Weekend French Playlist #7
Goodbye to HelloLisa, and new music from Aliocha Schneider, Ehla, and Aime Simone.
Sometimes streaming services like Spotify can be great for a little serendipity.
This week, it randomly served me up a track from HelloLisa, a pop-rock group that describes itself as a “DIY Indie band from Collioure, the most beautiful little town on the Mediterranean Sea.” They are not wrong about Collioure. It’s tucked along the French coast just south of Perpignan and before the Spanish border, with the Pyrénées as a backdrop.
One mini-profile described the “British pop of the Catalans” as a “well-kept secret after 14 years of activity.” The 7-person group, all childhood friends, cited such influences as Happy Mondays and Teenage FanClub.
After a decade of laboring in the obscurity of France’s alternative music scene, the band finally seemed on the verge of breaking through. Tim Burgess, the lead singer of the Charlatans, discovered HelloLisa and invited them to play at the Isle of Wight festival in 2016.
The band began work on its second full-length album (Haunted Strange Parties) and was preparing to release it in September 2018. But in July 2018, Julien Faulquès, the band’s co-lead singer, guitarist, and main songwriter, died of a stroke at the age of 42.
The group officially disbanded in 2019 after 14 years. Last year, the remaining members reformed as a new band called Jeune Senior Weekend.
HelloLisa made 4 EPs, but only the 2 full records are available on Spotify. As the group explained in a tweet: “HelloLisa will not restart and we are facing difficulties to maintain our music on all those streaming platforms because it costs too much to handle so it may disappear and stay only on Bandcamp.”
Adieu, HelloLisa. And Vive Jeune Senior Weekend!
Other highlights this weekend include new albums from Franco-Canadian singer Aliocha Schneider, the globetrotting Aime Simone (check out his version of Heart Of Gold), and Ehla.
As I was listening to Ehla, I came across her 2018 video for the song Pas d’ici (Not From Here). The video has a great, mid-1980s low-budget VHS quality to it.
Ehla grew up in the South of France and moved to Paris to pursue her music career. The song is about trying to adapt to the misery of life in Paris with its cold people and crappy weather (On the pavement, wet hair/In the rain like every morning; I like to remember/That over there [the South] the sun is shining/When the capital, in summer/acts up, becomes hostile) versus the smiling people of the South with their accents (I don’t hear the sea anymore/Or the accents that sing) and the sunnier weather.
As a former resident of Toulouse now in the Paris region, well, I get it…
Chris O’Brien
Le Pecq