Robbie Nevil – C’est la vie
#quotefromthe80s
They've got me workin' night and day.
Punchin' in, punchin' out
Is this really what life's all about?
What you are gonna do, what you are gonna feel? I don't know.
#RobbieNevil #CEstLaVie
In October 1986 a new song was released which actually was not so new, sung by a new face, which however was not so new. The face was that of Robbie Nevil, a guy from Los Angeles who was in fact unknown to the general public and to us teenagers and future dinosaurs, but in reality he was quite well known in the music world, because he had already written so many songs for people like Pointer Sisters. , El DeBarge, Sheena Easton, Al Jarreau, and later he would also write for Alison Moyet, Earth, Wind & Fire and many others.
His record company was convinced that his time had come, the time to produce an album of his songs (he actually had plenty of choice) obviously driven by a hit that broke the hearts and ears of teenagers. And here, however, the problems began, because good Robbie was very undecided. There was a song he liked, Dominoes, but who knows why, all the people he met and whom he asked for an opinion told him something else. It seemed they had aligned with each other.
Everyone asked him the same question: why don’t you sing that other song, the one you wrote some time ago for that other singer… if you sing it you will be successful, that is a very strong song! Robbie was a bit skeptical: he was very fond of that song he had written in 1984, almost three years earlier, and which he had then given to singer Beau Williams for his album Bodacious, that song with the title in French, C’est la vie, with choirs repeating “that’s life” in English: it was certainly a good song that Robbie had also written quite in a short time with his collaborators, but for some reason it hadn’t been as successful. Maybe Beau Williams didn’t have all this exposure, and not having a video certainly limited its circulation.
The managers of the record company kept telling him that he was crazy if he didn’t choose that song, but Robbie was still not convinced: that song had been in his heart for almost three years: maybe he found it beautiful, but the rest of the world didn’t, even if the managers seemed to be on his side. But one day, a very special fan convinced him to change his mind. And she wasn’t just an ordinary fan, she was his grandmother who was now over ninety-six years old! Well, even if Grandma is so sure that the right song is C’est la vie, well, maybe I have to listen to her advice, the good Robbie thought.
Once this fundamental choice had been made, however, another question remained to be resolved: the song needed a video, in order not to repeat the mistake made by Beau Williams. Not that it was a problem shooting a video, but… Robbie had never thought about what kind of video to shoot for C’est la vie. He was so convinced that he was going out with Dominoes as his first song, that he had also thought a lot about that video: he would have played the role of a sad boy, a bit sulky, a bit lonely, maybe with a black and white video.
And therefore, perhaps for lack of other inspirations, he actually brought the role he had thought of for Dominoes into the video of C’est la vie. The audience was seeing Robbie for the first time and therefore did not know that he was actually a very cheerful guy who loved company, so many came up with the idea of a sad Robbie Nevil, but those who know him know that he does is not at all like that boy in the video!
In short, in the end Robbie decided to follow his grandmother’s advice, and he did the right thing, because C’est la vie was a great success, and within three months he climbed the charts, together with people like Pepsi and Shirlie with their Heartache, Alison Moyet with Is This Love? or maybe George Michael and Aretha Franklin with I Knew You Were Waiting (for Me). And a few months later, however, he also released Dominoes, the song he had originally chosen, but obviously this song was unable to repeat the success of C’est la vie!
Robbie Nevil on Wikipedia
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