AUDIENCES in a Scottish village will be transported to the cafe concerts of interwar Paris next month when an award-winning chanteuse returns to its community-led arts festival.
Christine Bovill will take her five-star show Paris to the Dundee Rep before keeping her date with Lochwinnoch Arts Festival, where last year she performed Piaf, the show upon which she made her name as one of the finest song interpreters in the business.
Although songs made famous by Edith Piaf feature in what’s subtitled “a Parisian scented twilight of songs”, Paris sees Bovill cast her net more widely around the golden age of chanson from the 1920s to the beginnings of rock ’n’ roll in the 1950s.
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“We’re looking at famous people, famous stories and famous songs from that period,” says Bovill, who recently took the show to Vienna for the first time. The crowd there sung back to her – sometimes through tears.
“With the Paris show, I deliberately chose songs which were big successes in French and in English,” she says. “People are often surprised that they know 90% of songs but didn’t know that the song started life in French, like My Way or Let It Be Me.
“That way I can go to a city like Vienna, which was otherwise unknown to me, and me to it, and be this Scot who speaks in English and sings in French to a room full of Austrians – and have them sing back to me.”
Paris begins, not in France, but in Germany, where Bovill takes her newest show Tonight You Belong To Me – about the jazz age in New York – for a four-night residency in Berlin next week.
“We begin Paris back in Berlin with Kurt Weill, who was having great success with his operas and popular songs in the 1920s,” Bovill says. “But as a liberal Jew he found himself in hot water with the rise of the Nazis and fled Germany in 1933.
“Paris was the first port of call where he could have his songs performed, and his Bilbao Song crystallises that golden era from the cabarets of Berlin to the cafe concerts in Paris.”
Interspersed with tales from Bovill’s own life and from her extensive knowledge of the period, Paris then moves through selections from the pre-rock and roll era from the likes of Charles Trenet, Jacques Brel, Barbara, Juliet Greco, Charles Aznavour and Jacques Revaux, composer of Comme d’habitude, which later became My Way.
“By the time My Way became an anthem for Frank Sinatra, it was a different song,” Bovill explains. “Its French original was a real torch song about habit and indifference killing relationships.”
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Similarly, Let It Be Me, a hit for Bovill’s beloved Everly Brothers in 1955 as well as being sung by others such as Bob Dylan, Nina Simone and James Brown, started life as Je t’appartiens (I Belong To You), a song which Gilbert Becaud had originally written to God. Like the sexually and politically liberal culture of Weimar cabaret, no subject is off-limits in chanson, where the sacred and profane mix in songs drenched in the tragedy and joy of the human condition.
“With chanson you have a three-act play within a three-and-a-half-minute song,” Bovill says. “What made it so special is the importance of the lyric and the fact the songs are sung to the rhythms of the French language.
“Once ye-ye and rock and roll came along, French began to be sung within the rhythms of the English language, which is the language of rock and pop. You can’t sing: ‘Baby, you can drive my car’ in French, it doesn’t work.”
Bovill doesn’t rely on vocal gymnastics or theatrics. Neither is she doing impersonations. Instead, she’s driven by a song’s emotional veracity, something even her recordings convey. “A perfect example would be Piaf’s L’Accordeoniste,” she says. “It’s a woman of the night singing about falling in love with an accordionist. He’s conscripted but promises he’ll come back and play only for her.
“When she goes back to the spot where they met, someone else has replaced him. You can’t get in the way of the drama of songs like that, there has to be a purity of approach and delivery. Truth is at the heart of it.”
Bovill adds: “The first time
I played the Spiegeltent in Edinburgh, the owner said I was the most unpretentious performer he’d ever seen. It’s only now looking back, I can begin to understand what he meant.”
March 18, Rep, Dundee, 8pm, £16, £10 to £14 concs. Tel: 01382 223530. www.dundeerep.co.uk
March 19, Lochwinnoch Golf Club, 7.30pm, £10, £8 concs. Tickets: bit.ly/BovillLochwin www.christinebovill.com
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