French culture has always separated the highbrow from the lowbrow, keeping everything it considers refined and sophisticated apart from the common and vulgar. Throughout most of his career, Claude François suffered from this high/low culture divide, with his songs firmly categorised at the lower end of the scale. When, back in 1977, the defenders of serious French ‘chanson’ created the serious-minded Printemps de Bourges festival, it was an open reaction against the glitzy TV variety shows of the day as epitomised by Claude François, aka Cloclo. The dapper little singer in his tight white suit was considered to be the epitome of kitsch. When he was not prancing around on Maritie & Gilbert Carpentier’s TV shows on Saturday nights, his songs were blasting out in shopping centres, at local ‘bals de pompiers’ or at village fêtes.

Claude François consistently privileged singing-and-dancing spectaculars over songwriting. He devoted his career to amassing chart hits rather than defending art for art’s sake.  And, in the process, he came to embody a way of making music that seems almost touchingly old-fashioned these days. For most of his career, certain critics and a certain sector of the record-buying public, regarded Cloclo as ‘French music enemy no.1.’ In his detractors’ eyes, there were always too many sequins, too many dancing girls, too many cheesy  grins - and, Cloclo’s biggest crime of all, never enough sense in his lyrics!

But strangely enough, three decades after his death, Claude François appears to have reconciled himself with the defenders of both high and low culture, with what has become popularly known as ‘les deux France.’ Take a look at the prestigious list of credits on the new Cloclo tribute album, Claude François, autrement dit and you’ll find that the songs of the erstwhile king of kitsch have now been reworked by a new generation of fashionable young singers such as Jeanne Cherhal, Seb Martel and La Grande Sophie. 

Claude François remains a bit of an atypical case in French music history, enjoying as he does such a successful career from beyond the grave. Cloclo was never in the same situation as Boby Lapointe (a singer who only attained proper critical recognition and commercial success after his death).

After all, Cloclo scored a phenomenal number of chart hits in his lifetime. But it is interesting that over the course of the past twenty years or so, Cloclo’s Alexandrie, Alexandra has remained in the annual hitlist of the most-played tracks in French nightclubs. In 2008, even with the current record industry recession, it is estimated that Claude François will sell between 150,000 and 250,000 albums and between 70,000 and 100,000 DVDs. And if you calculate Cloclo’s record sales from his first single release (in 1962) to the end of 2007, they come in at an incredible 62 million (35 million of which were accounted for prior to his death - and 27 million since that fateful night in the bath!)

Claude François’s sons, Claude Jr and Marc, have meticulously assured the management of their father’s artistic heritage over the years. But Claude François’s posthumous success also owes much to the fact that he is the only French artist to have profited from an ongoing marketing strategy after his death. Over the past sixteen years, Fabien Lecœuvre has been charged with the mission of developing the singer’s image and turning Claude François into “the French Elvis Presley.” And there is no denying that Lecœuvre’s work on Cloclo’s image has paid off. Over the years, Claude François has gone from being the laughable ‘king of kitsch’ to enjoy something bordering on cult music icon status.

At the time of his death, Claude François was actually going through a period of serious reflection, reassessing his career, his record-buying public and his future in the music business. It has to be said, the 1980s were a cruel decade for Cloclo’s generation of variety stars. With the advent of FM radio, the French Top 50 and the invention of the CD, everything appeared to be conspiring against ‘les chanteurs à paillettes’ (the ‘razzle-dazzle’ brigade). A new generation of French music stars - including Jean-Jacques Goldman, Daniel Balavoine and Michel Berger - had emerged dressed in trendy Stan Smith tennis shoes, Benetton sweaters and scruffy jeans. And their sequinned, be-suited elders, such as Dalida, Michel Delpech, Rika Zaraï and Enrico Macias, began to look seriously old-fashioned in comparison. Claude François’s posthumous image also took some serious knocks. Once the shock of the singer’s brutal and pointless death had died down, the French media declared open warfare on Cloclo, denigrating his music, his stage costumes and his troupe of saucy Clodette girls.

Cloclo’s rehabilitation had to wait until the 1990s which marked a certain return to the dancefloor, big sunglasses and glam. Meanwhile, the generation who had grown up dancing to Claude François hits finally landed top jobs in the French media and at major record labels. In short, the conditions were in place for Cloclo’s star to rise again. In 2002, Yann Moix published a Claude François-inspired novel called Podium. Two years later, the novel was turned into a film about a bored bank employee who spends his weekends dressing up in white suits, imitating Cloclo live on stage. The film became a surprise box-office hit in France, attracting over four million viewers. Interestingly enough, while it was obvious that Moix delighted in sending up Claude François and the whole era of wide-collared shirts, tight trousers and Les Clodettes, his derision took a tender form and left no-one in any doubt that at heart the novelist and director was a secret Claude François fan.

However, the 2003 stage musical Belles, belles, belles, based on Claude François’s music and stage routines, fared significantly less well at the box-office. The show’s producers made the mistake of attempting to ‘revamp’ Cloclo for modern times, updating his songs and his choreography. And the error proved fatal. Claude François’s charm resides in the fact that he symbolises the ‘60s and ‘70s - and the further that period retreats from our contemporary lives, the more we like to fantasise about the freedom and insouciance of the ‘good old days.’

Meanwhile, Claude François has not been treated in the same posthumous way as other great music stars of yesteryear. Dozens of tomes have been published about the singer’s life and death (19 new titles and republications in recent months alone), but there has never been a real in-depth biography of Cloclo. Dozens of compilations and ‘greatest hits’ albums have also appeared in record stores over the years, but Claude François’s back catalogue has never been exploited in a logical way (like Jacques Brel’s or Barbara’s, for instance). This is partly due to the fact that the rights to this catalogue are shared between three major record labels: Universal (1962-1972), Sony-BMG (1972-1975) and Warner (1976-1978). Each label having had more than enough Cloclo hits to churn out a string of compilations, it is hardly surprising that the first ever ‘complete works of Claude François’ (a boxed set of 30 CDs) has only just been announced (and scheduled for release around September this year). This release should mark the final step in the rehabilitation of the man who once sang about being the eternal “Mal Aimé.”