Swinging Mademoiselles Deux

Performer: Various Artists
Distributor: E1 Distribution (USA)

Notes: Although, as its title suggests, Swinging Mademoiselles Deux is the follow-up to the earlier collection Swinging Mademoiselles: Groovy French Sounds from the 60s, it is actually a better album than its predecessor. Once again, the contents have been assembled from French pop records featuring female singers that roughly correspond to the era of Swinging London, say, 1966, hence the title. These are the equivalents to the contemporaneous British hits of Marianne Faithfull, Cilla Black, and Petula Clark. In fact, the exact French equivalent to Petula Clark is...Petula Clark herself, who was just as big a star in France singing in French as she was in Britain and America singing in English. Here, she takes on a French adaptation of the hit "Needles and Pins" with an entirely different lyric, called "La Nuit N'en Finit Plus." Her inclusion on the album points to its superiority over its predecessor. While some of the biggest stars of what was called the y�-y� movement in French pop are still missing, many of the singers here are better known than the ones on the first disc. As the subtitle puts it, the album contains "More groovy French pop from the 60s including Brigitte Bardot, Petula Clark, Jacqueline Ta�eb [who actually was on the first album] and Zouzou." Bardot's selection, "Ecoute le Temps," the theme from the TV show Saint-Tropez...Vole, actually bears a 1971 copyright, but no matter. This is still music that sounds like the mid-'60s, shortly after the Beatles arrived and before psychedelia set in, an eclectic, fun time when songs had harpsichord solos (Maryene's "Cette Fille N'est Rien Pour Lui") or borrowed the sound of the Kinks' "You Really Got Me" (Pussy Cat's "Acune Fille au Monde [Power of Love]"). In France as well as England and the U.S., it was a silly, entertaining interlude in pop, captured again on this album. (A disclaimer inside the CD booklet explains the occasionally uneven sound quality as "due to unavailability of certain master recordings," resulting in the use of old records instead.) ~ William Ruhlmann

Record Collector (magazine) (p.106) - 3 stars out of 5 -- "Psych, freakbeat and whimsy permeate the album..."

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