French Rhapsody

by Antoine Laurain

  Sweet Eighties

  It had all started with an advert in Rock & Folk. ‘New-wave band the Holograms and their singer Bérengère seek electric guitarist. Good standard required for young but motivated group. Come and audition before we get famous!’ Alain had turned up at the appointed place: the garage of a house in Juvisy belonging to the parents of the bass guitarist who’d been recruited a few weeks earlier by the same method. That afternoon three boys tried out and Alain had been chosen after giving a rendition of part of Van Halen’s ‘Eruption’, a bit of Queen, and Pink Floyd’s ‘Another Brick in the Wall’.

  It’s always the same with bands. A group of individuals with different aims get together united by a love of music. They play on their own at home and want to meet other guys and girls who also play on their own at home. They want to create the kind of sound that’s not on the radio. They feel they’ve captured the essence of their era and they want to share it with their generation and more widely with that vast, mysterious entity called ‘the general public’. The Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Indochine and Téléphone all started like that – with an advert, a meeting and a stroke of luck. At that time when you still have your whole life ahead of you, when the field of possibilities seems wide open, at that age when you can’t for a moment imagine being fifty-two – even the thought of it seems a fantasy. You’re going to be twenty for eternity and beyond, and what’s more, you are exactly what the world is waiting for. As a general rule, you are still untouched by tragedy: you still have your parents; your life, and that of those around you, is stable. Everything is possible.

  Vocals: Bérengère Leroy

  Electric guitar: Alain Massoulier

  Drums: Stanislas Lepelle

  Bass: Sébastien Vaugan

  Keyboard: Frédéric Lejeune

  Music by: Lejeune/Lepelle

  Words by: Pierre Mazart

  Produced by: The Holograms and ‘JBM’

  One girl, four boys. That was the Holograms. Five people from diverse backgrounds who would never otherwise have met, drawn together by music. A middle-class doctor’s son: Alain. A provincial girl from Burgundy who dreamt of being a singer and had come to Paris to study at the École du Louvre: Bérengère. A dentist’s son from Neuilly, enrolled at the Beaux-Arts but only interested in drums: Stanislas Lepelle. The son of a train driver who played synthesiser and longed to be a songwriter: Frédéric Lejeune. And finally the son of a cobbler from Juvisy with a little shoe-repair and key-cutting shop: Sébastien Vaugan, who could play bass guitar like no one else. Then Pierre Mazart, their lyricist, had arrived. A bit older than them and with no connection to music, he sold objets d’art and was destined to be an antique dealer. Passionate about literature and poetry, he had taken up the challenge of songwriting in English and was responsible for the track that would have been their hit, ‘Such Stuff as Dreams Are Made On’. It was a quote from Shakespeare, a mysterious, esoteric quote which fitted the new-wave aura perfectly. Bérengère had met him at a party thrown by students at the École du Louvre, along with his younger brother, Jean-Bernard Mazart, known as JBM.

  Stretched out on his bed, Alain was hit by a sudden wave of nostalgia, or perhaps it was despondency, maybe even the beginning of depression. In any case, none of the props of his trade – stethoscope, blood pressure cuff, syrups, pills – would be any use in diagnosing the problem or supplying a remedy.

  When the Holograms were around, there had been forty-fives; he would go and buy them at the record shop or at Monoprix. The record shop had been replaced by a grocer whose late opening had seen off the Félix Potin on the street. And that shop had changed hands several times before becoming what it was today, a phone shop selling the latest iPhones and iPads with their apps for downloading music or film.

  The photographic shop had also disappeared. You would go there to buy Kodak films with twelve, twenty-four or a maximum of thirty-six exposures, and sometimes when you collected them a week later, half the pictures were fuzzy. Now even the cheapest mobile phone allowed you to take more than three thousand photographs for free, visible immediately and often of extremely high quality. Uttering the phrase ‘I’ll just take a photo with my phone’ would have made you sound like a lunatic thirty-three years ago, thought Alain. Being able to phone anyone you liked in the street was not even a dream in 1983, not even an idea, not even foreseen. What for? most people would have replied to the idea of an iPhone.

