Saint Tropez

About

Like many disco groups of the 70s, Saint Tropez was a producers' brainchild, in this case of American producers Laurin Rinder & W. Michael Lewis who had already been successful with disco groups El Coco and Le Pamplemousse. Saint Tropez was a female group made up of three session singers. The first two albums Je T'aime (1977) and Belle de Jour (1978), both hugely successful disco albums with big symphonic orchestrations and a tight disco backing, all the instruments played solely by the two producers. Je T'aime offered Serge Gainsbourg's well-known classic in an equally sensual disco symphony. They also covered material by Van McCoy and Gregg Diamond's "Heart To Heart" (sung in French as "Coeur à coeur"), originally written for The Andrea True Connection. Belle de Jour followed the same formula, yielding two successful 12"s "One More Minute" and "Fill My Life With Love", and also covering Gloria Gaynor's "Most Of All". Typical for this kind of studio projects, lots of different singers were involved in the earlier '77 and '78 projects. After a four year hiatus, Rinder & Lewis revived Saint Tropez (Mona Lisa Young, Phyllis Rhoades, Lyndie White) in 1982 for a third album. Hot and Nasty, which leaned more towards R&B/Dance but still kept the lush orchestration of the first two albums. It yielded the single "The Love Stealers", a cover of the Peaches & Herb hit. A curiosity for all three Saint Tropez albums was a continued story, an audio film noir in French, telling the story of Nicole who's fallen in love with an assailant whom the Paris Police, as well as Interpol, are looking for. It started as "Violation" on Je T'aime, on Belle de Jour it was the title track and "When You Are Gone", and on Hot and Nasty, it was "Femmes Fatales". The third LP cover read an editor's note: "With respect to Femmes Fatales, the fundamental question before us is what will happen to Noicole's lover [...] Perhaps in St. Tropez IV we will learn the answer to this." But there never was a fourth Saint Tropez album. Only a final 12" single "Morning Music" saw the story continue on the B-side "The Chase" which closed the book on Saint Tropez.