So then: a Francophile Belinda Carlisle album produced by Sinéad/Jah Wobble/Ghostland man John D Reynolds and featuring Brian Eno, Sharon Shannon and Fiachna O Braonain on songs written and/or popularised by Piaf, Brel, Gainsbourg and Hardy.
I swear, I haven’t been at the brown acid.
Let it be said, those who dismiss Carlisle as a mere ‘80s pop curiosity do her a grave disservice. Among other things, she debuted as a drummer for The Germs before fronting The Go-Go’s, and she always had a superlative set of pipes, one of the all-time great Rachel Sweet/Susanna Hoffs/Ronnie Spector girly-pop voices. From ‘Our Lips Are Sealed’ to big production numbers like ‘Heaven Is A Place On Earth’, no matter how unlikely the setting, Carlisle could sell a tune.
But Voila ups the artistic stakes exponentially. The opening ‘Ma Jeunesse Fout Le Camp’ pitches Piaf in multicultural Paree, and is exotically spiced with Natacha Atlas’s wonderful call-to-prayer wail. Elsewhere, the reimagining of Gainsbourg’s ‘Bonnie Et Clyde’ is a doomed road movie propelled by Reynolds’s patented trance pulses, and featuring a spoken word cameo from O Braonain.
But there’s duende too. Leo Ferre’s ‘Avec Le Temps’ and ‘Ne Me Quitte Pas’ are both thoroughbred heartbreakers, the latter bypassing Simone’s holiest of holies by daring to risk sacrilege: it revises Brel’s masterpiece as grandly attired Big Pop Ballad – and pulls it off.
But Voila is no period piece. There’s a bizarre Hi-NRG homo-erotic ‘La Vie En Rose’, a sleazy dub remake of Serge’s ‘Contact’ and a brazen flamenco romp through the old Frankie Laine hit ‘Jezebel’. Carlisle even tips a backward nod to her salad days with the adorable plastic punk chug of ‘Pourtant Tu M’Aimes’.
Voila could’ve been a perfectly respectable soundtrack to a high gloss French heroin heist thriller, but to Carlisle’s credit, it’s a much richer, lusher artefact than that. File between Grace Jones burlesque, Mick Harvey’s Intoxicated Man and Anita Lane’s Sex O’Clock.