It’s a song from before the time when Richard Gotainer was the singer of Sempa or Youki. A time when his melodies slipped into French ears and marked the tempo of the eighties through transistors and TV sets.
When in 1976 he recorded this man with a car, in reference to Edith Piaf’s The Man with a Motorcycle, Gotainer was only an advertiser specializing in Jingles. It’s a simple B side of a 45 rpm which will not be a gold record and where we discover, not far from 50 years later, not much has changed for the average motorist.
“Potato! Driver of my two!”
Stress, traffic jams and wasted time are already the order of the day, four years after Joe Dassin’s Rush Hour Complaint. “I accelerate, I scramble, oh oh, I sneak, I fiddle. This is the fate and lot of the man in the car” sings Gotainer who, in passing, gets angry with his contemporaries. ” Potato ! Driver of my two! If I miss my date, I’ll pick up a random guy and punch him in the eye or two.”. 48 years later, we see, a bit startled, that 67% of French people admit to insulting other drivers.
“Drop your scooter, come do somersaults.”
Mechanical problems, appointments to keep and refueling to fill? So many problems which have not changed too much either. “My clutch is slipping, my tank is starving
This damn date is going to drive me crazy! “. Fortunately, the one who sported a very baba look seventies at that time, before becoming the dandy of the following decade, is mocked at each chorus by a female voice. “At the red light, you dreamed, with your fingers in your nose.”
But she is also responsible for calming the angry motorist. “Drop your scooter, come do somersaults.” The word of the male motorist of the seventies, as of all eras, is not always silver, but that of his partner is often golden.
