Cheek - Venus (Sunshine People) (DJ Gregory remix) (1996)
After the huge success of its first release, I:Cube’s Disco Cubizm, thanks to the famous Daft Punk Mix, the Parisian label Versatile did even better on its second one, Venus from Cheek, the alias of Gilb’R. If this track is less remembered, it’s because the true hit of this Maxi is on the B-side, a remix by DJ Gregory that should never have existed. “Gilb’R wanted to do a track, Venus, under a pseudonym, Cheek, and asked for a remix,” tells Gregory. “He asked Philippe Zdar (La Funk Mob/Cassius), who told him: ‘Sorry, I don’t have time for this, I’m going on vacation...’ Gilb’R comes to see me and tells me: ‘Listen, this is your time!’ I was petrified. I had to leave for New York two weeks later, he gave me the sections with the samples and I couldn’t produce anything. A week later, I went to him and told him I couldn’t do it… He answered: ‘Yes, you will. You will make this fucking remix.’ Then I chose some CDs at his place to find some inspiration. I took one from Brass Construction, Happy People, I laid down the record and I heard ‘Sunshine People, Sunshine People we are.’ That was it. I created the track in two days, gave it to him and flew to New York!” Gilb’R still hasn’t recovered: “For me, after Disco Cubizm, it was crazy, I found myself with two ‘anthem’ tracks in a row! This is the emblematic track of the French house, because it is also very naive, like a rough in its production, and incredibly efficient.”
Daft Punk - Around The World (1997)
Acquired by Virgin after the release of their first singles on the Scottish label Soma, Daft Punk released their first album Homework in early 1997, and presented Around The World immediately after to the mainstream. This synthetic disco track doesn’t contain any sample but is freely inspired by Chic, the band led by Nile Rodgers, as would explain Thomas Bangalter later: “Around the World was like recording a Chic album with a talk box and playing the bass on a synthesizer, since we couldn’t afford Nile Rodgers.” With its three words repeated 144 times, the track became an instant hit, thanks in part to its picturesque clip penned by Michel Gondry and choreographed by Bianca Li, which sees the robots appear for the first time. Twenty years later, Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo prove they have never strayed from their original idea, by calling upon the greatest musicians from the 70s for their album Random Access Memories, including Giorgio Moroder and above all Nile Rodgers on Get Lucky.
Stardust - Music Sounds Better With You (1998)
Three seconds from a 20 year old disco sample, a house beat, a smooth voice singing a catchy chorus led to the sale of two million copies. Maybe the most short-lived band in the history of music, Stardust gather DJ Alan Braxe, half of the Daft Punk Thomas Bangalter, and singer Benjamin Diamond. In 1998, Alan Braxe, who just released his track Vertigo, is preparing his live show at the Rex Club, in Paris. Thomas Bangalter comes to help him on synthesizer and bass, and Benjamin Diamond on vocals. The rehearsal quickly turns into a jam session, and the trio begins to browse through the samples, until they hear the one from Chaka Khan’s Fate, which clicks in their minds. They work on it for a week, and Music Sounds Better With You is finished on a Monday morning in the Daft House, Bangalter’s home studio. It is released in spring, on his label Roulé Records, before being distributed shortly after to the greatest DJs in the world during the Winter Music Conference in Miami. Pete Tong, from the BBC, plays it first. The record sales immediately skyrocket, and the track quickly goes beyond the club scene. Virgin signs it for worldwide distribution, and this one hit wonder sells more than 2 million copies…
Bob Sinclar - Gym Tonic (1998)
This is the song of dissension and the symbol of frenzy around the French Touch at the time. The story begins in a plane, where Thomas Bangalter and Chris le Friant (Bob Sinclar) are heading to Miami. The latter offers to make a track for his traveling companion’s album Paradise, and gives him Bad Mouthin’, a title from Motown Sounds (Michael L. Smith) released in 1978, as an inspiration. The half from Daft Punk extracts a sample from it and pastes on it the voice sample of Jane Fonda teaching an aerobics class on television, with the famous “One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight and back”. He leaves the royalties to her, on the condition that her name would appear nowhere and that the track would never be released as a single. However, once the album is sent to the DJs and radios, Fonda's sample is all people talk about. “In all my life, I’ve never received that much feedback in a day”, told Alain Hô, the boss of Yellow, in Stéphane Jourdain’s French Touch. Bob Sinclar calls Bangalter and his manager Pedro Winter in Los Angeles, but no one answers. Spurred on by Warner, who could sense the hit, Sinclar gives in and releases the track as a Maxi-single, without clearing the sample and by crediting Bangalter… The latter and Jane Fonda press charges and it goes to court. Yellow would end up releasing a “legalized” version of Gym Tonic, with a female singer to replace Jane Fonda’s voice...
Air - Sexy Boy (1998)
With their first album Moon Safari in 1998, Air gave a new direction to the French Touch, more sophisticated, more contemplative and less tied to disco. If their synthesizers have a 70s aura like many of their colleagues, the duo, with Sexy Boy, may have released the most sensual record of the era. More pop and elegant, Air’s music borrows from the perspective and the outdoors of their city of Versailles. Nicolas Godin had incidentally found a beautiful metaphor by comparing the band’s music “to a Frisbee which would never touch the ground”. When released, the album resonates with every critic, whether rock, pop or electro, and draws the ears of Sofia Coppola, who would entrust the soundtrack of her movie Virgin Suicides to Jean-Benoît Dunckel and Nicolas Godin, propelling them to a whole other level. Twenty years later, in Arte’s documentary Touche française, Nicolas Godin would say having felt the transition on stage: “Every time I was pushing the sampler button to send the voice sample that said ‘Sexy Boy’, I saw my former life fall away and my new life draw near.”
