Ca Plane Pour Moi is an all-purpose tame punk anthem. I’ve heard it used in TV shows and in theater plays. Last summer I saw a street performer at Faneuil Hall in Boston do yoyo tricks to it.
The current issue (#38) of Ugly Things, a non-academic scholarly journal chronicling “wild sounds from past dimensions,” has a five-page article about the band Elton Motello. The band was built around the duo of Alan Ward and Mike Butcher, who released “Ca Plane Pour Moi” under its original English title, “Jet Boy Jet Girl,” in Belgium in 1977. Plastic Bertrand (a project of Lou Deprijck) changed the lyrics but retained the same backing musical track. Yvan Lacomblez is credited as the song’s composer, but several aspects of the record’s creation are under dispute. Ugly Things gives Ward & Butcher’s side of the story, and they claim “Ca Plane Pour Moi” and its flip side “Pogo Pogo” were basically developed in the studio as demos, based on a vague concept of Deprijck’s.
The song was later covered by Captain Sensible of The Damned, with The Softies backing him.
I have great memories of Ca Plane Pour Moi. I was a junior in high school when it came out in the U.S. I was on the high school radio station and had been given a copy of the single at a CMJ convention. We had exchange students from France in our school around that time, and that one record formed a real bond between one of those visitors and us radio station punks. (We kept trying to get him to translate the Plastic Bertrand lyrics, but he would tell us that there were too many slang phrases which he couldn’t convey—including the title, which means something like “that’s OK by me.”
When I noticed the Elton Motello and Captain Sensible versions in the import shops in Harvard Square, I naturally grabbed them, and experienced the schoolboy giddiness of the naughty lyrics “he gives me head.” At the time, I convinced myself that these British acts had purposefully sullied the French lyrics with boundary-pushing content in the current punk fashion. I didn’t know that these were the original lyrics in their original language. The English lyrics both intrigued and repulsed me, as good punk songs should.
While t”Jet Boy Jet Girl” is seldom heard these days (those lyrics weren’t just arch, they contained non-PC sentiments such as “I’m gonna make you be a girl), “Ca Plane Pour Moi” has become the acceptable face of wild boyish ‘80s punk and its soon-to-be-born sibling New Wave. It’s used to shorthand the frantic pace of life in the neon-spraypainted ‘80s. I was watching Scorsese’s Wolf of Wall Street on Netflix the other night, and there it was. Ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh. Ca plane pour moi.