  What remained now of the 1980s? Very little, if anything, concluded Alain. Television channels had multiplied from six to more than a hundred and fifty according to the satellite subscription he had. Where there used to be just one remote control, now you had to juggle with three (flat-screen TV, DVD player and satellite box). These machines were constantly updating and three-quarters of their buttons remained an unused mystery. Everything was digital now and so sophisticated that it was possible to do almost anything sitting in a café. The web had given unlimited access to everything, absolutely everything: from Harvard courses to porn films, by way of the rarest of songs that previously only a few fanatics scattered across the world would have possessed on vinyl, but which were now available to anybody on YouTube.

  The print editions of the Encyclopædia Britannica and its door-to-door salesmen no longer existed – everything was on Wikipedia. The medical dictionary with its horrifying illustrations which had previously been the domain of professionals was now available to absolutely anyone in three clicks. And there were forums where patients played at being trainee doctors. In never-ending discussions sometimes going on for several years. Laymen, with no one to moderate their opinions, exchanged erroneous diagnoses and inappropriate treatments. For a long time now, Alain had had to put up with patients interrupting him with the infamous ‘Yes, but, Doctor, I read on the internet …’

  And what of the ‘idols’ of that era? David Bowie had emerged from his British solitude to launch a final album, Blackstar, only to bow out of life two days later. The accompanying video was a carefully orchestrated farewell to his fans. U2’s Bono only cared about poverty and about becoming Secretary General of the United Nations – and perhaps that’s what he would become one day. Ravaged by plastic surgery, Michael Jackson had finished his life as a quasi-transsexual dependent on sleeping pills right up until the final overdose, with his career overshadowed by sordid rumours of his behaviour with little boys. As for the enigmatic Prince, before he was found dead at his Paisley Park studios, he had only made rare appearances for unexpected secret concerts, and other than that only communicated through the web, making new songs available for download. No one knew if he still had a following who bought them.

  Of course there were idols today. Alain knew about Eminem, Adele, Rihanna and Beyoncé, but beyond that … The few times he had seen them on music channels had convinced him that the vast majority of music produced round the world today oscillated between rap and pop, sometimes a fortuitous blend of the two, and invariably involved videos of young girls dressed like high-class prostitutes, wearing too much make-up and gyrating around gleaming expensive cars. All the songs sounded the same; they were quite stirring, but aimed squarely at fickle adolescents, who would quickly move on and forget them. The Holograms did not have that problem: no one had forgotten them because no one had ever heard of them.

  Enthusiastic Beginnings

  They would get together to practise at the weekend. Usually in Juvisy, in the garage of Sébastien Vaugan’s neat stone villa. Sébastien’s father’s Peugeot 204 had to be driven out and parked on a little side street first. Vaugan, who had just passed his driving test, took care of that, mostly before the others arrived. At the back of the garage there were lots of tools attached to the wall and there was a wood lathe which the cobbler had used to make his dining-room table and chairs himself. In addition, there was an old Communist Party poster probably dating back to the sixties, which exhorted the workers to unite for the Revolution. Vaugan wouldn’t talk about that. His father was a member of the Party, b
ut Vaugan was a reserved young man who never spoke about his personal life apart from bass and records.

  Bérengère had encountered Lepelle one afternoon when she was going to meet her boyfriend at the Beaux-Arts. The brass band of the famous college was in full flow in the courtyard and Lepelle was in charge of taking the money. In a break, Lepelle had hurried over to the young girl who was watching the band play and smoking a cigarette.

  ‘What you’re listening to is rubbish. I don’t care about that poxy band or about taking money. What I’m into is drums. I’d like to join a group, a real group. I want to be a drummer.’

  ‘Like Charlie Watts?’ Bérengère had asked him.

  ‘Better than Charlie Watts!’ Lepelle had replied. ‘He’s not that good, Charlie Watts, although I’m glad you mention him; normally when people talk about the Stones they only talk about Mick Jagger or Keith Richards. Are you into music?’

