COLLABORATION

My fascination with the voice and persona of the French singer, Edith Piaf, goes back a very long way. I can remember as a child hearing her on the BBC Light Programme and being captivated even then by its plaintive, husky swoops and dips. I didn't understand a word of French, but I knew that the song 'Milord' carried a dramatic story at its heart, that the almost-laugh in the singer's delivery of the final verse, "Allez, venez, milord, vous avez l'air d'un môme…", held both contempt and affection for the recipient of the song, whoever that might be.

It took me a few years of learning French to be able to translate the lyrics of these beautiful songs. In those days, there was no YouTube – you had to work the words out for yourself. My mother got so tired of hearing 'Hymne à L'Amour' or 'Mon Manège à Moi' endlessly repeated on my cassette player that she longed to hear some heavy metal, Tamla Motown, reggae – anything! - instead. But I persevered, and so opened up for myself a whole canon of sung dramas, evoking the back streets and boulevards of Piaf's beloved Paris; the passionate encounters by the Opéra, the Seine, Montmartre; the hopeful young lovers and despairing, abandoned women who people her musical world.