Bizarre Boys - Hop Off You Frogs (Taking The Pissoire)/ Electro Frog

 

Gary Bushell and pals with their dire Francophobic 45

Label: Creole

Year of Release: 1986

The trouble with most tabloid press shitstorms is that, far from being the defining news stories or arguments of the year, they're frequently barely even the hundredth most important event happening that minute. The endless froth and seethe of most red-tops is often manufactured outrage to either distract readers from the real problems of the day (if you're buying into left-wing social theory) or attempt to excite them by treating the world as one giant wrestling match. Simplistic stories about heroes and villains always seem to sell whether they're on the big screen or the newspapers. 

Over the in blue corner in 1986 we had Renaud Sechan, a French singer of some renown in his home country who had a minor chart hit there called "Miss Maggie". The song, Sechan claimed, was first and foremost a celebration of femininity, dedicated to all women of the world who he felt were marvellous, apart from Margaret Thatcher whose behaviour he deemed "more masculine than a man's". The English translation of the song ends with the killer lines: "And when the final curtain draws/ He'll join the cretins in the harvest/ Playing football, playing wars/ Or who can piss the farthest/ I would join the doggic host and love my days on earth/ As my day to day lampost I would use Madame Thatcher."

Renaud's outlook is far from perfect here. Stereotyping women as fair damsels who are entirely peaceable and universally politically fair-minded is problematic in itself (I could think of a couple of female French politicians who are far from being the kind of gentle perfumed hippies he describes) as is declaring tough - or masculine - behaviour in women to be a wholly negative and unwanted trait. For all its occasional sharpness, elements of the song veer close to Rik the People's Poet territory. As such, his sweeping statements perhaps should have been picked apart, but in the end, the only people prepared to step forward and do so were a bunch of hacks from The Sun who weren't exactly interested in delving into the contradictions and undercurrents of his argument. 

Journalist Geoff Barker offered a tune he'd written (or at least some lyrics to the tune of "Under The Bridges Of Paris") to some pals from the paper to perform - broadly unnamed in press interviews apart from Gary Bushell, who in typical fashion seemed keen to stand in the spotlight even when it might have been a better idea not to.

"There's a lot of animosity between the French and the British", Bushell declared. "We couldn't miss the chance to have our say".  

The problem here is that instead of trying to outsmart Renaud with satire, Barker decided just to run his finger down a list of French stereotypes and make some vague attempts to rhyme them. Snails get referenced, as does "sitting on the Louvre", "Up your Eiffel", frogs legs, and... oh, fill in the blanks for yourself. It sounds like it was written by pinning a few stereotypes to a dartboard and firing away. 

Musically, it's equally unstructured and inconclusive even by the standards of the worst novelty records, with the music slightly falling out of time in places (this could be deliberate in order to get a laugh, but I suspect isn't - and even if it is, what kind of a joke is that?), vocals sounding as if they're performed by the local rugby club close to chucking out time, and the absence of anything resembling a chorus, a groove, a point, or even a clue. It just sits there, grunts a few second-hand insults and goes. 

Renaud may not have produced a work of high satire, but in this particular war, he found himself looking like Noel Coward while the men in "our" corner resembled some blokes who had followed through in a musical farting contest. It's also odd how lily-livered "Hop Off You Frogs" is in terms of insults given Renaud's invective, only stooping so low as to call him a "twit". Well, The Sun was a "family paper" (albeit one with nude women in) I suppose. 

At this distance, the entire spectacle seems absurd, a quaint spat about something surely nobody in Britain really cared about - in fact, it was uncharacteristically cultured and outward looking of The Sun to get into a tizz about what was number 13 in the French pop charts that week. You would almost suspect that both they and Renaud's record label were fanning the flames for commercial benefit. In the end, neither record sold a bean in Britain, barely anybody here remembers the argument anymore, and "Hop Off You Frogs" is an unwanted rarity as a result, seldom chanced upon in second hand record racks anywhere and presumably causing confusion when it does turn up. 

So far as all the characters in this story are concerned, Renaud remains a much respected musical artist in France, despite the fact he moved to Britain in 2007 citing a love for British society and disillusionment with his home country - a twist to this tale I certainly wasn't expecting. Gary Bushell also served in the Punk/Oi band The Gonads who I suspect he'd rather we talked about, as well as becoming a strangely inescapable broadcasting figure in the nineties. Barker, on the other hand, has been shy by comparison in recent years. He shouldn't feel afraid to leave his house, though, as this isn't even the worst single ever released by a Fleet Street writer, as the ghost of Derek Jameson would doubtless tell him. After all, at least this one might have pre-empted "Crazy Frog" with its danceable, ribbeting B-side.

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