  Bérengère had replied that she was a singer. Two months earlier she had discovered a piano-bar in a cellar near Notre-Dame, called L’Acajou. She had gone for an audition and now sang there two nights a week from ten o’clock until midnight. She earned a hundred and fifty francs a night, just pocket money. She sang Barbara, Gainsbourg, a bit of Sylvie Vartan, but what she loved most was Bowie and, more than anything, ‘wave’.

  Lepelle had gone to L’Acajou one evening and met the pianist. He said he was a bit too old to set up a group, but he knew a lad who was great on keyboards – the son of an old regiment mate by the name of Frédéric. He gave them his phone number. Frédéric Lejeune joined their project. The first three Holograms were therefore keyboards, drums and a singer, and they played at open-air concerts and in little suburban venues.

  One evening, Lepelle suddenly said, ‘Would you like to go out with me? You’re very beautiful, really.’

  ‘Thanks for the “really”.’

  ‘I didn’t mean it like that. You know what I meant …’

  There had been an embarrassed silence, then Lepelle heard her say, ‘You’re cool, Stanislas, but I don’t want to go out with you.’

  ‘OK,’ Lepelle said reluctantly, ‘well, we’re not going to break up the group over this.’ He then went on, mendaciously, ‘Anyway, I have so many girls after me at the Beaux-Arts, I can’t handle them all.’

  *

  It was decided that they should make the group bigger. They couldn’t carry on with just the three of them; they needed a bass player and an electric guitarist. And also they couldn’t just go on doing cover versions, they needed to write their own songs. Frédéric Lejeune composed nice tunes, but, according to Lepelle, they lacked ambition. A guitarist and a bassist would bring a new element. The three decided to put an advert in Rock & Folk. Ten bassists turned up. Most of them were not nearly good enough, but then Vaugan began to play. When he finished his piece, he looked up and murmured, ‘I don’t do that very often, it’s my first audition.’

  ‘And your last,’ Lepelle responded, ‘because you’re with us now. Don’t you agree, Bérengère?’

  Then there had been the audition for the guitarist and Alain was chosen. Now the Holograms were five.

  Lejeune’s melodies improved, Bérengère’s voice became more and more assured, Alain perfected his solos whilst studying for second-year medicine, Lepelle neglected the studios of the Beaux-Arts in order to concentrate on his drumming and Vaugan’s playing remained excellent even though he was busy with his carpentry training. But the words of their songs still posed a problem. Lepelle had undertaken a first draft of three songs but the words were ridiculous: mysterious girls, nights without end under a red moon, what a boon. Alain had tried to write one too but no one had liked that either. Vaugan refused even to try, as did Lejeune. They had quite liked Bérengère’s attempts, but judged them a bit too feminine.

  They looked into the cost of hiring a studio but it was exorbitant so they had opted instead to record some songs in the Vaugans’ garage. This necessitated stopping mid-song when a moped went by or when the neighbour’s dog barked. The resulting sound was not great, but acceptable for a demo to be sent to a record company. In the end, though, the group decided to wait until they had ‘something mind-blowing’, to quote Alain, before they sent anything off.

  ‘You’re right, man,’ Lepelle decided, ‘we need a songwriter and a proper studio. And we’ll have to sing in English if we want to have worldwide appeal. We’re not trying to be Indochine or Téléphone. We want to be better than U2, better than the Eurythmics, better than Depeche Mode. We’re the Holograms and we’re going to be the best!’

  ‘Les Mots Bleus’

  An idea began to form in his mind. An idea that would help to dispel his feelings of fury and injustice. He would contact them. There was no reason why he should be the only one to know that they had actually succeeded in bagging a meeting to discuss songs of which he no longer had a recording. Still in pain, Alain got up and went over to his desk, almost knocking into his examination table, and, sitting down, turned on his computer.

  They may not have had a career with the Holograms, but some of them were quite well known. Sébastien Vaugan was easy to track down – the French Billiards Academy, which served as his headquarters, was in the phone book, but Alain wanted if at all possible to avoid asking him anything at all. The plump, shy boy with the genius for playing bass had become an extreme right-wing thug. At fifty-three, muscular, with a shaved head and always dressed in black T-shirt and leather jacket, Vaugan, known simply by his surname, was a rabble-rouser and the head of an extremist group, called the WWP – White Western Party. He’d been all over the internet for years and had been convicted several times for inciting racial hatred, offences against the police and magistrates, and slandering journalists.

