When I was a junior in high school, on “Foreign Language Day,” I and several of my friends (a few who didn’t even got to my high school in the first place) decided to do a cover of Plastic Bertrand’s hit French punk/novelty record Ça plane pour moi (roughly translated as “This life (or “glide”) is for me”). I played bass. Another friend banged on a trash can, from which one of the smallest girls we knew emerged with a Pebbles Flinstone from Hell get-up on in a cloud of smoke. The lead singer was my oldest friend, Jay Good, who I have known since I was 4-years old. He was one of the two funniest kids in school and acted like a crazed, punk version of Chuck Barris as he sang the lyrics, which make little sense in French or in English. We all thought we were cool and at the day’s end told that none of us would be welcome the following year. That was even cooler!
But Plastic Bertrand’s version was not the original. It’s the version everyone knows—as heard in Gossip Girl and in various car commercials and covered by The Damned, Sonic Youth, Vampire Weekend and others—but it’s a much toned-down cover. Ça plane pour moi blatantly rips off the instrumental backing track of the original version, a song titled ‘Jet Boy, Jet Girl,’ by punk rocker Elton Montello. The same musicians played the same song note for note for Plastic Bertrand.
So if it’s exactly the same song, and the original is even in English, then why is that not the version that everyone knows?
Take a look at the videos, it’ll be pretty obvious. First the cover version, Ça plane pour moi by Plastic Bertrand:
And now the original lyrics, by Elton Motello. The things you can get away with on a foreign TV show, eh? The original 45’s picture sleeve has a transexual with her dick out. It’s amazing to think this record was reasonably widely distributed 30 years ago.
