The One That Got Away

835. PLASTIC BERTRAND, "Jacques Cousteau"
Written by Phillippe Claes, Lillo Nicosia, and Plastic Bertrand
1980 Did not make pop charts

Okay, this is one of the ones for which I can't give you a link. You just have to trust me.

For at least fifteen years, I though I had hallucinated this song. I heard it once at a Halloween party at the Graduate School of Design when I was in college and--with one huge exception, which I'll get to later--I pretty much retained it whole ever since.

Admittedly, it's not a hard song to retain. The guitar is undisguised Chuck Berry, and the bass player and drummer seem to be on autopilot. Musically, it's the kind of a song that one almost receives in a pre-heard state. But the vocal is wonderfully childish, and the lyric is a great goofy bounce. By the time I heard it, the assumption was that a song wasn't Punk if you didn't offend someone, so a song as inoffensive as this would have gotten rather automatically classified as New Wave.

Flash forward to the late 90s when I was going Kazaa crazy, just plugging in every song I could think of and seeing if I could get a hit. Tried this one on a lark, found it right away. Same chords, same bassdrop vocals, same Chuck Berry guitar . . .

But I didn't remember it being in French. I had a whole set of English lyrics in my head: Jacques Jacques Jacques Cousteau, How low can you go? etc.

Neither the sound system in the GSD that night nor my French was good enough for me to have heard the lyrics in enough detail to translate them on the spot. Also it was late, I was um distracted, etc. Were all the Eurotrash and Fashionable Ones around me singing along in their own spontaneous translation that night so that's what I remembered? Maybe, but not likely--the fact that the song was in French would have made it cooler for them.

Which leaves me leaning toward one last possible explanation: there was an Anglophone cover of the song out by that point and that was the song I heard. That means there's another single out there that I still have to find . . .