Stone

Our pick of the pops

French singer Stone is best known as half of the cheesy 1970s husband-and-wife duo Stone et Charden, but she recorded her best material as a mop-topped mademoiselle in the mid-1960s.

She was born Annie Gautrat on 31 July 1947 in Paris. She began working in a shoe shop and spent her evenings in the Bus Palladium night club, where friends nicknamed her Petite Stone, as they reckoned her helmet-like hair make her look like Rolling Stones guitarist Brian Jones.

She was voted Miss Beatnik 1966 and won a trip to London to help choose England’s equivalent.

On the back of her notoriety, she was offered a contract with the Polydor label and adopted Stone as her stage name. Her first EP was issued later that year. It contained Le jour, la nuit, a version of the Beatles’ You won’t see me, and remains one of her best recordings, though it didn’t arouse much interest at the time.

She turned to the Beach Boys as the source of her follow up, Fille ou garçon, a reworking of the group’s Sloop John B, which was issued on the Problèmes EP. However, she lost out in a sales war with the queen of French yé-yé Sylvie Vartan, who had also released a version of the song (as Mister John B).

The Pour une fille c’est different EP, which featured the excellent Garde ton sang froid (her take on the Troggs’ I can't control myself) and was issued later in 1966, also disappeared without trace.

She fared better with her fourth release, an EP entitled Baby Stone, which featured a song of the same name and explained how she’d earned her stage moniker. The song had been written by her Vietnamese-born boyfriend Eric Charden, and the release made the top 20 in February 1967.

Her biggest success of the 1960s came with the follow up, an EP featuring another Charden composition, the somewhat comic Vive la France, as the lead track. The release gave an indication of the future direction of her career but is noteworthy for two of its other tracks, Buffalo Bill, written by Serge Gainsbourg, and the psychedelic gem Le nénuphar. The release made the top ten in April the same year.

However, her next EP, which led with the song Je reviens chez moi, didn’t sell, and an attempt to be selected as the French entry to the 1970 Eurovision song contest, with the sub-standard Goût, j’ai du goût, also failed.

This left Stone out of the public eye until the early 1970s when she joined up with Charden – by now, her husband – to score numerous hits with naff accordion-heavy pop.