Here’s another track that sort of popped into my head somewhat recently and spun around in my head for a while. I’m not sure how entirely. There might have been mention of Isabelle Adjani in conversation, watched one of her films a short while ago, or there’s something I listened to recently that prompted me to remember this song. Or maybe it’s because of the track’s slightly unusual tempo — at least for what sounds like a disco-influenced number — which moves along at a somewhat slow, deliberate and languid pace unlike most tracks intended for nightclubs which tend to hover in the 110-135 BPM zone.
The track is called “Beau Oui Comme Bowie” (translating roughly to “Handsome, yes, like [David] Bowie”) — from Isabelle Adjani‘s first, self-titled album released in 1983 — and opts for a tempo that hovers around 95 BPM, which I would call a “slow chugger”, with a “chugger” for me being a personal slang term for any track written with intention for the club dancefloor that works at a BPM of 115 or lower. This one is definitely lower but for whatever reason works. If anything it prompts those on the dancefloor to skip the high cardio movements and lays into something more devious and sensual perhaps, given Adjani’s vocal delivery and the cool and collected instrumentation, fusing orchestral hits and some subtle guitar rock riffage. I’m thinking of Adjani’s group of musicians back in the early 1980s when writing this album all in the studio proclaiming “let’s do a disco, dancefloor smash!” and then just cruising this track in the slow lane. But as I’ve said, it works.
Another interesting thing is that when the track arrives at the chorus, it repeats in an unusual number of counts before repeating again — in this case 3x 4/4 bars and then two extra counts — which sounds smooth and if anything adds a bit more drama to the music. Sadly this little trick or “asset in the musical toolbox” is severely in lacking in a lot of modern dance-oriented music, both above and under ground.
For whatever reason I always think of when I first moved to London almost twenty years ago when I hear this track, as I had discovered it through a mix at the time — like some other tracks — as I was attempting to familiarise myself with what was happening musically in my new city. My brain makes some sort of stylistic connection between this track and another artist working across the pond in New York around this time, that being singer and scene shaker Cristina, noted for her 1984 album Sleep It Off (track from that posted below).
Adjani’s voice on this one sort of pulls from the tradition of French pop music (she did after all collaborate with Serge Gainsbourg) — which broadly fits in with the chanson genre — with a breathy, vibrato-inflected approach. The video for this track is standard “promo video” fare from that time, with Adjani cycling through a number of haute couture ensembles in what appears to be a fashion show set in an indoor swimming lido. Another track from this same self-titled album, “Le Bonheur C’est Malheureux” (posted below, translating to “Happiness is Unhappiness”) aligns more with upbeat, orchestra-inflected disco fare that was starting to fade in the early 1980s, including a video where Adjani is dancing around pedestrians in a public street setting, donning large dark sunglasses and a shiny, black satin trenchcoat with exagerrated shoulders.
I’m not as familiar with Adjani’s musical career nearly as much as other entries here where I get more into the background of an artists. I don’t know enough about Adjani as a musician and how the creation of her albums came about — whether it be she had a deep interest in music and penned all (if not the majority) of her songs, or whether or not she was a curator/creative director of her music based on the input from many other musicians — but I suppose the fact that she’s been releasing music ever since might have something to say about her interest and commitment to the artform.
Of course many of us are more familiar with Isabelle Adjani as an actress — an acclaimed and powerful one at that — with any given number of films she’s starred in over the decades, including films from her native country of France as well as many English-language films. Some of her films I’m familiar with include the intense and bizarre psychological horror Possession — released in 1981 and directed by Andrzej Żuławski, and coincidentally being the namesake of Possession Records with the name chosen by a friend who started the label before I was involved and started running it myself — as well the horror films The Tenant (Roman Polanski, 1976) and Nosferatu the Vampyre (Werner Herzog, 1979), the period dramas of The Brontë Sisters (André Téchiné, 1979) and Quartet (James Ivory, 1983) and finally an early, stylish “new wave” thriller by renowned French director Luc Besson called Subway (1985) in which Adjani stars along with another rising French actor of the time, Christopher Lambert , who is more well-known from the blockbuster, fantasy/sci-fi film Highlander that came out a year later, in which Lambert plays the Scottish protagonist and Sean Connery (who is actually Scottish) plays an immortal Spaniard… go figure.