Mr. Oizo - Flat Beat (1999)
Would Flat Beat have had that much success without the gesticulations of Flat Eric, the yellow cuddly toy associated with Mr. Oizo? Probably not, especially with the intended minimalism of the track. At the origin of this hit is an ad that Levi’s ordered from Quentin Dupieux, who later decided to stage Flat Eric on a busted beat: “In the beginning, it was just a stupid loop I did for the Levi’s ad. But from there, DJs sampled the loop from their TVs and released several bootlegs! So we decided to quickly release my track.” Carried by the cuddly toy, which also sells by the thousands, the title began to be played everywhere, even if it clearly lacked depth (the same bass/drum loop playing, before launching it again alongside a small synthesizer gimmick). Dupieux easily admits it: at the time, he didn’t know anything about the genres in electronic music: “I was listening to Dopplereffekt, Daft Punk and the Beastie Boys, and on this track I was just trying to create a club feel.” A rather thin common thread that would lead him to this prototype of electro-house, with a sander-like bass which would inspire the Turbine movement and the Ed Banger label, which now hosts his electro flights of fancy.
Demon vs Heartbreaker - You Are My High (2000)
This record left its mark on clubbers as soon as the start of the year 2000: released on January 16, You Are My High haunted dancers til the summer, and even beyond. While his first album of disco-like house, Midnight Funk, was just released by Sony, Demon, in the middle of a tour, completed this title because he felt “a visceral need to make a unifying track which would be the height” of his live performance. The track gathers all the elements of the French Touch, a filtered disco loop–extracted from I Don't Believe You Want to Get Up and Dance (Oops!) by the American funk band The Gap Band–, an ultragroovy bassline, and killer vocals, also borrowed from The Gap Band, from the track of the same name released in 1979. The title hits the mark right away, and sells hundreds of thousands of copies, also thanks to its naughty clip, two tongues, among which the one from porn star Draghixa Laurent, that dance together in close-up for more than three minutes. Played non stop on the M6 channel in France, before being pulled after complaints from Catholic mothers, the clip would inspire many variations, an ad by Jean-Paul Gaultier, or more recently the video from Disclosure’s You & Me (Flume Remix), and above all many love stories. Timeless, You Are My High also inspired the French band Agar Agar, who released an exquisite cover of the song in 2017.
St Germain - Rose Rouge (2000)
Pioneer of the French electro scene, most of the titles of F Com, the flagship label of Laurent Garnier and Eric Morand in the 90s, have been recorded in his studio in Chatou. Ludovic Navarre got himself noticed with his first LP Boulevard in 1995, before getting to the next level in 2000 with the release of his album Tourist with Blue Note. The prestigious label offered him unprecedented exposure, and his single Rose rouge is played everywhere that year, on the local and national radios. While on TV, journalists don’t hesitate to use it as the soundtrack of their reports. Based on the voice sample “I want you to get together”, which starts with Marlena Shaw’s Woman of the Ghetto, and on the cymbal play of Joe Morello, the drummer of the Dave Brubeck Quartet (on the classic Take Five), supported by a dancing kick, with intermingling brass instruments and flutes, Rose rouge is a jazz-house jam which opened the doors to the perceptions of an entire generation.
Modjo - Lady (Hear Me Tonight) (2000)
Such naivety! When they released Lady in 2000, their first track composed in ten days, Romain Tranchart and Yann Destagnol hoped to sell only 50 000 copies. But as soon as it was released, the single reached first place in the UK charts and reached the top 10 in thirty or so other countries, even overtaking Madonna’s Music, made by Mirwais. Lady (Hear Me Tonight) would sell more than 2 million copies in the end and the duo would find itself carried away in the music industry’s infernal machine. Seated between Pamela Anderson and Salma Hayek during the award ceremonies, Modjo spent their days promoting their music in the offices of Universal records. Despite them having no experience as producers, they had to deliver an album (also called Modjo) which would go on to win a Victoire de la Musique award. They barely had time to breathe before they would be forced to assemble a rock band for the concerts, during which the audience would discover that they have nothing to do with the DJs/producers from the French Touch… Once the tour was over, Romain Tranchart and Yann Destagnol made the smart decision of ending this madness that would have left its mark on the history of music to such an extent that on stage, Chic now plays Soup for One (from which comes the sample used in Modjo’s hit) in medley with Lady...
The Supermen Lovers - Starlight (2001)
Like the hip-hop from the 80s, the French Touch era was most of all a big sampling contest. The concept was to find the more obscure funky loop to avoid getting your idea stolen, and at this game, Guillaume Atlan, the man behind The Supermen Lovers, was rather lucky by turning into dance a record The Rock, composed by the short-lived band East Coast formed in 1978 by Charlie Wallert (the “singer’s producer”, which notably produced George Benson’s hit Love of My Life). Released at the start of 2001 as the first single from the album The Player, the track, featuring the singer Mani Hoffman, quickly became a dancefloor hit. Starlight succeeded brilliantly in France, in Norway and all the way to New Zealand, and has ensured the posterity of The Supermen Lovers, which isn’t a band, like Guillaume Atlan keeps repeating every time the press gets it wrong. Better think twice before choosing your stage name.
