The Cyrille Gosselin Band played their French songs in French in Seattle last Sunday night, and they were excellent.
Like many French musicians, Cyrille’s command of French is quite good. Not typically ones to join the rush to Anglicize, some outstanding French singers and songwriters (see Francis Cabrel) have been bound to their domestic market and foregone a wider audience.
On the other hand, throughout the 1960s and 1970s, British acts were encouraged by their record companies to record French, Spanish, German or Italian versions of their hits to reach a wider audience. This gave us David Bowie’s ‘Héros’ and the Beatles’ ‘Michelle’ (French versions of ‘Heroes’ and ‘Michelle’, for all you non-French-speakers).
These fluent and accomplished versions do not accurately capture a typical British school leaver’s ability to speak French. For us, Bill Wyman is our héro, le Rolling Stone that parler Français comme un de nous.