouraged!)
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wow a “1” that’s not on Mel-O-Dy LOL–oh well since that label bit the dust–the junk has to go somewhere , and I’m sure there’s still a few 1’s to be given at VIP-land. not familiar with a lot of French artists but Richard Anthony like Johnny Hallyday was/is only as good as the songs given them. This one is a thud no matter who does it–even Elvis who did it live on the ALoha from Hawaii special.
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Yup – it’s just one of those songs that’s so thoroughly rubbish, nobody can save it. Although Richard doesn’t get off scot-free here: his vocal delivery on this one is uncharacteristically awful.
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I totally agree with the 1/10 given to this song, even if had prefered to see a 0/10 at least once on this blog ! As I’m French, and therefore know this kind of music (of what ?), I’d like to bring some precisions.
Richard Anthony is not in what we call ‘pop’ (meaning for us a certain level of quality,for instance Serge Gainsbourg), neither in what we call ‘chanson française’ (meaning ‘French song or singing’, and focusing on the quality of the lyrics and the vocal interpretations, for instance Jacques Brel or Georges Brassens).
Indeed, he is in a music (what ?, again) genre we call ‘yé-yé’ (pronounce it ‘yeah-yeah’, but with a French accent) which consisted essentially of very poor adaptations of American hits to which the guys seemed to have a terrible difficulty to write decent French words, which made them sing many times ‘yé-yé’ ( with French accent, I insist) both on verses and refrains, certainly hoping it would make it sound more ‘American-like’.
A famous exemple of it are Claude François’ covers of ‘It’s The Same Old Song’ (‘C’ Est La Même Chanson’), ‘Reach Out, I’ll Be There’ (‘J’Attendrai’) and ‘If I Had A Hammer’ (‘Si J’Avais Un Marteau’). The last one is a masterpiece of the genre : Claude François sings at least eight times ‘yé-yé’ (maybe more, I stopped counting) before pronouncing a word. These were big hits, making Claude François the most popular singer in France during all 60s and 70s, selling more singles than even The Beatles, making all our mothers traumatizing my generation with the baddest musical education in the world. (to be continued)
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(continuing the previous comment, sorry, it’s long !)
Richard Anthony had very few hits. Personally I know only one, and it’s even worse than the song discussed here, so I won’t even tell you the title of it. It would be a criminal behaviour to incitate you to listen to it.
His record company did not try to launch him on the U.S. market (absolutely no chance, believe me), but to buy him a kind of credibility on the French market by saying he had a single distributed by Motown. So, almost forty years later, the guy still made interviews in which he said he had been on Motown, which is not completely true. Because of that, people I know who hear me saying I like Motown think I like ‘yé-yé’, when the two things are, in my opinion, the exact contrary. I’m disgusted. This is the worst Motown record for me. But no, Richard Anthony won’t make stop liking Motown, despite his considerable effort to do so.
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