I posted here last month about Belgium’s most famous one hit wonder, Plastic Bertrand, he of Ça plane pour moi fame. and now he’s back in the news, being accused of, well, being a punk equivalent to Milli Vanilli! From the Guardian:

If evidence given to a Belgian court this week is to be believed, the man recognised as the voice behind Euro-punk’s anthem had built his acclaim on shaky ground: he did not actually sing the song.

According to a linguistician commissioned by a Belgian judge to examine the original recording of Ça Plane Pour Moi and compare it with a version released in 2006 by Bertrand’s former producer, the singer of the 1977 track spoke with a distinctive twang that would not have come naturally to the Brussels-born front-man. “With the endings of sentences on the tapes the voice can only belong to a Ch’ti or a Picard,” read the judgment, implying the true singer must have originated from north-eastern France, an area which produced both the Picard dialect and the affectionately mocked Ch’ti patois.

It is also the area that produced Lou Deprijck, the track’s composer and producer, who believes he has been vindicated in his claim to be the true performer of the big-selling single. “My Ch’ti patois has proved me right. I am relieved,” he was quoted as saying in Le Parisien newspaper. “I hope I will finally get my rights.” Deprijck, who for the past decade has been pursuing his music career in Thailand, has insisted for years that he was the real singer on Ça Plane Pour Moi, the hit that made it to No. 8 in the UK single’s charts despite being performed in largely unintelligible French.

Roger Jouret – the man behind the Plastic Bertrand persona – vehemently denies the claims.

Read the entire article: Belgian singer Plastic Bertrand denies allegations over hit song (Guardian)

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Plastic Bertrand vs Elton Motello: Jet Boy, Jet Girl vs Ça plane pour moi

Thank you Chris Campion of Berlin, Germany!

 
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.