1. Isabelle Genevieve Marie Anne Gall, known professionally as France Gall, was a French ye-ye singer.
40 Facts About France Gall
1. 2.
France Gall's mother, Cecile Berthier, was a singer as well and the daughter of Paul Berthier, the co-founder of Les Petits Chanteurs a la Croix de Bois.
3.
The only daughter of her family, France Gall had two brothers: Patrice and Philippe.
4.
In spring 1963, Robert France Gall encouraged his daughter to record songs and send the demos to the music publisher Denis Bourgeois.
5.
France Gall encouraged her to record four tracks with the French jazz musician, arranger and composer Alain Goraguer.
6.
France Gall teamed with Distel's business manager Maurice Teze, a lyricist, which allowed her to create an original repertoire, unlike the majority of her contemporaries who sang adaptations of Anglophone hits.
7.
France Gall was then selected to represent Luxembourg in the Eurovision Song Contest 1965.
8.
Success at Eurovision ensured that France Gall became even better known outside Europe and she recorded "Poupee de cire, poupee de son" in French, German, Italian and Japanese.
9.
France Gall's singles continued to chart successfully, including the Gainsbourg-penned "Attends ou va-t'en" and "Nous ne sommes pas des anges".
10.
France Gall had a hit with the song "L'Amerique" by Eddy Marnay and Guy Magenta.
11.
Stewart Mason states this early period of France Gall's career, culminating in the Eurovision win:.
12.
Also in 1966, France Gall released another successful song written by Gainsbourg titled "Les sucettes".
13.
France Gall was 18 at the time the song was released, and she maintained that she was ignorant of the song's double entendres.
14.
France Gall said she had sung "with an innocence of which I'm proud" and later said that this humiliation caused her to avoid going out in public after being "betrayed by the adults around me".
15.
France Gall then refused to sing the song and vowed never to work with Gainsbourg again.
16.
France Gall left for a tour in Japan shortly after the song was released and it has been stated that she felt mistrust for producers until meeting Michel Berger.
17.
At the beginning of 1967, France Gall sang "La Petite" in a duet with Maurice Biraud, which describes a young girl coveted by a friend of her father.
18.
France Gall moved to the record label La Compagnie in 1969, with whom her father Robert signed a contract, where she made a number of recordings, but did not succeed in finding a coherent style with Norbert Saada as artistic director.
19.
France Gall's version made the Ultratop 50 Singles chart in Belgium that year.
20.
France Gall had it released in Spanish as "Los anos locos".
21.
France Gall bought a hideaway there on the island of N'Gor, close to Dakar in 1990.
22.
France Gall was enthralled by Michel Berger's music when she heard his song "Attends-moi" one day in 1973.
23.
In 1974, after she sang vocals on the song "Mon fils rira du rock'n'roll" on Berger's new album, France Gall's publisher asked him, at her behest, to write for her.
24.
France Gall had already made her mind up that "It will be him and nobody else".
25.
In 1979, France Gall took part in a show which remains memorable for many.
26.
In 1982, France Gall rehearsed in the Palais des Sports of Paris to present Tout pour la musique, an innovative spectacle marked by its use of electronic music.
27.
In 1985, France Gall joined Chanteurs Sans Frontieres, on the initiative of Valerie Lagrange.
28.
In 1987, the song "Evidemment", written by Berger and sung by France Gall, was a moving homage to their lost friend.
29.
France Gall topped the pop charts in many countries in 1987 and 1988 with another song from the Babacar album, "Ella, elle l'a", a Berger tribute to Ella Fitzgerald.
30.
France Gall took a break from singing in the early 1990s and did not record any more for several years.
31.
France Gall did make an album titled Double Jeu with Berger, released 12 June 1992.
32.
France Gall decided to commit to the performances at Bercy and promoted the songs that she and Berger had created together.
33.
The repertoire featured songs written exclusively by Berger, but France Gall included her own versions of songs originally performed by others.
34.
In 1996, Gall asked Jean-Luc Godard to produce the video clip of her song "Plus haut", taken from her album France.
35.
France Gall married her collaborator and songwriter Michel Berger on 22 June 1976.
36.
France Gall entered into a pact with her husband to alternate their professional projects to take care of their daughter in the hope that a cure would be found.
37.
In 1966, France Gall appeared in the television film Viva Morandi, made in the same psychoanalytical mould as the Federico Fellini film Giulietta degli Spiriti.
38.
In January 2010, Gall was portrayed by Sara Forestier in a feature film released in France, Gainsbourg, based on the graphic novel by writer-director Joann Sfar.
39.
France Gall staged and appeared in the 2007 France 2 documentary Tous pour la musique, marking the 15th anniversary of Michel Berger's death.
40.
France Gall was buried with her husband and daughter on 20 Avenue Rachel at Montmartre Cemetery in Paris.