As usual, by Claude François: the secrets of a worldwide hit

On November 3, 1967, 57 years ago, a love song was released, the first 45-rpm record from Flèche records, a company created by a certain Claude François. This title ultimately sold 350,000 copies. A nice success, but nothing exceptional for such an artist. This song is As per usual. Today, it is the third most played in the world, behind Yesterdaythe Beatles, and Georgia on My Mindby Hoagy Carmichael, immortalized by Ray Charles.

However, it should never have seen the light of day. Originally, it is by Jacques Revaux, the musician who composed countless hits for stars such as Michel Sardou, Eddy Mitchell, Sheila, Dalida, Sylvie Vartan, Charles Aznavour and Johnny Hallyday. Its title? For Mewhose lyrics are in English. Sardou refuses it, just like Mireille Mathieu, Hugues Auffray and… Claude François. It was, ultimately, Hervé Vilard who agreed to perform it, but on condition of relegating it to the B side of his next 45-rpm record. In short, this smells of everything, except success.

The song no one wanted?

But Jacques Revaux persists and once again proposes For Me to Claude François, with whom he has never collaborated before. In his memoirs, My life in songs (Ramsay), he remembers: “ On August 27, it was oppressively hot. Claude suggested that I settle down by the swimming pool at his mill in Dannemois, in Essonne. […] When our host asks me what I have for him to listen to, I quote this model of For Mesaying I don't have anything other than that […] Unfortunately, or perhaps luckily, there is no room to listen to the recording by the pool […] Refusing to enter the house, Claude asks me to play him the song on the guitar that he had already heard and refused. […] When he hears the first chords, he immediately gets hooked… »

On the other hand, for the English lyrics, it's still no. But Claude François has another song in mind, As Usualby Brenda Lee, immense American singer known for the sublime I’m Sorry. Et As Usual can, in French, be translated as… “as usual”. And, as chance sometimes does things well, the lyrics evoke a woman waking up in the morning in her bed and realizing that her lover is no longer there… As usual, then.

At the time, the future Cloclo was experiencing a painful breakup with Gall, which inspired these first verses under obvious influence: “ I get up. And I push you. You don't wake up. As per usual. » It was then up to Jacques Reveaux to refine the melody and to the lyricist Gilles Thibaut, the author of That I love you et Requiem for a Madmanby Johnny Hallyday, to finalize the text.

The flair of crooner Paul Anka

If the result sold well in France, as seen above, it nevertheless played repeatedly on the radios during the winter of 1967. And there, a miracle. Paul Anka, Canadian crooner of Syrian origin, is on vacation in Mougins, a Provençal village where the painter Pablo Picasso died, when he hears As per usual. His career has run out of steam and since then Crazy Lovea big success in 1957, he released nothing notable. As a result, he immediately went to to meet the impresario Gilbert Marouani, the publisher of As per usual. And it was over a drink at the Plaza Athénée that Paul Anka negotiated the rights to a future adaptation of the song.

It will therefore be My Waywhich tells a completely different story, that of a man looking back at his past, seeing the good he has done and the evil he has committed, but ensuring that he has always led his life as he heard, in his own way… “my way”, in English. If its adaptation is a success, it still has nothing of the future global success that we know.

David Bowie's dashed hopes

The following year, the young David Bowie, then almost unknown – recognition would not come until 1969 with Space Oddity –, attempts another adaptation entitled Even a Fool Learns to Lovewhich he tried in vain to have another crooner, the Welshman Tom Jones, sing. If David Bowie later recognized that his version was not up to par, he would later take his revenge by adapting Amsterdamby Jacques Brel, in the language of Shakespeare, while Sinatra also borrowed from the repertoire of Jacques Brel, taking Don't leave merenamed If You Go Away.

Because in this fight for posterity, it is obviously the one we nickname The Voice who wins hands down. His rereading of As per usual becoming an instant classic, so much so that the Anglo-Saxon public struggled to admit that it was, originally, a Franco-French song…

Claude François will take more than legitimate pride in this, thus becoming one of our most covered singers in the world; even Sid Vicious, the bassist of the Sex Pistols, will also crack a My Way angry to say the least in… 1978, the same year that Claude François gave up the ghost. In 2024, he would have celebrated his 85th birthday.

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