Lizzy Mercier Descloux
Lizzy Mercier Descloux ( born December 16, 1956 in Paris as Martine -Elisabeth Mercier Descloux, † 20 April 2004, Saint- Florent, Corsica ), was a singer-songwriter, musician, actress, writer and painter.
Early years
Lizzy Mercier Descloux grew up in Lyon. She studied at the National Art School in Paris and met fellow students Michel Esteban know. Together with Esteban they built the plates and fashion business HarryCover ( haricots verts = a corruption of green beans ), which became a center of the early punk scene in Paris. 1975 traveled Esteban and Mercier Descloux to New York, made contact with punk, disco and New Wave musicians, and made friends among others with Patti Smith and Richard Hell. Smith wrote the foreword and illustrated Mercier Descloux ' first book, Desiderata, which also threw in some light posts.
In 1976, Mercier Descloux with Esteban in an apartment in SoHo, which they shared with Patti Smith. The apartment quickly became a meeting point for the New York music and art scene. Mercier Descloux taught himself to play the guitar and performed in galleries of SoHo and clubs of the Lower East Side. She played along with DJ Banes (alias Michel Esteban ) initially in the formation Rosa Yemen - influenced by Mark Cunningham's ' No Wave band Mars. Esteban had in the meantime - the label Ze Records founded - together with Michael Zilkha, an heir to the British retail chain Mothercare. There also appeared Rosa Yemen of six pieces existing EP Rosa Yemen: Live In NYC July 1978.
In 1979, the album Press Color in an impromptu 10-day recording session together with DJ Banes and Erik Fitoussi of the French punk band Les Garçons & Marie. The LP contained, inter alia, Cover versions of the theme song from Mission Impossible and " Fire" by Arthur Brown. Both songs were hits in secret New York nightclubs, but the album sold poorly.
Mean years of life
Despite the moderate success of Press Color was Chris Blackwell, founder of the record label Iceland Records, attention to Lizzy Mercier Descloux. Blackwell entered into a distribution partnership with Ze Records and financed the production of Lizzy Mercier Descloux ' second album Mambo Nassau. The LP was recorded by Steven Stanley and Wally Badarou at Compass Point Studios Nassau. On the plate Mercier Descloux processed for the first time influences of African music, after they had dealt extensively with the French label releases Ocora. Mambo Nassau is therefore the first approach of a European musician to the (then not so named ) genre of world music.
Sales in the U.S. were disappointing and not covered from production costs. In Europe and Asia the response to Mambo Nassau was significantly better, and CBS took Mercier Descloux for the European market under contract. They first released two singles ( " Mister Soweto " and " Maita ", the latter for the first time in French), but then set out on long journeys through Africa, interrupted only by a short stay in New York, where she of with Arto Lindsay in a short film Seth Tillett occurred. In 1984 she gave a concert at a club in Soweto and took along with South African artists, produced by her then-boyfriend Adam Kidron, their third album où sont corn passées les gazelles? on. ( The LP was released on the international market without title and was re- released in 2006 in a modified form as Zulu skirt. )
Back in Europe
1984 settled Mercier Descloux again settled in France. There was the title song of their third album, "Mais où sont les passées gazelles? ", Awarded to a surprising summer hit and the prestigious music award Bus d' Acier. The album reached number 30 of the French charts and was one of the first records of African music that could be placed in a European singles chart - two years before Paul Simon Graceland presented a similar album.
With Kidron they produced their fourth album One for the Soul, which was heavily influenced by Brazilian music in Rio de Janeiro. On five songs of the album you should hear the trumpeter Chet Baker. However, the album was a commercial flop, as well as the resulting album suspense in London in 1988, which was produced by Mark Cunningham and John Brand.
Mercier Descloux then withdrew largely from the music business and settled in the Caribbean, where she concentrated mainly on painting. In 1995, she returned for a performance project by Bill Laswell to New York. The project was not published, but resulted in Laswell Album Hashisheen - The End Of The Law (1999), on the Mercier Descloux along with Patti Smith, the piece "Morning High" ( from a poem by Arthur Rimbaud ) interpreted.
Around 2000 Mercier Descloux returned to France in order to finally settle in Corsica. 2003 was diagnosed with cancer in 2004, died Mercier Descloux in their hometown of Saint- Florent.