A Head Full of Wishes is a site for Galaxie 500, Luna, Damon & Naomi, Dean & Britta and Dean Wareham. With news, articles and lists of releases and past and future shows.
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Originals: This Changing World by Claudine Longet (covered by Damon & Naomi)
Twelve years ago I was in the midst of a series of posts looking at the songs that had been covered by all the A Head Full of Wishes related acts. Most of the posts were little more than a short blurb raided from Wikipedia along with a couple of clips on YouTube. Some were a bit more detailed. Perhaps surprisingly the one that got more detail than any others was Damon & Naomi’s cover of This Changing World that was released on their first post-Galaxie 500 album More Sad Hits in 1992. The story (or at least my story) of This Changing World was told over two posts and even surprised Damon.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0c5RvyLzZYs
This is a rehash of those two posts from 2014.
OK… this one took a bit of work. Another track that was in my database with the words “information required”, and since I added it I guess I had stopped looking (even though the Internet had got so much better since the 1990s). I suspect by 2014 I had probably got to the point where I may even have forgotten that it wasn’t a Damon & Naomi original, although the French opening should have kept tipping me off.
Even now it wasn’t simply a matter of typing the title (or some lyrics) into Google or Spotify, no this took a bit of serious Google-ing to get any sort of history for This Changing World… and what I have must not be considered in any way authoritative.
The sleeve on my original Shimmy Disc copy of More Sad Hits credited the track simply to “J. C. Oliver”. This undoubtedly contributed to my failed earlier research since it wasn’t a lot to go on.
By 2014 things must have got somewhat easier as O discovered that J. C. Oliver was Jean-Claude Oliver although Discogs even in 2014 was uncertain about him, at the time suggesting his name was Olivier. I notice that now the Discogs entry has more detail… I’ll link to his page at the end of the post since it now is a spoiler to this post!
The 2008 20|20|20 reissue of More Sad Hits credits the song to Oliver/Spyropolus/Valade which gave me a little more to go on.
I eventually tracked a version of the song down to Claudine Longet’s 1970 album “Run Wild, Run Free” where the song was named “This Changing World (De l’automne a l’automne)” which was very similar to Damon & Naomi’s version and was clearly the version that Damon & Naomi covered.
Claudine Longet has had an eventful life. She was married to Andy Williams, was friends with Bobby Kennedy, and later was convicted of accidentally shooting her boyfriend. There’s plenty on the Internet about her but I’ll leave that for you to dig into if you want to, you may as well start at the Wikipedia page.
All sorted then?
Not for me. While this was the version that Damon & Naomi covered it clearly wasn’t really the original.
In 1968, French duo Line et Willy represented Monaco in The Eurovision Song Contest with a song called “À chacun sa chanson” which was written by… J. C. Oliver and R. Valade, two of the three names on the More Sad Hits reissue. A bit more poking around found an EP of Line et Willy’s Eurovision song, and on that EP was De l’automne a l’automne, also written by Oliver and Valade.
Jean-Claude Oliver (or Olivier) was the composer and Roger Valade wrote the lyrics to the song.
The third name was that of Diana Spyropolus who wrote the English lyrics for the second half of Claudine Longet’s cover - I haven’t managed to uncover much more about Ms Spyropolus - although I guess it could be this one … but the 25 year gap between This Changing World and Cornelius and the Dog Star might suggest otherwise.
Damon & Naomi’s version was the closing track on their fantastic debut album More Sad Hits.
https://damonandnaomi.bandcamp.com/track/this-changing-world
So, This Changing World was the b-side of the song that came seventh for Monaco in the 1968 Eurovision song contest… that’s pretty obscure… although not as obscure as the b-side of the song that came fifth in a song for Norway in 1976.
But back in 2014 Line et Willy’s version of De l’automne a l’automne was nowhere to be found on the Inernet so my first post on the 25th June left the readers to try and imagine what the song was like before Diana and Claudine had got to it. But, I wasn’t ready to give up and after some scouring I found a seller on eBay France had a copy of the EP and I pounced, and a week later I was able to post the real original.
In last week's Originals post I pointed out that the original of This Changing World was actually the b-side of the 1968 Monaco entry in the Eurovision Song Contest, and was therefore too obscure for the Internet to provide a version to listen to...
Well, not any more. Where Spotify and YouTube failed, eBay came up trumps, so here is the original of This Changing World, a song that even Damon & Naomi didn't realise they had covered!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4DBinBrqTY
Damon was as surprised as anyone at the provenance of a song that they had covered 12 years earlier:
@grange85 hey claudine ripped that arrangement off as much as we did hers!
— Damon K (@dada_drummer) June 30, 2014
thanks to @grange85 we get to hear the original of a song we covered on More Sad Hits (we copped it from Claudine) http://t.co/jQY0YuSacR
— Damon K (@dada_drummer) June 30, 2014
Here are Line et Willy coming seventh at the 1968 Eurovision:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PnFuv4n-iDA
Winner that year was the Spanish entry La La La by Massiel which I have to say is better than Line et Willy’s effort but maybe not better than Cliff’s absolute banger that was just one point behind in second.
Now, the thing about Eurovision is that it was always considered a bit… crap. Sure some gems wormed their way through, but generally it was not great. But, absolutely required viewing! In recent years however it has become something other people watch. I’m getting old and can’t imagine anything close to Waterloo or a Puppet on a String being in the mix these days. In six week’s time the 2026 Eurovision Song Contest will take place in Vienna. I might watch it… but, probably not.
Maybe I’ll just rewatch 1974 and see the lovely ONJ in her nightie getting beaten by ABBA!
