C’est la vie (or not, as the case may be)
Blimey! Another tranche of celebrities just bit the dust: Chas from Chas ‘n’ Dave, Geoffrey from Rainbow, Charles Aznavour from France and John Cunliffe from the Ragdoll via Greendale.
We had family connections with John from his days as a teacher in Kendal and I’ll write of that in a later post, including a couple of his unpublished ditties (sadly neither is a limerick), but this week’s ALAW concerns the diminutive Gallic chanteur, Charles Aznavour.
Both of Aznavour’s UK hits charted in the 70s during my teens and I remember them well, but I also remember thinking that he was an unlikely purveyor of romantic ballads. It must have been the French accent that did it – la langue de l’amour – as Aznavour himself demonstrated when sweet-talking Miss Piggy on The Muppet Show:
(Perhaps Don Estelle, ‘Lofty’ in It Ain’t Half Hot Mum should have affected such an accent; he had a terrific tenor voice, but at four foot nine and rotund, he stood little chance of being taken seriously as a balladeer – although Aznavour himself only reached five foot three).
Anyway, here’s my eulogy to the little Frenchman…
A singer of beaucoup chansons
Le petit Français has now gone
And his fans can’t rejoice
‘Cos now Charles ‘as ‘n’ a voice.
Le chanteur à chanté his last song.
Postscript: Is French La langue de l’amour as the subtitles in the clip from The Muppet Show suggest, or Le langage de l’amour as Google translate implies? I don’t know, but from the days when a French waitress used to make me go weak at the knees simply by greeting me at the door of the Findlay Clark garden centre café in Aberdeen in heavily accented and broken English, I do know this: le Français est la langue la plus sexy au monde!
