Ed. Note: We apologize for taking an extra long weekend. Apparently no matter how cheap you are, you still get sinus attacks. You heard it here first.

As we mentioned a few weeks ago, we’ve decided to take High Culture on a Low Budget into a few new directions, the first of which being an aural component to budget travel. Kicking us off is the uber-fabulous Alex Robertson Textor (can we make a bad pun and say he’s ARTistic by nature?). Freelance travel writer, editor of Spendthrift Shoestring, and former editor of the EuroCheapo.com blog (and one of our favourite cohorts when it comes to travel on the cheap), Alex has fond childhood memories of ultracheap Spanish hotels (the kind with Styrofoam shelving) and supermarket lunches scarfed on park benches. Formerly an academic, Alex has spent the last several years redirecting his professional life into full-time travel journalism and editing.

And the rest is all Alex…

” In 1984, my family moved to the small German state of Saarland, which sits on the French border. We lived there for a year, in the medium-sized city of Saarbrücken, a few kilometers from France. On the weekends we visited cities like Strasbourg and Metz by train, and sometimes we drove our tiny tin can of a car to little villages in the countryside. France felt distant despite its close proximity.

The music I would hear on French radio or glimpse in video form on television was intriguing and strange. It was easily accessible but incomprehensible, and not just due to the language barrier. These songs stood apart from the other easily identifiable genres that populated my teenage life: thoroughly produced British tunes, sincere and earnest German pop music, and essentials-driven Italian disco, with many varieties of American music superimposed over the rest.

I’ve always affixed great longing to the French songs I heard back then and in the following few years, a longing probably magnified because I only understand some of the words here and there and don’t have a sense of context for them. Common to most of these songs, in my view, is a melancholy, even sentimental, plaintiveness.

  • Tout doucement – Bibie
    I think of this song as extremely French. It’s easy to imagine Édith Piaf’s vocals on a different production of it. On the version I found online and downloaded, there are audible vinyl scratches that add immeasurably to the song’s mood.
  • Ouragan – Stéphanie
    Princess Stéphanie of Monaco released this piece of pure pop taffy in 1986. It manages to feel extraordinarily plaintive despite its upbeat, commercial production.
  • La 3eme sexe – Indochine
    This is another emblematically 1980s song, suitably up-tempo, with an almost obligatory saxophone in just the right places.
  • Square Rooms – Al Corley
    “Square Rooms,” a notably moody bit of synth-driven pop, was a massive hit in France in 1985 for American television actor Al Corley.
  • Cargo de Nuit – Axel Bauer
    I remember seeing the video to this song on the late great German music program Formel Eins, a mess of machinery and shirtless men. It was inexplicable. Yet intriguing.
  • Voyage, Voyage – Desireless
    Desireless’s “Voyage voyage” is a 1980s classic. Note, again, the sadness in the ultrapoppy melody and production.
  • Marcia Baïla – Les Rita Mitsouko
    “Marcia Baïla” is an iconic song if there ever was one, strange and beautiful and familiar.
  • Johnny Johnny – Jeanne Mas
    Dreamy and reminiscent of many songs of its time, “Johnny Johnny” is possibly the most average pop song on this playlist, but it’s also charming”


Alex Robertson Textor (L) with fellow EuroCheapo auteur Annie Shapero. (Photo Courtesy ART)