Plastic Bertrand – Ça Plane Pour Moi

In my personal opinion, “The Late Late Show With Craig Ferguson” was the greatest late night talk show of all time – and I’m including the very first years of David Letterman’s show, which I watched devotedly, in real time. No one has done more with less than Craig Ferguson, and to me, it was always funny.

Among the funniest things I’ve ever seen were his occasional lip-synch dance numbers, and this one in particular just slayed me:

The song: an otherwise forgotten bit of post-punk/cusp-of-New-Wave from 1978 (ahead of its time, I would say) by a Belgian artist going by Plastic Bertrand. Incredibly, this somehow not only got released in the US, but climbed to #47 on the Billboard Hot 100, making it one of three French language songs ever to crack that chart. (The other two? The sultry “Je t’aime… moi non plus” by Jane Birkin and Serge Gainsborough, from 1967, and the intractable 1963 earworm “Dominique,” by The Singing Nun. I don’t know what mountains of cocaine it took to get this airplay in 1977-1978, but I’m happy it did. I had little to no memory of the song until Ferguson lip-synched it hilariously and it all came rushing back.

My kids, teens at the time, thought it was hilarious too. Then on a family vacation in Burlington, Vermont, we happened into a record store at a time when I was really not adding vinyl to the collection, but just for the love of we I spent a few minutes scouring the bins and this jumped out at me. So yes, instant acquisition (along with another amazing find I’ll talk about if i can ever get to The Ventures. And when we brought it home, we were quite delighted with it – it became one of the few records my younger kid would actively seek out. (It helped that I don’t have a digital version of it at all.)

“Plastic Bertrand” is apparently Belgian musician Roger François Jouret – although he didn’t sing on his own biggest hit, “Ça plane pour moi,” which was produced and sung by Lou Deprijck. No matter, it’s great fluffy fun, and so is the rest of the record – much of it sounding somewhat like a crazed, horn-addled version of The Beach Boys. It includes a frenetic version of “Sha La La La Lee,” and the delightful and era-appropriate “Pogo Pogo.” Every time I put it on, I’m surprised that it’s not just the one hit – the whole album is quite a joy.