"Clo-Clo," as he’s still known to his fans, was one of the French cover’s more prolific practitioners. His discography includes some unlikely selections, and his accidental death in 1978 was even more off the page.
What song recorded in 1929 in Memphis by Cannon’s Jug Stompers became a top-40 hit during the Sixties folk revival, and by doing so was fair game for the French coverers? If you said "Walk Right In" by the Rooftop Singers, you know more about this music that I do and could teach me a few things. Marche tout droit, "walk all right," is an account of time spent engaged in a universal guy pastime: hanging out, watching women pass by, and wishing certain ones would return.
Clo-Clo was an over-the-top guy who sported sequined stage clothes and toured with a revue that included backup singers named "The Clo-dettes," who took on anything American, from country to Motown. Six jours sur la route ("Six Days On The Road"). Serre-moi, grippe-moi ("Bend Me, Shape Me"). Le monde absurde ("Eve Of Destruction"). He cut C’est la même chanson, "The Same Old Song," along with a handful of Motown tunes, at the legendary Hitsville USA studio in Detroit. And no French pop icon’s discography can be complete without Dadou ron ron.
Ironically, it was the cover process in reverse that gave him a North American legacy. His Comme d’habitude got English lyrics from Paul Anka and became "My Way."
On March 11, 1978, Claude François was electrocuted at his Paris apartment, after a shower, when he tried to change a burned-out light bulb while forgetting he was still standing in water. Nearby, on the boulevard Exelmans, the city of Paris has named a street corner Place Claude François. La Poste, which finds nothing wrong with having pop stars on stamps, so honored Clo-Clo and five others in 2001.