Suzanne Doucet

From Schlager to new age music singer, from actress and television presenter, Germany’s Suzanne Doucet has done it all.

She was born on 27 August 1948 in Tübingen, southern Germany. Suzanne grew up learning to play the guitar. After leaving school, she toured France and Italy, paying her way by performing in the streets.

After returning to Germany, she was discovered in Munich and whisked off to Berlin to record her first 45. However, Schenk mir einen Tag mit viel Amore, released in 1964, flopped.

It was her second single that made Suzanne an overnight star. Das geht doch keinen etwas an, a cover of French hit by Le Petit Prince, C’est bien joli d’être copains, reached number ten in Germany and spent 16 weeks on the charts in the early summer of 1964. (The B-side was even better: Sei mein Baby was a terrific cover of The Ronettes’ Be my baby.)

Billed as a kind of German Rita Pavone, Suzanne enjoyed a high media profile. Her follow up single, Okay, ich geh’, composed by Charly Niessen, hit record shops in September 1964 and went on to sell 300,000 copies.

The bright and breezy So long, so long (which she also released in English in Japan) and Glück und Liebe also made it into the German top 40.

However, each successive release fared worse than the one before it and her luck ran out altogether by the end of 1965.

Even the beatier Du mußt dich entscheiden, issued in 1966, couldn’t restore Suzanne to the charts. However, the record – now a rare find – has become a favourite among fans.

An album, imaginatively entitled Suzanne Doucet, brought together all of the singer’s recordings to date.
 
A switch to the Liberty record label in 1968 saw her begin recording in London with Les Reed, Tom Jones’s producer.

Their first collaboration was Nur mit dir, a highly credible version of British singer Kiki Dee’s Baby I don’t care, though the single failed to make a dent on the charts.

The follow up, Wenn New York brennt, was another of her better releases, though it also missed the charts.

She issued her first single in the United States that same year, the Bee Gees-penned Swan song, and an album, which she recorded in seven different languages.

A change of style in the 1970s and a move to the US in the 1980s helped her achieve recognition as an authority on new age music.