This entry is probably also prompted by from what I remember as a few conversations with friends in more recent times about well-known talents in the film acting world crossing over into the realm of writing and releasing music, which is a very mixed bag in terms of well-known acting names and the style of music they’ve each opted to release. There’s of course instances of this that are well-known on the “pop culture” level, such as Keanu Reeves playing bass in Dogstar — probably the main reason why that band is even familiar to people, which could possibly be an issue of contention with the other band members — and Bruce Willis banging out questionable blues rock. Any number of film stars have attempted to break into the pop music world, usually with underwhelming results.
Eddie Murphy dipped into music as well, with his collaboration with musician Rick James on the electro-funk novelty “Party All The Time” (which I oddly enough have the 12″ single for that — don’t ask how). Steve Martin is apparently an accomplished player of bluegrass music.
There’s also those from the acting world that have put a bit more creative energy into music, opting for more noisier and more “alternative” projects. Juliette Lewis had The Licks. British actress Maxine Peake contributed to the Sheffield-based experimental music collective called The Eccentronic Research Council. Christopher Lee in his later years released albums of symphonic metal records. Character actor Richard Edson is a bit different, in that he had put in time with a number of bands before his acting career took off. He was the original drummer from Sonic Youth and had spent time in the NYC post-punk/disco collective Konk, whose material has recently gotten the re-release treatment on the Futurismo label, which is run by my friend and former bandmate Delaney Jae.
There’s also the well-known actress Scarlett Johansson — of Ghost World, Lost In Translation and Under The Skin fame — who released a couple of albums starting in the late 2000s starting with Anywhere I Lay My Head (2008), which I always remember as it included a couple of musicians I was faintly acquainted with — Baltimore-based Sean Antinaitis and Katrina Ford — both who had been in a few bands from the general underground scene I was involved in at the time which really liked, such as Jaks, Love Life and Celebration — all under-rated and amazing bands that have had some impact on me.
Given the backgrounds of those two musicians, I thought it was a very interesting pairing of talents, mainly given the nature for Ford and Antinaitis’s musical trajectory. I could post a track by either of these three bands but I feel properly a proper entry for that is shelved away for sometime in the near future, and this is where this sidetrack ends.
So enough with the the lists and anectodes and let’s get back to the track this entry is about.
One final thing to note about “Beau Oui Comme Bowie” is it’s subject matter. Obviously it plays on the known sexual ambiguity of David Bowie and from there addresses androgyny in general, with some lines below roughly translated to English:
“Male to female / Slightly cracked / A little too feline / You know you are
Handsome, yes, like Bowie
A little bit of Oscar Wilde / A little bit of Dorian Gray / A few cold glimmers / And an icy air”
It was a time in pop music when the subject of gender fluidity started to become more prevalent in music and cemented it in the consciousness of the music public, influencing and providing inspiration for many out there who maybe didn’t feel entirely one or the other.
It’s also a song that directly references another creative celebrity in the title (along with others mentioned in the lyrics). Again, there’s many more examples of this and from the very top of my head tracks like “Bette Davis Eyes” by Kim Carnes, “Robert De Niro’s Waiting” by Bananarama and even something as out there and obscure as “Letter To ZZ Top” by U.S Maple (a band covered here earlier) spring to mind.
There’s one song in particular that comes to mind that far more offers a parallel to Adjani’s track, with the subject matter and song title again referencing another musical celebrity, as well as it that is also by a French artist, came out around the same time and works in the general disco, synth-pop arena where “Beau Oui Comme Bowie” generally sits. This is a track called “Les Nuits Sans Kim Wilde” (“The Nights Without Kim Wilde”) by Laurent Voulzy, a singer/songwriter who had already been doing music for well over a decade before this 1985 hit was released, working in a style of synth-pop that had the colouring of numerous other French synth-pop acts at the time, like Étienne Daho and Desireless. The track itself had its blessing from the celebrity featured in the song, British singer/musician Kim Wilde, who contributed vocals to the song as well as making an appearance in the track’s promo video (posted below).
Oh… one more for the list. Eric Wareheim of the popular comedy duo Tim And Eric — prior to finding his success in the comedy world — had stints in the hardcore underground of the 90s circles I was in at the time, most notably with the Philadelphia-based “horror” themed hardcore band Ink And Dagger, whom I believe I saw at North Vancouver’s legendary all ages venue Seylynn Hall back in the late 90s. His tenure was brief, and I wouldn’t have even clocked if he was even in the band at the time. And with that final factoid I’m clocking out on this one.