Nouvelle Vague co-conspirator Marc Collin may claim with the merest flash of understatement that it was just a simple idea, but it was one nobody else had thought of.
Collin and fellow French musician Olivier Libaux have produced an album that will stop you in your tracks. They started with 13 post-punk classics by Joy Division, The Cure, Depeche Mode, The Clash, Public Image Limited, The Undertones and others. They then stripped the songs back to their acoustic roots, handed the lyrics to one of a half-dozen young Paris-based female singers and, hey presto, reinvented everything from Love Will Tear Us Apart to Just Can't Get Enough as bossa-nova thrills as imagined and sung by Astrud Gilberto.
Nouvelle Vague will irritate and infuriate many raincoat-wearing purists but give anyone with open ears a shot of sheer pop joy. The music of dreary 1970s Britain whisked away to be seduced on the colourful beaches of Rio or in the chi-chi lounges of Paris, it is an audacious achievement.
Reinventions on such an epic scale are nothing new. A couple of years ago Uwe Schmidt took the music of Kraftwerk, added a rub of rumba, a splash of salsa and a clatter of cha-cha and carved a new career as Señor Coconut. That he also subsequently took a coconut to Michael Jackson's Beat It, Deep Purple's Smoke On The Water and The Doors' Riders On The Storm shows that there is much mileage in weird-beard covers and that Schmidt thinks he's onto a good thing.
Collin would prefer if comparisons to the work of El Coconut ceased without further ado. "I like the Señor Coconut records, and it was a good idea to take the music of Kraftwerk and play it in that way," he says, "but after two or three songs you go, OK, I've heard this now, what's next?"
What saves Nouvelle Vague from a critical mauling is that any lingering irony, novelty and humour about the project dissolve after 30 seconds of Love Will Tear Us Apart, as the pure, naive tones of Eloisa, a Brazilian singer, transform the bleakness of Ian Curtis's anthem into something hypnotic, sultry and ethereally melancholic. "Bossa nova is very melancholic music, so when Eloisa was singing Love Will Tear Us Apart she said she did not recognise the song but she recognised the mood and the melancholy, so she treated the song like it was something from Rio."
For Collin and Libaux it was the songs that attracted them in the first place. Old enough to remember when A Forest, This Is Not A Love Song or Making Plans For Nigel were gathering applause the first time round, they had a hunch that the tracks might benefit from a lick of paint. "We wanted to show that the songs themselves would stand up to this kind of treatment," says Collin. "We were not doing it to be funny or to be ironic; we wanted to showcase the songs in a way no one had thought of playing or recording them before. I suppose we wanted to bring out some of the mystery and magic we always thought was there."
Both are veterans of the French dance scene - Collin releasing records as Ollano and Avril, Libaux producing albums such as L'Héroine Au Bain - but they took a new approach to recording this album. Initially, they wanted to use Brazilian singers, but they could find only one in Paris. "We then thought it might be good to get some French girls to sing, so we asked around." The singers who arrived at the studio had no idea what to expect. "It was very spontaneous," says Collin. "We would take a guitar, play the melody, give the girls the lyrics and ask them to sing. . . . It was strange, because the singers had never heard these songs, and we began to realise there is now a generation who just don't know these songs, even the Depeche Mode and Cure ones. It's very strange to think there are people buying the record who have never heard the original versions either. Does it make me feel old? A little bit!"
