Feral House has a book coming out about the European singers from the the 1960s known as Yé-Yé Girls. The were typically young, cute, short on vocal chops, and manipulated by Svengalis who were sleeping with them. I like the bubblegummy music, though! (Here’s an online Yé-Yé radio station.)
A lot of TV watchers were intruded to Yé-Yé when Megan Draper performed “Zou Bisou Bisou” at hubby Don’s birthday party on Mad Men (Here’s Gillian Hills singing it in 1962).
This collection by pop music expert Jean-Emmanuel Deluxe includes many interviews with the original singers and producers, and hundreds of visual examples of record covers, magazines, and a teenaged fan’s scrapbook from the period. This book includes the famous Yé-Yé practitioners Sylvie Vartan, France Gall, Françoise Hardy, Chantal Goya, Brigitte Bardot, Jane Birkin and dozens of others, including perverse Serge Gainsbourg.
Yé-Yé had secondary explosions in the 1970s and 1990s in Japan and Europe through the likes of Lio (who provides this book’s foreword), and in the United States through singers like April March, whose Yé-Yé number “Chick Habit” was heard in the Quentin Tarantino film Death Proof.
Yé-Yé Girls of ’60s French Pop