If a season of changes means anything, it means that at least for this website, we’re heading towards some new direction (one influenced by the livelier, easy-going, temps of springtime). You see, it’s around this time of the year that my mind tries to share music that’s a snapshot in season that captures, perhaps, a rise of the heart. Love is in the air, so to speak. So, with these thoughts in mind, I thought of shifting our focus elsewhere, to the little-heralded music of French, Saint-Sever-Calvados singer-songwriter Arnold Turboust and to his 1988 release, Let’s Go A Goa.
Listening to Let’s Go A Goa, one would think Arnold would hail from some sophisticated cosmopolitan metropolis with easy access to the world’s music. Reality couldn’t be further from the truth. Tucked away in some backcountry Nantes exurb was where Arnold’s first love of music was cultured.
Although French by birth, Normandy’s closeness to the British Isles proffered its inhabitants a certain closeness in culture that could feel decidedly distinct from the rest of the homeland. Likewise, Arnold developed a love of music that had more of a wayfaring spirit – not ever entirely too attached to continental Europe. Although a lover of music, from a young age, Arnold didn’t feel destined to make it himself.
Arnold came of age in ‘70s France. It was at that time that he fell in love with the music of France Gall and the songs of Serge Gainsbourg (an artist his father would play albums of at home). As a young child, his mom would stress the importance of learning to play music (while other kids would go out and play sports). In time, when he came of age, Arnold realized that although learning piano was interesting, practicing it was droll and boring. For him, the only way to pursue that part of him freely, any further, would be to play with others at church, in a band, or anywhere they’d have him.
In the beginning, Arnold’s first introduction to the professional realm of music came by pure chance. A friend of a friend’s drummer happened to be part of French post-punk group, Marquis De Sade. Why not audition to be their keyboardist?
Although an interesting venture, one could tell that Arnold’s first foray into the world of commercial music wasn’t exactly what he expected. A songwriter by heart, his more genteel, romantic, personality clashed with Marquis De Sade’s more abrasive, darker, bent. Thankfully, he’d shortly find a perfect foil for his ideas.
It was in the early ‘80s when another musician, one Etienne Daho, turned up at a Marquis De Sade session. Much like himself, Etienne had grown up with a distinct love of pop music and was having a bit of a self-crisis trying to figure out just how much he wanted to wallow in “punk” and New Wave anymore. As they shared a kinship and struck a friendship, they realized that the French song still had something peculiar and special about it, their shared love of Francoise Hardy’s music was a meeting point, but working together could forge a new path for them. They had to try that out first.
Etienne Daho’s star-making turn, in 1984’s La Notte, La Notte…, was the first fruit of their labor, away from Marquis De Sade, and on their own as true songwriters. Then, in the span of three years, from that album onwards to 1988’s Pour Nos Vies Martiennes, Etienne would explore a more accessible, progressive form of French art pop music, that would yield bonafide hits like “Tombé Pour La France” from 1986’s Pop Satori and songs like “Week-End À Rome” that Arnold played an integral part in creating. Collected works that signaled a new era of Chanson music, signaled to Arnold that perhaps he had enough in his own tank to try something bearing his own name.
In 1986, in between Etienne Daho’s Pop Satori recording sessions, Arnold began to demo songs that didn’t quite fit what Etienne was working towards. At first, Arnold didn’t plan to be a singer but it felt like the time had come to get out of his comfort zone and see what he can do with his voice – no one else wanted it, so why not?
When Arnold showed off his demo to “Adélaïde”, he was surprised a well-established label like Phillips would gladly press it as a single if he found a way to add more professional, final touches. That’s when Arnold took it seriously.
Arnold would take singing lessons to explore “Adélaïde” fully. French actress, and game friend,
Zabou Breitman happily joined him to add female vocals that worked with his limited vocal range. A fuller edit showed Arnold’s driving, Telex-influenced, slice of French pop. Somehow, the single was released in 1986 and became a minor hit. Arnold now found himself with a new lease on a solo pop career, one that came naturally, out of surprise. What would be the next surprise is what he would offer as a follow up.
For his next single, “Les Envahisseurs”, Arnold explored a territory we would call nouvelle lounge music that perhaps Etienne and himself were, arguably, laying the groundwork for. Mixing deep electronics with “exotic” satirical, lyrical, imaginings of unseen locales. On tape, when he’d go into the studio to create his debut full-length, Let’s Go A Goa, his music took on a dreamier side that was less groove-oriented and more nostalgic in tone.
Working with lyricist, Benjamin Minimum, and sometime Depeche Mode producer, Richard Conning, they wrote songs like “A La Frontière De Ton Beau Pays” and opener, “Miss Hippie” that seemed tinted by American folk jangle, that seemed to have a touch of twee and innocence to them. Far from the suave, Etienne Daho, Arnold’s closest music analog, and whom he’d work on creating the first single off this album, “Francine’ Song” showed his own music had achieved its own level of sophistication that was wrapped in a package that was a bit more level-headed and approachable.
Arnold spoke of feeling inspired by singers or lyricsts like Charles Trenet, those that were quite straightforward with their emotions, of trying to make personal music that wasn’t clouded by a fog of detachment. Arnold was much closer to the music of Brian Eno, New Musik, and Ryuichi Sakamoto that originally pushed him to seek different pastures.
Gorgeous ballads like “Le Vent” and atmospheric ones like “Téléphonez-Moi” explore such closeness in music and personal growth. Let’s Go A Goa was released in 1988, with songs like “L’Ennui” that pointed to French chanson that could mix with the burgeoning “deep house” movement. Yet, the album also has a certain dreamy, almost neo-psychedelic levity to it that keeps it not entirely too serious.
Although, definitely of its era, I have to agree that it shares a certain promise that was rightfully (or wrongfully) squashed by the lack of a hit song…or worse…the lack of a major label push. Is there still room for a certain brand of contemporary music? If there is, I wager, this unjustly out-of-print album hits just all the right buttons as it does for me.