What would the summer holidays be without summer hits, those songs that loop on the radio, that we sing at the top of our lungs and that make us dance until the end of the night? “Le Devoir” takes you on a musical and temporal journey to (re)discover these “hits” that marked our holidays.
How I always want to love, hit of the summer? Pipeline of the summer, yes. Tunnel under the Atlantic! Let’s line up the numbers. Huge success is a Lilliputian understatement, it’s so big. Huge for us: 200,000 copies of the 45 rpm released by Trans-Canada lined Quebec in 1970, that’s not nothing. No less impressive are the thirteen weeks spent at the top of the charts, a record approved. But the million and a half times How I always want to love, just in France? Without counting the dissemination in a good sixty countries (where the addition is lost, for lack of reliable data)? It’s amazing. It leaves you panting.
But what is so extraordinary about this tune? Languorous, easy to remember melody, beautiful voice of “bedroom”, as we said at the time, we can certainly say that it had the potential to become the international anthem of desire expressed in 3 minutes and 19 seconds . But still ? That’s it: it’s the perfect slow. The greatest “beau grand slow”, as Richard Desjardins will sing much later. Slow: ballad slower than slow, made to stick tight on the dance floors and floors, even on the “tarpaulin” of the basements in the evenings (the booms, as they said in France). The slow is THE preliminary demonstration allowed in public. The more the text promises what’s to come, the warmer it is along the spine and in the folds of the neck. How I always want to lovebold but not as explicit as the I love you…me neither of the Gainsbourg-Birkin duo in the summer of 1969, goes just far enough: “How beautiful you are when you’re naked / To feel your breath short / I want to make love to you”. When you are 12-13 years old in 1970, the evocation of the thing is the thing itself.
Summer Slow Golden Rules
Cleverly, the song opens with its title: it’s won from the outset. And then, when it gets up, at the bridge, we can’t be anymore. It is not insignificant that this bridge resembles so much the chorus of “It’s Only Love »“album song” from the Canadian edition of the Rubber Soul of the Beatles, less known than Michelle, let’s say. The song’s producer, Denis Pantis, once did the comparative demonstration. When listening, the line “It’s only love and that is all” from the Beatles piece recalls Hamilton’s “Comme tu es belle dans la nuit”. As well as the three verses which follow.
There’s no hazard. A summer slow is a summer slow: between Aline (Christopher), Capri is over (Hervé Vilard) and others Love Me Please Love Me (Michel Polnareff), the sequence of chords, the bass at the peak, there are specifications. It is very punctuated, not without reason! It’s made for all those who can’t dance, you have to help them… It’s no coincidence either How I always want to love is in all the radios in August, in September and until October 1970. The slow of summer is always carrier of melancholy, memory of the summer which goes away (and all the other summers which went away ). From the agonizing anticipation of See You In September (The Happenings) at the inevitable screening of Last kisses (Nancy Holloway), it always comes time to “tidy up our holidays” (Trap, by Brigitte Bardot) and to face the return to school. We have to make it last, this last slow. In 1986, the Belgian duo Sttellla summed it all up in henaurmic and medieval puns in The slow of the lake : “When you kissed me / I got Ivanhoe!” / This lake slow is slow”.
The sad story of Marc Hamilton
No doubt you have noticed an oversight in this text. Not to say: a forgotten. It’s on purpose. How I always want to love, lyrics and music, is a song by Marc Hamilton. Died last February, the singer-songwriter will literally have been the victim of this disproportionate success. Whose fault is it ? A bit much to the common strategy of Pantis and the French producer Claude Carrère. If Marc Hamilton is on the front page of our newspapers (Photo-Vedettes, in particular, with a sitar and a good hippie face), he does not appear anywhere in France. No photo on the covers. Little or no interviews, little or no TV performances. We play the card of the mystery singer. Worse, it is implied that this Marc Hamilton would be a Briton, hence his slight accent (a shame, after Charlebois!). We play the pub like a Peter Sarstedt, who serines in 1969 Where Do You Go To (My Lovely) with a strong French accent.
Marc Hamilton, whose other songs are not lacking in interest (starting with the B side of the 45 rpm, magic carpet, a psych-pop marvel), will thus miss out on the planetary glory that should have been his. Even the financial usufruct will escape him, overwhelmed by the infinite ramifications of contracts, the negotiation of copyrights and the management of various royalties. The title of his autobiography, published by Lanctôt in 2005, says it all: The song that killed me. We can think, not without a sad irony, that the guy from yé-yé groups, first Les Shadols, then Les Monstres, will not have known how to be seen. With Les Monstres, Marc Hamilton sang… masked.