Bubblegum OD is Rock’n’Soul’s radio show devoted to cartoon rock, pop pablum, and sundry other candy-coated musical guilty pleasures. Many of these songs were penned by the Brill Building's best and brightest and contain provocative double-entendre lyrics. Sometimes a Mars bar isn’t just a Mars bar...

November 15, 2020: Teenie Weenie French Pop Party

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Les Poppys: The only 17-member French choral boy band that matters!

Les Poppys: The only 17-member French choral boy band that matters!

I’m playing French Pop on today’s show to mark the five-year anniversary of the terrorist attacks in Paris (11/13/15). But rather than dwell on terrible acts done by misguided people, this show is a celebration of French culture in all its cool, mysterious, beautiful, eclectic, delicious, goofy splendor.

Today’s show will highlight the group Les Poppys, who never released a record in the U.S. and don’t translate easily. I didn’t want to make the show a lecture, so I’ve written about them below. But what I intended as a blurb became a 1,000-word essay that barely scratches the surface! C’est la vie... Hopefully, it sparks your interest.

Sacre Bleu! Release Les Poppys Records in America

About five years ago, I encountered a video of this mysterious, multicultural, Benetton ad of a boy band. Led by a tall, shy kid with North African looks, the chorus solemnly posed on a stage graced with a UNICEF symbol, clapping out the rhythm to his a cappella French chant before bursting into a pleasingly harmonic plea for peace accompanied by a routine of simple choreographed motions. Clearly, these boys meant business.

I learned the song was called “Non, Non, Rien n’a Change” (“No, No, Nothing Has Changed”) and it had sold 1.2 million copies—not one of which had ever turned up at any record or thrift store I’d perused—and I was compelled to find out more. This is how I became—as far as I can tell—America’s leading authority on Les Poppys, France’s most under-appreciated-children’s-choir-turned-pop band. I hope to retire that title because they deserve much wider admiration.

By the turn of 1970, choirs and classical music had already begun bleeding into rock. Baroque pop had run its twee course as a kinder, gentler psychedelia, and the Rolling Stones and the Who (“You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” various rock operas) were well versed in the stuff. Even Corporate America got the hang of this by 1970 when on a remote mountaintop, a chorus of the youth of many nations clasped hands and sang “I’d Like to Buy the World a Coke,” in solidarity to sell soda pop.

In a few years, artists like Alice Cooper (“School’s Out”) and Pink Floyd (“Another Brick in the Wall”) would be relying on children’s choirs as the latest rock gimmick. But first there was the French children’s rock choir Les Poppys. And they were le fucking brilliant.

Les Poppys first bloomed in the spring of 1970, five years after the von Trapp family’s dramatic story broke box office records in the Sound of Music and five years before Van Halen began tearing up backyard parties throughout the San Gabriel Valley. Former pop star/songwriter Francois Bernheim (Les Roche Martin) was now artistic director at the label Barclay along with former singer Jacqueline Herrenschmitt, and they sought boys between the ages of 10-13 for a musical project that would combine the angelic voices and harmonies of traditional European choirs with the driving beats and licks of the Beatles, the Stones and Jimi Hendrix.

At this time in France, young people were feeling their power—and frustration. Fresh off the 1968 protests, the antiwar opinion was strong, an environmental movement was brewing and the Age of Aquarius was looming. This group’s songs would express these sentiments through the pure, innocent voices of children. Bernheim found exactly what he was looking for in a small town just north of Paris.

Bruno Polius, Pierre Purhardy, Christophe Normand and a few dozen others urchins were plucked out of semi-obscurity from municipal choir Les Petits Chanteurs d'Asnières (“the Little Singers of Asnières”) and minted as first-generation Poppys. (In France, choir is an after school occupation, the equivalent to playing Little League in the U.S.) Seventeen boys were issued mod, colorful stage uniforms and instructed to keep away from scissors to achieve “les cheveux longs” of rock stars. They had the best resources at their disposal—Barclay, France’s top music label, a full orchestra, top rock players, and songwriters who wrote hit tunes with thoughtful arrangements and progressive lyrics about the Vietnam war, children’s rights, ecology and world peace.

At the height of their popularity in the the early 1970s, Les Poppys beat the Beatles on European charts, sold 5 million records, were flown to gigs in military planes, opened for Nina Hagen, could be heard singing in a James Bond film and performed at sold out events and on TV shows throughout Europe—all while attending school and living fairly normal preteen lives. They took Barclay out of debt and made the label lots of filthy lucre—and received very few pennies, if that, in return. It’s a complicated story, one made blurry by age, language barriers, cultural quirks and geographical divides. And amazingly, 50 years after it began, in the age of instant access to everything, it is likely that you haven’t heard it, or them. Why not?

Frankly, I own enough French pop music to have designated a section for the genre in my record bin, and am a bit of an encyclopedia of 1960s and ’70s pop culture. I know enough about Bubblegum music to rival a Tiger Beat editor. How could I not know about this Parisian precursor to the prefab prepubescents that would invade music thereafter?

Turns out it’s a fascinating (and sometimes sad) story. Despite their success, Les Poppys are unknown to 99.9% or more Americans. Part of this has to do with their Frenchness, but there’s more to the mystery: while they can certainly hum a few bars, most Europeans probably couldn’t name a single group member, and you won’t find one credited on the back of a record, although the maker of their designer duds is. Les Poppys were conceived and marketed as a group—not a group of individual singers. While American fan magazines were chock full of intimate details about David Cassidy’s choker size or the Osmonds’ horoscopes, Les Poppys photo essays were accompanied by PRish texts about the group’s activities or profiles of the adults running the show. They seldom included a caption or mentioned a boy by name.

Also, this group’s record company invented The Menudo Syndrome: Poppys were generally replaced by a younger model when they reached puberty (or “molted” as Google Translate likes to put it). Thanks to the reserves of the Asnières choir, there was a pool of potential Poppys to dip into when a voice cracked or a boy got too… twitterpated. Even that first year there was a changing of the guard. A Disneyfied version of the group went on for many years, and the Asnières choir still performs today. But Les Poppys, as Bernheim and Herrenschmidt conceived, ended around 1974.

There is a LOT more to the story. Suffice to say, it is good, as is a lot of the music, considering this was a children’s group and the prime market was… young girls, who are not a high consideration set when it comes to delivering quality product. While there were some aspects of schlock (Mr. Barclay had a knack for slapping any 17 boys who were available that day on the cover and listing songs titles in the incorrect order), but the sound is solid.

And it’s a quality listening experience that Americans never got to hear. Les Poppys need a proper U.S. release. Not to a “fan” audience, because there is none. A label with some hubris needs to stand up and introduce them as an undiscovered artist that’s hiding in the vaults—like others did with Serge Gainsbourg or Sixto Rodriguez—with a fascinating and timely story to tell. Do it correctly and they should have no problem cultivating an audience—or grabbing a Grammy.

– Becky Ebenkamp