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CD
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LITA 139CD
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"Remastered from the original tapes. Essay by 'Punk Professor' Vivien Goldman, interviewing key players. CD includes full album plus 2 bonus tracks. By the time poet, singer-songwriter, and artist Lizzy Mercier Descloux recorded 1984's Zulu Rock, she'd marked herself out as both a globe trotter with more passport stamps than Tintin and a musical innovator whose loose, arty spirit could be applied to styles as varied as no wave, Bavarian oompa and Soweto jive. She'd also established a tight-knit threesome with muse/former lover Michel Esteban and producer/on-off lover Adam Kidron, who all reunited to follow Zulu Rock -- a surprise hit in her native France -- with something that, once again, represented a complete about-turn. The location, this time, was Rio De Janeiro, a suitably exotic location to follow their sojourn in Soweto given that Brazil had recently emerged from twenty years of dictatorship. But unlike Zulu Rock's broad appropriation of the local sound, One For The Soul borrows very liberally from Brazilian culture. The aim, says Kidron, was to 'reimagine the blues', but Lizzy's musical essence was in flux. 'A Word Is A Wah' meshes reggae with her beloved accordion, 'Women Don't Like Me' is wild, new wave pop, and she even wanders into soul territory, with whispery lounge versions of Al Green's 'Simply Beautiful'. Most notable is the album's foray into jazz, and the fact that Chet Baker, the master jazz trumpeter, blew his last on 'Fog Horn Blues' and the sensuous 'Off Off Pleasure'. Rio was to be the last great hurrah of Lizzy and Michel's global recording adventures, and although work proceeded apace, the experience was often quite tense. 'The sessions were tough work,' says Kidron, in the new liner notes by Vivien Goldman accompanying this deluxe reissue. 'Lizzy never quite got singing, no matter how much she drank, and no matter how hard she tried. Chet was very much at the drug-ravaged end of his life and had very little stamina or dexterity left... but there is a deep, sad, lyrical tone to his performances on the album.' So fraught were the sessions, it's a miracle that such a cohesive, sparky record emerged. The record-buying public did not agree, and as the album crashed and burned, so did the relationship between its three heroes. Lizzy was, for the first time, about to take on the world alone -- and there was but one album left in her."
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LITA 139LP
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LP version. Includes download code for full album plus two bonus tracks.
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CD
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LITA 140CD
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"Remastered from the original tapes. Essay by 'Punk Professor' Vivien Goldman, interviewing key players. CD includes full album plus 6 bonus tracks. By the time bohemian singer/poet/artist Lizzy Mercier Descloux recorded her fifth album, 1988's Suspense, she'd enjoyed a recording career that was as far from the clichés of music lore as is possible, flitting between genres, continents and collaborators, enjoying great success and equally great failure and even stealing the final breaths of master trumpeter Chet Baker for 1986's One For The Soul. When she came to make Suspense -- reissued here as the final album in our series -- she was, for the first time, working without her longtime muse, partner and manager Michel Esteban, with whom she'd first moved from their native France to New York, where it all began. The pressure was on to repeat the success of 'Mais Où Sont Passées Les Gazelles', a smash hit in France, and Descloux's label were keen to make a conventional artist of her, pairing her with John Brand, an in-vogue producer with a style geared to a big, shiny 1980s chart sound -- an approach Lizzy had never experienced before, nor intended to. Recorded in Oxfordshire and Wales, it features songs recorded in both French and English, with lyrics by Mark Cunningham, the trumpet player of the avant-garde band MARS, and James Reyne, the Australian artist who co-wrote much of One For The Soul. In Vivien Goldman's new liner notes, Esteban notes that Suspense sounds 'less Lizzy than the other records, less open,' but in splitting herself into two -- English and Francophone -- the album has two personalities too; oddly, it shines a light on the real Descloux that her cultural experiments never did. Though the initial aim was to make a folky, acoustic album, the pop sound suited the singer, and 'A Room In New York' is as fine and sparky as AOR gets. But when early single 'Gueule D'Amour/Cry of Love' stiffed, EMI lost confidence and buried the LP. Bound by her contract to the label, Descloux moved away from music and focused on painting. She eventually settled in Corsica, the French island, where she died, aged 48, of cancer. Descloux's musical career ended, therefore, with the aptly titled Suspense. It was only a matter of time before this furiously creative artist's work was re-evaluated, and with these deluxe reissues, that time is now."
