.jpg)
Les filles sucettes:
Barbie Gaye, Millie Small, and France Gall
I.
My Boy Lollipop is a somewhat irritating song first recorded in 1956 by 14-year-old American singer Barbie Gaye, as a kind of R&B shuffle: click here.
The version that is better known today, however, was the one released in 1964 by 16-year-old Jamaican singer Millie Small, and which has a bluebeat ska rhythm: click here.
Whereas Barbie Gaye's single was only a minor hit, Millie's reached number two in the charts in both the UK and US and sold over seven million copies worldwide.
II.
Whether Serge Gainsbourg was inspired by the above to compose his own paean to the lollipop and the girls who like to suck them, I don't know. But Les sucettes, famously recorded by France Gall in 1966 - a year after she'd won the Eurovision Song Contest with another Gainsbourg ditty (Poupée de cire, poupée de son) - was a far superior - and far more sexually suggestive - number.
For although Les sucettes was seemingly just a simple yé-yé style song about a young girl, Annie, who likes aniseed flavoured lollipops, Gainsbourg makes it fairly obvious via his lyrical inventiveness that the song is about fellatio; that's not barley sugar she's swallowing.
Mlle. Gall, despite being eighteen at the time - so somewhat older than either Barbie Gaye or Millie Small - insisted that she was entirely unaware of this fact. She had sung it, she said, avec une innocence dont je suis fier, and later confessed to feeling betrayed by those around her who had been complicit in her humiliation.
However, although she refused to sing Les sucettes after discovering its (not so) secret meaning, she continued to work with Gainsbourg, who wrote several of her most memorable - if increasingly odd - songs, including Teenie Weenie Boppie, which was about a deadly LSD trip involving Mick Jagger.
Readers who click here can enjoy a music video for Les sucettes directed by Jean-Christophe Averty for the TV show Au risque de vous plaire, which features phallic-shaped lollipops, intercut with various young women suggestively sucking on them [1].
Alternatively, readers who click here can watch the song being performed as a touching - if slightly pervy - duet by an angelic France Gall and a diabolic Serge Gainsbourg [2].
Notes
[1] A remastered version of the video for Les sucettes was made in 2017. The following year, HMGS created a short looped film with material edited from this video, emphasising the oral-erotic aspect of the song, and uploaded it to coup.com: click here.
[2] Gainsbourg later recorded his own version of Les sucettes with a slightly psychedelic arrangement (by Arthur Greenslade), which can be found on the album Jane Birkin / Serge Gainsbourg (1969): click here.
