Originally gaining acclaim as an actress, Birkin met Gainsbourg on the set of the 1969 film Slogan in which they both starred. Of course Hills wasn’t Yé-Yé’s only British infiltrators, the most famous being Jane Birkin. Soon enough, the Brits wanted a piece of the pie of Yé-Yé culture.Īdopted Parisiennes like Gillian Hills, who was tapped as the next Bardot, had several hits including “Zou Bisou Bisou,” “Ma Première Cigarette” and “Tut Tut Tut Tut”, as well as “Une Petite Tasse D’anxiété”, written by Serge Gainsbourg and sang together as his first Yé-Yé duet. But all of them embodied an enviable image of the 1960s Parisienne, effortlessly cool and stylish, whose look was envied and endlessly copied (but rarely successfully). Jean-Emmanuel Deluxe, author of the great resource Ye-Ye Girls of ’60s French Pop, wrote that each Yé-Yé girl represented a unique archetype, like the fashionista, the nerd, the romantic and the protestor. But as journalist Véronique Hyland points out, even feminist Simone de Beauvoir gave credit to the Lolita attitude of the Yé-Yé girl, recognising that she was “a carefree, in-between woman who giggled at the idea of marriage and commitment, in what was still a very conservative society”. The seemingly innocent song carries undertones about oral sex and Gall later said she was humiliated and felt taken advantage of. At 17, Gall won the Eurovision Song Contest for Luxembourg with a song written by Gainsbourg and a year later, became known for performing another one of his compositions, “Les Sucettes” (“The Lollipops”). Take France Gall, the daughter of a lyricist who wrote songs for Edith Piaf. There was a divide, however, between the largely male composers who wrote Yé-Yé music (most notably Jean Bouchéty, Michel Colombier and Serge Gainsbourg) and the young women who sang it. Yé-Yé music was ingrained in the quickly changing musical zeitgeist of the 1960s, pulling inspiration from Phil Spector’s “Wall of Sound” that was the backtrack for the era’s girl groups and the Beach Boys as well as the hit-making machine of New York City’s Brill Building. While many of these British and American musicians pushed the rapidly shifting gender boundaries in an era of bourgeoning sexual liberation, they had nothing on their more open, or promiscuous, French counterparts. Each show featured a weekly pop sweetheart. Some Yé-Yé girls got their start on the weekly radio program “Salut Les Copains” (think of it as the French equivalent of “Top of the Pops” or “American Bandstand”). Sylvie Vartan on the cover of “Salut Les Copains” And unlike the male-dominated British invasion, Yé-Yé allowed many female stars to shine, bringing their sound to global audiences.
But Yé-Yé music didn’t just ‘translate’ rock and roll for the European market – it also expanded the genre sonically, exploring genres ranging from baroque to jazz to chanson (the French style of lyric-driven music).
Inspired by the Anglophone craze, the Yé-Yé movement provided a French sensibility to the beat music of the 1960s, with its own French-language artists including Françoise Hardy, France Gall, and Sylvie Vartan. The French called it Yé-Yé, literally derived from the “yeah! yeah!” lyrics that had become the sound of British and American rock and roll. While the Beatles were singing “She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah” in England, continental Europe was forming its own musical phenomenon.
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