Andre Popp

by Jason Ankeny
Composer/arranger André Popp was born in Fontenay-le-Comte, France in 1924; the son of a church organist, he studied music at the St. Josephe Institute of Music, and at 15 assumed his fathers church duties after the elder Popp enlisted in the French Army. After the war, the aspiring young composer befriended poet and lyricist Jean Broussole, and together they relocated to Paris, collaborating on the hit songs Papa Loubourer and Il Dansait; Popp also scored an international instrumental smash in 1954 with Les Lavandieres du Portugal. He and Broussole reunited in 1957 for Piccolo & Saxo, a series of recordings highlighting individual instruments to illustrate the inner workings of an orchestra; their efforts went on to earn the Grand Prix du Disque. Under the guise Elsa Popping and her Pixielanders, he and producer Pierre Fantosme next surfaced with the groundbreaking Delirium in Hi-Fi, a classic of space-age pop which employed state-of-the-art studio craft to rework standards like La Paloma and Beer Barrel Polka in hallucinatory fashion. After taking top honors in the 1960 Eurovision Song contest with the song Tom Pillibi, Popps experiments in tape manipulation continued on 1963s Holiday for DJs, although his subsequent work — including the 1967 blockbuster Love Is Blue — staked out far more mainstream territory.