Tuesday 10 April 2012

Saperlipopette

All day on Saturday and Sunday I had this song going round and round inside my head - an Easter earworm, if you will. Good job it brings a great big Chesire Cat smile to my face whenever I hear it!


I just looked up the lyrics, which seem to be depict a clutch of absurdist anthropomorphic situations: a shrimp finds itself in trouble served up on a plate and just to make his day even worse he has toothache; or a weasel decides she needs a nose-job and opts for a (more Serge-like?) Roman nose; or the doe whose milk turned into cheese...  "SAPERLIPOPETTE!" they each cry in turn.

The term Saperlipopette seems to be an exclamation of surprise. So far I've found it translated as "Gadzooks!" or "Goodness me!" or "Fiddlesticks!" or "Goodness gracious!" and even, as an English translation of Tin Tin has Captain Haddock bellowing, "Blistering Barnacles!". [If anyone out there has a better translation/meaning for the word, please leave a comment and share it with the rest of us. Thanks.]

So, can you resist Germinal Tenas' everything-AND-the-kitchen-sink production and arrangement or Clothilde's butter-wouldn't-melt innocence?


Clothilde - Saperlipopette
[You can buy this song on the recently reissued Femmes de Paris complete box set.  Another Clothilde track is currently available on Girls in the Garage vol.12]

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