Thoughts for the weekend

I shall have a few.

Thanks to the video embedded below. The song is Where do you go to (my lovely) written and sung by Peter Sarsted. This performance was on the music show BeatClub (in the glorious days of sixties black-and-white television with host Cilla Black visible in the first frames). The clip posted seems to have been ripped by a German viewer when the clip was broadcast on the excellent 3Sat channel.

It was a #1 hit in the UK charts for six weeks in 1969 and was awarded the 1969 Ivor Novello Award, together with David Bowie's Space Oddity.

The lyrics are absolutely chock full of namechecks referring to France; they hinted at a France which I found compellingly attractive. There were quite a few of us, then, casting a wishful glance across the English Channel.

Partly this was due to the events of 1968. The fortieth anniversary falls next year, when I shall myself be a true soixantehuitard. It was to Paris that our lovely Jane Birkin had decamped to join up with Serge Gainsbourg.

Peter Sarstedt captured a certain longing for a France of louche sensuality and decadence. Sounded good too me. To Bowie, too, like me at the time a definite Francophile. The novel by Pierre Daninos about the archteypal Brit in France, Major Thomson, is the reason I acquired the sobriquet of Major Tom (c.f. Space Oddity, for which I produced the videoclip).

Best of all, when I hear the song again, I have a huge feeling of thankfulness that I did enjoy just over ten years, from 1971, of that louche sensuality and decadence.

The lesson being, kiddies, careful of the songs which capture your imagination; you might just live them.

(For further consideration, class; the relationship between Californication and MySpace...)

Have a good weekend. Cue music!