The French - The Model

No bargain CDs at the weekend but picked up a handful of 7 inch singles including this little 'darkwave' gem by The French with their cover of Kraftwerk's The Model. It dates from the same year that the single version of Das Werk's track was released and really couldn't sound much more early 80s if it tried. As far as I can tell The French only released a couple of singles so there's very little about them on t'internet. If you do happen to know anything about the band though please leave a comment and we can fill in yet another little hole in the musical universe. Merci!

UPDATE!

Thanks to the wonders of modern technology and the loveliness of the chap concerned I managed to track down and catch up with The French's lead singer Mr William Redfern! Here's his message:

'Hi Daron, Ha! I am indeed that same person! How fantastic that all these years later people are still finding us. We were based in Manchester from 1980 until 1984 (after moving our band Art Failure from Nottingham and reinventing ourselves), which was an exciting time in that city- the band eventually fell apart and we all went our separate ways until a few years ago when thanks to Facebook we all got back in touch again, in fact our guitarist Graham Lees now has a studio in LA and he remastered all our stuff (and Art Failure's album) and it's all now available on iTunes, Spotify etc if you wanted to hear some more - though it's listed as The French 8083 as weirdly another band called The French came into being in the intervening years. Thanks for getting in touch, I'm so pleased that our 'babies' are still out there being discovered.

Ps, Just read your blog about it too, lovely thanks - and as you mention it came out the same year as Kraftwerk had a hit with The Model ...and thereby hangs a tale... The Model was of course released in 1977 on Man Machine and had never been a hit but we'd always loved it so thought it would be fun to do a funky version. Shorty after we released it Kraftwerk played at The Apollo in Manchester as part of the Computer World tour and we managed to blag in to see them backstage and gave them a copy of our single (they were a bit confused by our presence but were very sweet chaps) so, about four months later they re-released it as a double A side single with Computer Love, The Model was picked on up by a Radio 1 DJ (can't remember who) and became a number 1 for them - we are all convinced that they thought 'well if kids are doing covers of this maybe it time to release it again' - and whilst I have no proof I still reckon I play an, albeit anonymous, role in music history!'

Anonymous no more! What a ruddy great story eh? Bearing in mind that The Model first came out on the Man-Machine album in 1978 as Das Model it would be fascinating to know if Kraftwerk were indeed inspired to release the English translation on the B side of Computer Love in 1981 by The French's take on the track...

Here's a darn fine post punk track by Art Failure (pre-The French) too!