Nouvelle Vague proves you can’t keep a good idea down. It began with two French arrangers, Marc Collin and Olivier Libaux, a bunch of their music buddies and an idea that it would be fun to rediscover New Wave and punk songs, well known or not, and put them to a bossa nova beat, with singers who had never heard the songs before. Like the French New Wave of the 1960s, where French film directors reinterpreted American “B” movies, their intent was to come up with something French and light and clever all at once.
Their first record, Nouvelle Vague, released in 2004, reinterpreted songs by XTC, Modern English The Clash, The Undertones, the Dead Kennedys and Depeche Mode. It was, more than anything a lark, but it became a very successful one, with the album ultimately selling more than 200,000 copies and a concert tour that took them to more than 20 countries. Songs from the collection continue to be used in movies, TV and ads, giving the album far more life than anyone had expected.
While the project was thought to be limited to that one album, Collin realized it would be a shame to let it drop there. Instead, he vowed to be true to the original concept, which was the re-evaluation and re-recording of songs that were not generally considered important. But while his mental construct for the first one involved a young Brazilian girl from the 1960s singing “Love Will Tear Us Apart” on a Rio beach, he kept thinking about a Jamaican dude in a Kingston suburb strumming along to “Heart of Glass” and a lonely French girl in a Paris metro station playing “Fade to Grey” on an accordion, as people streamed by oblivious.
From those two diverse mental images, the second Nouvelle Vague album, 2006’s Band a Parte, was born. With the sound – percussion, acoustic guitars, sensual feminine voices, accordions, steel drums, reggae, calypso, bossa nova, etc. – in mind, the songs themselves fell into place. A starting point was Bauhaus, because of the voodoo-esque, horror feel to “Bela Lugosi Is Dead,” to “Israel” by Siouxsie & the Banshees and, by association, “The Israelites,” by Desmond Dekker.
To make the arrangements different from the first, he recruited Caribbean singer, Gerald Toto, and to keep the collective feel intact, he invited back the first album’s “stars,” Melanie Pain, Marina, Olivier Libaux and Phoebe Killdeer, who had not been on the album but had knocked people out on the tour. The final track listing included classics like the Buzzcock’s “Ever Fallen in Love,” New Order’s “Blue Monday,” Echo and the Bunnymen’s “Killing Moon,” Blondie’s “Heart of Glass” and The Cramps’ “Human Fly.”
It too was well reviewed and fed the demand for the live tours that continue to this day. Although there are no plans for a third record at this time, there’s no reason to think that they won’t be back soon. In the meantime, they released a compilation mix CD under the DJ Kicks series, this year called Late Night Tales: Nouvelle Vague. True to form, it includes a wide range of favorites, from Dexy’s Midnight Runners’ “Come on Eileen” and Os Mutantes’ “Baby” to Glen Campbell’s “By the Time I Get to Phoenix” and This Mortal Coil’s “You and Your Sister.” Can it get any quirkier than that? Nouvelle Vague doesn’t think so.
Love Will Tear Us Apart
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