What was the first French song to reach number one in the UK?
Climbing to the top of the charts is hard, but climbing to the top of the charts in another country is even harder, and that’s why Beatlemania was such a big deal.
Before the Fab Four came along, it was pretty much a write-off for any band in the UK to make it in the States, for releasing music that resonated in America was extremely hard, and then going across the pond and still managing to capture the audience’s attention was an even bigger task. Sure, a few singles from the UK had charted in America, but none had the kind of impact The Beatles did.
It was 1964 when Paul McCartney, John Lennon, George Harrison and Ringo Starr’s plane touched down in America, and the US public got a good look at the Liverpool lads for the first time. The band certainly had a charm to them; additionally, their music and live performance were so good that people around the country felt immediately drawn to them.
It was only a matter of time before they went to number one, and they stayed there for a while until folk rock came into action, with Bob Dylan and The Byrds taking back the charts for the Americans. Regardless, the impact of The Beatles had been felt by so many that they continued to be a force across the States until they eventually split up some seven years later.
In this, chinching the gold spot on a foreign chart with a song not in the country’s native tongue is something of a bigger curveball success, because usually, when a lot of people listen to music, they want to hear lyrics that they connect with, and that means they need to be able to understand them, which obviously can’t be the case if they are written in a completely different language.
On the other hand, there are factors beyond lyrical understanding that can help a song gain traction and subsequently climb to the top of the charts, which is exactly what happened with the first French song to reach number one in the UK, where, even though it was a good track, it was controversy that helped it gain widespread acclaim.
What was the first French song to reach number one in the UK?
The first French song to top the charts in the UK was 1969’s controversial track ‘Je t’aime… moi non plus’, told from the point of view of two lovers in the heat of doing what lovers do, which you can well understand thanks to the heavy breathing of the two singers, Jane Birkin and Serge Gainsbourg. It was viewed as so controversial that the BBC banned it, which only led to a spike in record sales, hence the song’s popularity.
Gainsbourg, the writer, was never happy with the infamy surrounding the track, as it was supposed to be an honest love song, explaining, “The music is very pure. For the first time in my life I write a love song, and it’s taken badly”. In fact, the moaning in the song was considered so realistic that some listeners believed the two were actually having sex in the studio, such that Birkin had to come out and dispel the rumours.
“We made it very boringly in Marble Arch [in London], both of us in sort of telephone cabins,” she corrected, adding, “When you recorded in the old days you only had two takes, and he was very afraid I was going to go on with the heavy breathing two seconds longer and miss the very high note […] so he was waving at me like a madman from his cabin.”
