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INSPIRATION: Louis Philippe

  
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Louis Philippe - An Unknown Spring - Featuring Miss Lake
Listen here:

A few days ago I received a short email to the site with an attached mp3.. intrigued I played the file... what I got was a charming piece of classic, French music (complete with accordion intro) with gentle vocals in tribute to Veronica Lake. In fact a song that wouldn’t have been amiss in one of her movies.

I asked Mr Philippe about how the song came to be and just how he discovered Veronica Lake in the first place?

An Unknown Spring
Louis Philippe has very graciously allowed me to put an advance copy of the track "Miss Lake" on Peek-a-boo Bang for your listening pleasure.

The track is from his forth coming CD "An Unknown Spring" (which is in stores June 6th). Remember.. if you love the track you can buy a copy of the album direct from his website. Visit his site at: louisphilippe.co.uk/

And you can hear more at his MySpace page: myspace.com/louisphilippemusic


"The song is mostly based on the memory of seeing René Clair’s ’My Wife is a Witch’ for the first time. I was very young at the time, but was totally mesmerised by her beauty. Bewitched, in a word. This fascination was rekindled by discovering Preston Sturges’s Sullivan’s Travels - still one of my favourite films -, which made me realise that Miss Lake was not just a beautiful face, but also a superb actress (whatever she might have said about it herself), with a voice (and a tone of delivery) quite unlike anyone else’s."

"I guess the lyrics are an expression of wonder at how, while she could exert such extraordinary attraction, you could feel a certain remoteness in her demeanour, which only added to the mystery in her aura. Hence the very last verse ’no need for ’I love yous/what about a ’goodbye’?’ The many tragic turns in her life which the song (very discreetly) alludes to make it a distant cousin to Ray Davies’s ’Celluloid Heroes’ in that respect."

"Funnily enough, a few of my fans are also - by pure coincidence - Veronica Lake devotees. You may even find a few VL threads on my message board."

"Thank you for keeping the flame alive."
~ Louis Philippe