  This ghost from the past had kept popping up in Alain’s life every few years, in the most diverse places. Their paths had last crossed six years ago in a restaurant. Before that it had been in a DIY shop, at a funfair in the Tuileries Gardens, and once by the baggage carousel at Orly. Each time, Vaugan seemed happy to see Alain; each time Alain had promised to have a drink with him, and each time he had failed to follow it up, without Vaugan ever seeming to hold it against him. Alain did not, however, feel that a further meeting, which this time would not be by chance, was really called for.

  When the coloured Google logo appeared, Alain typed in ‘Stan Lepelle’. Their old drummer had dropped ‘Stanislas’ and now preferred ‘Stan’. He was enjoying increasing fame in the world of contemporary art. Twenty years ago he had attracted attention with an installation of thirty thousand pencil sharpeners and pencils in the Colonnes de Buren. He had stayed there a full week, day and night, sharpening all the pencils right to the end, until all that remained were shavings that his assistants gathered up and his dealer then sold, elegantly set in glass. Alain had taken his family to see the artist, but was told he could not be interrupted. He had bought one of the glass discs containing shavings, though, and it now adorned one of the bedrooms in his holiday home in Noirmoutier.

  There were numerous results on the Net for Lepelle. Alain read through his Wikipedia entry which listed all his installations across the globe, giant structures – of a die, a key, a light bulb – in urban or rustic settings, but all creating an unusual effect. Next he clicked on Lepelle’s website and saw his official picture: frowning, with very short hair. Over the years he had seen that face several times in various magazines like Connaissance des arts or Art actuel. The website also listed the numerous prizes awarded to Lepelle’s work throughout the world. At the top of the page, the thumbnail marked ‘Contact’ displayed the email address of a prestigious gallery in Avenue Matignon. Alain wrote it in his notebook.

  When he typed in ‘Frédéric Lejeune’ an impressive number of Frédéric Lejeunes appeared. None of them seemed to be the one he was looking for. In about 2001, Frédéric had sent him a brochure for a hotel he had just opened in Thailand. He had obviously gone through his old diaries and sent a copy of the brochure
to all his old contacts. That was how Alain had learnt that the keyboard and synthesiser player from the Holograms had decided to make a new life for himself in Thailand. The last time he had thought of him was on hearing the news of the tsunami. Had Frédéric and his hotel been carried off in the tide of rubbish that the wave had swept into the towns? Out of curiosity he had checked several times on the Net. It seemed that the ‘little paradise of relaxation in the Land of Smiles’ was still standing. After putting in some key words along with his old friend’s name, like ‘Thailand’, ‘resort’ or ‘little paradise’, Alain succeeded in finding the ‘Bao Thai Resort’, still being described as the ‘little paradise of relaxation in the Land of Smiles’.

  Next he searched for ‘Bérengère Leroy’, and again several faces appeared and none of them corresponded to what Bérengère would look like today. Alain quickly gave up. Bérengère was not to be found. Her parents owned a relais in Burgundy but he had forgotten the name of it and had never been there; JBM was the only one who had. Anyway, Bérengère would almost certainly be married. When women married, they changed their names and disappeared from listings and directories. Alain had not even bothered to put JBM’s name into Google. JBM was so far removed from him now he would never reply.

  An hour later, Alain had sent an email to the three contacts jotted down in his notebook: Lejeune in Thailand, Lepelle at his gallery and Pierre Mazart at his antique shop Au Temps Passé on the Left Bank. It was Pierre who had written ‘Such Stuff as Dreams Are Made On’. Pierre had always been passionate about the past and history of art, and perhaps he would have kept the cassette and could make him a copy. To thank him, Alain decided he would buy an ornament from his shop. Perhaps a mortar – he had broken the white marble one from his father’s day and patients liked seeing old-fashioned medical artefacts in the consulting room. It reassured them about the expertise of their doctor. The prospect of unburdening himself to someone else about the letter was comforting and he felt his backache receding a little.