The French song that dominated the charts all summer long in 1974
Hit songs are a mystery. You can wonder what makes a song a success, or even a topper of charts, but some tunes seem to hit the masses like a star strike that no one can quite explain, like this French track.
Overwhelmingly, it’s typically tough for a foreign language song to chart, or even perform all that well, in a country that won’t be able to connect to the lyricism. In the entire history of the Billboard 100 chart, which started in 1958, there have still only been ten non-English number-one hits. In the UK, there have only been eight number ones in a foreign language.
This seems to be changing, though, as Rosalía’s multi-lingual album Lux has seen a huge wave of mainstream interest as she moves through 13 different languages across the record’s 15 songs, while during the 2026 Super Bowl halftime show, Puerto Rico’s Bad Bunny performed in Spanish, proving how his own non-English songs have been adopted by a massive mainstream audience.
As streaming services make music easier to discover and distribute, the marketplace is opening up. It’s far easier to find songs from different countries or in different languages, and so the world of good tunes is less pocketed away country by country. Before, it would have been harder for artists from other countries to break through and even get their tunes across seas, oceans or borders, and yet, on occasion, they still did, like in the 1970s, when a French tune broke through, becoming the ultimate song of the summer in 1974.
The French song that dominated the charts in 1974:
There is a caveat here, though, which is that the French tune wasn’t actually sung in French, or, at least, the version that ruled the charts wasn’t.
Released on June 14th, 1974, Charles Aznavour’s ‘She’ landed directly at number one on the UK charts and stayed there for four weeks, selling over 300,000 in its time. While Aznavour is a French artist whose career was mostly spent singing in French, the song was created for the purpose of being a theme tune for the English TV show, Seven Faces of Woman. Written as a commission for the show, it was penned in English, but was later recorded in French, German, Italian and Spanish after the British version blew up way beyond the television show.
By now, the song is perhaps best known for featuring in Notting Hill via a cover by Elvis Costello. Singing, “She may be the face I can’t forget, A trace of pleasure or regret”, it’s a beautiful, romantic tune about love at first sight. It also seems strangely prescient as Aznavour wrote in the tune, “She may be the song that summer sings”, with no idea that the song ‘She’ actually would be the song that the summer of 1974 would be singing on repeat.
Unfortunately, its success didn’t really stretch beyond the UK. Europe adopted it slightly in their own re-recorded version, especially the more upbeat French take, titled ‘Elle’. But the song didn’t make it across the pond, missing out on the top 100 there, even as UK listeners obsessed over the track during the 1970s own summer of love.
