Claude François - on Motown!

[psychedelic jacques]

It's surprising what you can stumble across when trawling through DFTMC. Apparantly the French star recorded four tracks at Hitsville, in French, on 5th March 1971, all produced by Hank Cosby. Three are Four Tops covers - same old song [c'est la meme chanson], shake me wake me [reveille-moi], and bernadette [same title], along with a fourth original song called 'Ballons et les Belles', part written by François himself.

It appears they appeared on an album in France in 1971 [[on the Disques-Fleche label), and subsequently on a 2010 French CD. I've tracked them down - to me 'ballons' is the weakest of the 4, with the other three all sounding a bit "1971 guest appearance on the Dusty Springfield Show" [[UK readers will know what I mean), but pretty good nonetheless, particularly 'shake me'.

The interesting thing to me is that, unlike the Richard Anthony buy-in on VIP in 1965, these are actual motown produced tracks so could theoretically have been released on US or UK motown back in the day [[language barrier notwithstanding). They did not appear on Motown Around The World, though. I'd be interested to know if anyone on here knows more about the story behind these tracks and this rather unusual coming together of Motown and an A list [[in 1971) French singer.