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LITA 140LP
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LP version. Includes download code for full album plus six bonus tracks.
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CD
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LITA 138CD
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"Remastered from the original tapes. Essay by 'Punk Professor' Vivien Goldman, interviewing key players. CD includes full album plus 5 bonus tracks. In the course of three albums, Lizzy Mercier Descloux, the rogue poet, artist, and singer-songwriter, travelled on a musical voyage from Manhattan (1979 debut Press Color) to The Bahamas (1981 follow-up Mambo Nassau) and apartheid South Africa (1984's Zulu Rock) -- a controversial cultural boycott in protest of the nation's racially divided society. One place Descloux had never visited was the pop charts, but that changed when 'Mais Où Sont Passées Les Gazelles? (Where Have The Gazelles Gone?)' -- a reworking of a South African Shangaan disco hit -- went all the way to the top spot in her native France, giving her a platform and a profile in the land she'd fled many years before. Recorded at Satbel Studios in Johannesburg, the album followed what her mentor Michel Esteban describes as 'an extraordinary adventure' through eastern Africa following the footsteps of 19th century poet Rimbaud through Sudan, Ethiopia, the East Coast. A socially conscious person, Descloux wanted to use her music to draw some attention to the situation in South Africa, even obliquely, but there were musical motivations too -- she was tapping into a hot and little-heard dance music in the aforementioned Shangaan disco, Soweto jive and mbaqanga, the style Malcolm McLaren had mined for his mash-up hit 'Duck Rock' a year before. The music of South Africa seduced, subsumed, and molded Lizzy, who sounds surer and more swinging than ever before throughout Zulu Rock, but credit must also go to British producer Adam Kidron, then best known for his work with Scritti Politti, who joined Esteban and Descloux for the entire African journey. Lizzy and Adam's was a battle of wills from the start, but his insistence on getting Lizzy to sing in a more conventional, tuneful way resulted in an emotional, ambitious, creative power struggle that delivered arguably her best vocals yet. In Vivien Goldman's new liner notes for this reissue, Kidron says: 'My first impression of Lizzy was that she couldn't sing but that she had that crazy Madonna, Neneh Cherry, Nina Hagen attitude thing going on and a magical way with words -- a marketer's gift for getting to the essence of a feeling or idea.' And for once, on this album, the marketing did itself."
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LITA 138LP
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LP version. Includes download code for full album plus five bonus tracks.
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ZE 026CD
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2016 restock. 2006 reissue. This is the third record Lizzy Mercier Descloux recorded, originally released by CBS Records (France-only) as Gazelles in 1984, now repackaged by Ze Records, including five bonus tracks. After having spent the previous few years promoting the Mambo Nassau album, Lizzy became enamoured of her trips to Africa and its music: highlife, Zairian rumba, Manu Dibango's makossa, King Sunny Adé's Juju music and Fela Kuti's Afrobeat and Julius Levine's African pop. The music you will hear on Zulu Rock is as diverse as the blend of ethnic groups in South Africa itself: it is mbaganga -- which literally means "the poor South-African stew," a musical blend of different local styles and Anglo-Saxon pop. A heavy and emphatic bass line characterizes this sound, with a technique inspired by Zulu guitars. Against all expectations, the record was very well received in France, both by the critics, who awarded it Best Rock Album of the Year, and by the public. "Mais oét Passé Les Gazelles?" went on to be the unlikely hit single of summer 1984. .
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