Featured Essay: The Debate of the Century: That Weird French 45 in my Record Collection

by Chris Ingalls

I’ve been alive for 55 years and have been buying records since I was ten (although that’s slightly misleading: from 1987 to 2015, I didn’t buy a single record, since it was during the “vinyl is dead” era - but I digress). With all of that vinyl baggage, I never totally caught on to the idea of the 45 RPM format. But there are a few exceptions.

Some backstory: I have three older siblings and basically became a music nut thanks to my older sisters – teenagers at the time – buying and bringing home records in the mid-70s. The Beatles “Red” and “Blue” compilation albums, Who’s Next, Led Zeppelin IV, Aqualung, Frampton Comes Alive, a few anomalies like the American Graffiti soundtrack, LOTS of Queen and Aerosmith, some embarrassing shit like Styx, REO Speedwagon, and Kansas – this was what I was raised on as a grammar school kid, as was my brother Gary, who’s four years older than me. My sisters never really became completist freaks like me and Gary, but they planted the seed and for that I am eternally grateful (They never opened up to punk rock, but that’s ok – I discovered that in high school).

Through all of that, we were basically “album” fans. We never really grasped the concept of the 45. I seem to remember my sister Karen had the 45 of Terry Jacks’ awful bubblegum hit “Seasons in the Sun,” but that was mostly it. From 1974 to 1979, during this fertile period of music discovery, we lived in the suburbs outside Paris, France. Dad was employed by the defense contractor Raytheon to help develop ballistic missile systems for NATO (or something like that – I loved my father but since he wasn’t a rock star or a cartoonist, his livelihood didn’t really interest me). At some point in 1977, he bought a 45 that was probably the furthest thing from what was making the rounds on the living room turntable, and my brother and I ended up enjoying the hell out of it.

The 45 in question was called “Le Debat Du Siecle” (The Debate of the Century), an eleven-minute recording by two French comedians, Thierry Le Luron and Pierre Douglas, who were known for doing political comedy and developed an act where they impersonated two famous current politicians in a debate scenario. The politicians were Raymond Barre (played by Le Luron), who was at the time the French prime minister, and George Marchais (played by Douglas), the leader of the French Communist Party.

Fans of Saturday Night Live’s political sketches – particularly the debate spoofs so popular in SNL “cold open” segments – could find plenty of parallels here. Barre was center-right and Marchais was obviously very far to the left, and their personalities – not to mention their ideologies - were perfectly matched for conflict. Le Luron played up Barre’s laid-back, avuncular style while Douglas was the loud, brash rabble-rouser. They did the act on TV and radio, and thanks to the success of these appearances, they cut this two-sided single in front of an appreciative studio audience.

Regardless of our ignorance of French politics, Gary and I ate this up. It was funny, it was over-the-top, and there were even a few pop culture references we could appreciate. As then-fluent French speakers, we even tried to recreate it in our living room with new dialogue, out of boredom (this was way before the internet - having fun sometimes required outside-the-box ingenuity). True to the SNL similarities, there were a couple of times when they broke (mostly Le Luron), which made it even funnier. Good luck finding a physical copy these days, but you can hear the recording on YouTube here.

The 45 disappeared for decades until 2015 when I was visiting Gary in Florida, where he was living at the time. There was a small section of his gargantuan vinyl collection where some of Dad’s old jazz 45s from the ‘50s were stashed, and lo and behold, there it was. Subtle attempts to gain ownership of scratchy singles from the likes of Ahmad Jamal failed, but I seemed a lot more enthusiastic about Le Debat du Siecle than Gary was, so he let me take it.

The record occupies a space in my modest 45 collection alongside a mildly varied bunch of singles. Among them are a very scratchy, sleeveless copy of Led Zeppelin’s “Fool in the Rain,” which Gary bought in 1979, probably because the only other song he knew from In Through the Out Door was the decidedly un-Zeppelin-like “All My Love”; Kyle Craft’s version of the Annie anthem “Tomorrow,” tucked into the sleeve of his killer 2018 album Full Circle Nightmare; the collaboration between art-rock quartet JOBS and visual artist Sam King, Similar Canvas / Different Properties; a lovely Nico Hedley / Field Guides split single from the sadly now-defunct Whatever’s Clever label; Lana Del Rey’s cover of Father John Misty’s “Buddy’s Rendezvous,” and a handful of others. But the one that spoofs European geopolitics may be the most prized of the bunch. 

Chris has been writing about music for PopMatters since 2016 and previously wrote for the now-defunct experimental music site Tome to the Weather Machine. He is an occasional guest on the music podcast Losing my Opinion. He lives in Melrose, Massachusetts, with his wife, son, dog, two cats, and lots of records.

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