Look Homeward

Yippe!! WHERE ARE THE GAZELLES?!
What gazelles, the shoes? NO. The animal that looks like a horse? NO, THAT'S A ZEBRA! What then? WELL, THE GAZELLES!! Don't know...

God I hated world music then, in the mid-80s, and I guess I only started to appreciate it when it became simply Music. I didn't want an exotic landscape, what I was really craving was a gut-stinking city. To this day I still can't listen to Paul Simon. Paul 'shitty' Simon. I'm only swearing because you can't say you don't care much about Graceland to an english folk without having them staring at you as if you'd just told them you had a fling with Postman Pat. And their dad. It's like snatching their Hovis moment.

 Anyway, back to Lizzy. Little French new wave girl goes to New York and hangs out with Patti Smith and Richard Hell. Her and her partner (Michel Esteban, later from ZE Records) form Rosa Yemen. They sound pretty much like early Sonic Youth, same time tho. They disband and her first solo album Press Color is out in 1979. For her second album she flies to the Bahamas and gets a taste for African sonorities. Ensues a trip round Africa, and a return to France where she has a hit with her single Où Sont Passées les Gazelles? in 1984. Then on to London, recording her last album with Mark Cunningham, member of the New York band Mars.

She died from cancer in Corsica, aged 47. It was in 2004.


Bonus track, Mars - 11,000 Volts


picture, Lizzy Mercier Descloux with Chet Baker when they recorded One for the Soul in Brazil in 1986