Before joining us, rue Chaptal (Paris 9e), on the terrace of the Museum of Romantic Life, April March took the opportunity to admire, at 11 bis on the same street, the building where Serge Gainsbourg grew up. A necessary pilgrimage for this New Yorker who, since 1994 and her first album, Gainsbourgsion!devoted to the repertoire “1960s” from the author of Bonnie and Clydeerted herself as the most Francophile of American singers.
If it’s hard to have escaped his thrilling adaptation of drop the girls who, under the title of Chick Habitpaced Boulevard of Death by Quentin Tarantino (2007) before illustrating TV commercials, Elinor Blake’s springtime pseudonym remains best known to fans of underground pop.
While pursuing a career as a cartoonist in animated films, this filiform fan of the sixties has indeed shaped an intriguing discography often testifying, in a bilingual version, to her pion for the country of Sylvie Vartan, Françoise Hardy, Jacques Dutronc or Brigitte Fontaine. . Without being satisfied with retro fantasies.
“Highly demanding”
Far from being limited to a Frenchy exoticism, Elinor in Paris, April March has continued to evolve its singular universe to the rhythm of collaborations with several goldsmiths of our pop avant-garde. After records with Bertrand Burgalat, boss of the Tricatel label, the eccentric Toulouse d’Aquaserge or the precious Mehdi Zannad (alias Fugu), his new album conceived with the Rouen duo Staplin, April March Meets Staplin, brilliantly prolongs this habit. The always elegant spirit of the singer flourishing this time in the soundtracks for film lovers designed by Norman Langolff and Arno Van Colen, between luminous melodies, hypnotic daydreams and more twilight tensions.
“He’s a character! », ures the multi-instrumentalist Norman Langolff, whose father, the composer Franck Langolff, worked, among others, with Serge Gainsbourg and signed the music of Joe the cab. “His adventurous craftsmanship is very exacting and broad-minded. She declared her love for a French-speaking culture at a time when it was not fashionable in the United States, or even in France. »
“My parents were very Francophiles”insists the singer, born in New York in 1965. Daughter of an art historian and a publisher, Elinor Blake was immersed very early in an intellectual environment open to pop culture. “At home, we found as well Tintin And Asterix than the works of Michel Foucault, clical music records than those of Françoise Hardy, Maurice Chevalier or Charles Trenet”remembers the one whose first drawings take as models the silhouette of Betty Boop or the dancers of Degas.
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