Friday's French music break - Jabberwocky featuring Élodie Wildstars, "Photomaton"

Friday's French music break this week is another one of those electro-pop jobs, sung in English.

It's "Photomaton" by the group Jabberwocky featuring the vocals of Élodie Wildstars.

It might well be familiar to some of you as the song has also been used recently in a commercial for the Peugeot 208.

Peugeot 208 Pinocchio commercial (screenshot)

Peugeot's "Pinocchio" is a harmless enough video, unlike the official one, which is both sexually explicit and contains scenes of a man being strangled (how delightful) and has been "age restricted" based on YouTube's "community guidelines".

Still, sex and violence seem to sell with the video having been watched over two million times.

Jabberwocky, also known as JBBRWCK because vowels are clearly superflous when being trendy, are a three piece electro-pop group of...wait for it...medical students from Poitier.

Camille Camara, Emmanuel Bretou et Simon Louis Pasquer met around four years ago, each having already dabbled with music.

Camara and Bretou had apparently played in a school rock band together while Pasquer was into sampling in a hip hop group and did a little mixing too.

(screenshot from official video)

Photomaton is the group's first release and its commercial success (it peaked at number two in France) follows a familiar pattern for acts trying to break through to a wider public...YouTube.

Once they had written the lyrics and the melody and found  Élodie Wildstars to sing lead, it was just a matter of recording, mixing and posting on YouTube (the "official video" came several months later) with a national radio station picking it for its playlist and a Paris record label (Pain Surprise) contacting the group to sign and manage them.

The lyrics, according to Pasquer who wrote them, "tell the rather hazy story of the anger of a girl 'on the edge'."

"They (the lyrics) contrast with the melody which is kind of sweet," he says.

"It's the sort of music you can listen to when you're happy or sad."

Yadda, yadda, yadda.

How about, it's just a pretty good example of electro-pop music and basta?

Anyway, here's an amateur video of the group performing live in Poitiers in October 2013.



For that "age restricted" official video, you can click here.

And of course, there's also the Peugeot commercial for those who cannot get enough of the song.