ZANG TUMMM TUMB ARTICLES “the first draft of history”

Elle Greco

ANNE PIGALLE Everything Could Be So Perfect (ZTT)

ALAIN DELON pilots his small red sports car through a crumbling mountain pass; through a shower of opening credits, and Anne Pigalle’s half-baked pidgin-pie floats piteously on a wave of well-mannered orchestration.

The cinematic allusion is a necessary one, for this is a strangely evocative and almost compulsive debut which — despite an articulate but ultimately unadventurous scoring from Nick Plytast, whose continental approximations are as authentic as a Mother’s Pride croissant, and in spite of Pigalle’s impersonal purr — is intent on luring innocent passers-by into some Two Ronnies Parisienne twilight.

Imagine a cheerless Cilla Black singing of men in bowler hats, body-poppers and suitcase salesmen on the streets of Liverpool and you’d have a rough idea of the dis-service Anne Pigalle does to France and more specifically, Paris, with her cluttered red-light cartoons.

The joke is distilled into a most bizarre thunder during the opening ‘Why Does It Have To Be This Way’, where clever Trevor Horn twigs that only the most immodest of settings can supply the sulky punchline to Pigalle’s (ever so) slightly unconvincing sense of existential resignation.

Elsewhere, Luis Jardim, who produces the remainder of the album, only waves the big stick during a temporarily engaging ‘Crack In The Ocean’ where Pigalle’s tearless lament momentarily drops its string of musical onions and gets more than a little inquisitive.

Melted down, ‘Everything Could Be So Perfect’ might be formed into a souvenir Eiffel Tower — perhaps a more truthful French totem, but not so perverse, so unwittingly comic or so inexplicably intriguing.

John McCready