That's weird. I'm not a subscriber, but the page opened, but not from the posted link.
Helen Barrett JUNE 1 2020
By the summer of 1978, British music fans had been subjected to two years’ worth of homegrown punk: disdainful, nihilistic and definitely not Belgian. Then wham, bam! Along came Plastic Bertrand.
His music was something like punk. But from the moment he bounced into the Top of the Pops studio, with his too-bouffant hair, his barrage of French-English lyrics, and cavorting with the BBC’s dance troupe (the ever-literal Legs & Co dressed in plastic carrier bags and waving baguettes), this upstart foreigner seemed to have misread pop’s angriest moment in spectacular fashion. Worse, he was smiling.
In fact, the track was intended as a prank. And while Bertrand was not taken seriously, “Ça plane pour moi” never left us. More than 40 years later this pumping two minutes, 57 seconds of three-chord doggerel is used by DJs, film-makers and advertisers as shorthand for the joy of being alive. It has soundtracked countless films, including Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street, and television adverts for Hovis, Asda and, this year, Kellogg’s, all hoping to inject a shot of adrenaline into their campaigns.
But “Ça plane pour moi” (the title is a French idiom that translates as “Everything’s going well for me”) was preceded — just — by a darker, more complex and little-known twin.
English punk band Elton Motello’s “Jet Boy Jet Girl”, a near-simultaneous release recorded in 1977, uses an identical backing track. Both records were born from the same events and made by largely the same musicians and producers. But while Bertrand gabbles his way through a (slightly questionable) series of happy drunken vignettes, Elton Motello’s song is an unsettling, explicit tale of teenage sexual exploitation — clashing narratives about what it means to be young.
Elton Motello were fronted by Alan Ward, a British glam-punk musician with connections to The Damned (who later covered the song). In the late 1970s he was gigging and working in Brussels as a recording engineer, when the English punk movement caught the attention of his studio’s producer, Lou Deprijck.
“He tried to sell the idea of doing a punk single in Belgium,” says Ward. Session musicians, with Ward as engineer, duly made a demo, and Deprijck presented it to a label who liked it. “But it was just a track — no lyrics.”
Deprijck asked Ward to “do me an English version”, and “Jet Boy Jet Girl” was Elton Motello’s response. But French radio stations wanted French-language tracks, so Deprijck recruited the charismatic Brussels-born Bertrand (real name Roger François Jouret) and “Ça plane pour moi” was released on AMC Sire, initially as a B-side. “It picked up the vibe of the moment,” says Ward. “In the UK, mothers and fathers liked Plastic. He was no Johnny Rotten. But in France he was really edgy.”
“Ça plane pour moi”’s radio-friendlier lyrics were written by Yvan Lacomblez, a Belgian musician and songwriter whose trademark style was “strange images put together — it doesn’t follow a narrative”, says Ward.
Unlike “Jet Boy Jet Girl”. While Bertrand’s track went on to be an international hit, Motello’s interpretation was a difficult sell. The protagonist, a gay 15-year-old whose older lover spurns him for a woman, has violent fantasies. A rather frightening performance on German television can be found on YouTube, with Ward wearing a T-shirt on which he has scrawled “**** You”.
But there is also a sweet plaintiveness to“Jet Boy Jet Girl”. “I was trying to get to the point of what people feel, gay or heterosexual,” says Ward, who now owns a Belgian recording studio. “I still get people sending emails, saying how much the song helped them.”
Meanwhile, the perennially lucrative “Ça plane pour moi” may not be all that it seems. Bertrand mimed it in TV studios, but whose is the bratty voice on the record?
It is a question that has been the subject of several court cases. Bertrand initially insisted it was him, then changed his story, telling a newspaper in 2010 that he did not sing on the track, despite being credited. During a court case that same year over royalties, a Belgian judge commissioned a linguistician to examine the original. Expert evidence suggested the true vocalist was of northern French origin. Deprijck, who has claimed to be the real vocalist, is from northern France.
Whatever the truth, Ward, who as engineer was in the studio for the 1977 recording, says the question of who really sang “Allez hop! La nana!” is not important: “Without Plastic, it would not have been a hit. He and his charisma sold it to the public.”
Most cover versions play it straight: Sonic Youth’s 1992 run-through is strangely flat, while French covers band Nouvelle Vague tried giving it a reggae lilt in 2009. Kim Wilde has romped through it in live shows. “I chose to cover it as a challenge, to show off a bit,” says Wilde. “Getting your mouth around those tricky lyrics is not for the faint-hearted.”
What of Bertrand? Now 66, he still tours and performs. In lockdown he has recorded an acoustic song as a tribute to care workers. But he will be remembered for a burst of pop energy, and the thrill of being young, happy and everything going your way.
