Gigi

Josh send me a guestpost on mysterious yeye-girl Gigi:

From the wreckage of a relationship gone wrong, I discovered and then fell in love with the 1960’s yéyé singer Gigi. My ex-girlfriend Sabine, a maddeningly unpredictable Parisian broke my heart on New Year’s Eve of 2004. She walked out on me and our New York City apartment. She left everything behind. It took me a year to get up the nerve to throw her stuff out. Stacked in the back of the closet, under all her clothes were a few boxes filled with fan paraphernalia; 45s, LPs, magazine covers, fanzines and ephemera from the career of a certain Gigi Gaston. She was beautiful and elusive and reminded me of Sabine. I became obsessed, trying to piece together Gigi’s life story. I determined that she had been raised in a gypsy family in Bulgaria. When she escaped to France in 1950 – the rest of her family tragically died. Raised in an orphanage she was eventually adopted by a cultured Parisian French family. By the time she was 17 she was a worthy rival to Françoise Hardy and Sylvie Vartan in the yéyé world and in her heyday was known as ‘the Black Flower’. Nothing came easy for Gigi and tragedy struck at every turn.
I’ve scanned in quite a few of the magazine and record covers and found some appropriate quotes online. Sadly all of her music has remained in a legal limbo and unavailable at this time. It’s almost as if she were a dream.