Voyage, voyage

About the song

«Voyage, voyage» was the first single by Desireless, released by CBS Disques in 1986, and it turned an unknown singer into one of the most recognisable faces of European pop almost overnight. Desireless is the stage name of Claudie Fritsch-Mentrop, born in Paris on Christmas Day 1952, who had spent the previous fifteen years in fashion rather than music: she trained at the Studio Berçot design school and later ran a small clothing label of her own. She was in her thirties when the song came out, with a cropped brush-cut hairstyle and an androgynous look that made her stand out immediately on television. The pseudonym, English for «without desire», was chosen to suggest someone who watches the world from a calm distance.

The song was written by Jean-Michel Rivat, who wrote the words and produced the recording, with music by Dominique Dubois. It was not originally meant for Desireless at all: it had first been offered to Michel Delpech, one of the big French singers of the 1970s, who turned it down. The track was recorded at the Studio d’Aguesseau and built on the tools of mid-eighties synth-pop — drum machines, layered synthesisers and a slow, hypnotic pulse — with Desireless singing in a low, almost detached voice over the top. That contrast between the cool electronic backing and the warm, open invitation of the words is a large part of why the record still sounds distinctive.

The lyric is a call to travel. It flies over volcanoes, clouds, marshes, capital cities, deserts and far-off islands, crossing the whole planet in a few verses, and it keeps pushing the listener further: beyond day and night, and finally into the boundless space of love. Behind the postcard images there are darker glimpses — barbed wire, hearts under bombardment, dangerous ideas hanging over the capitals — so the journey reads as an escape from a harsh world as much as a holiday. The short bridges end by telling the traveller to look at the ocean, and the chorus closes on a traveller who sets out and never returns.

For a learner of French the song is a small grammar lesson hidden in a pop hit. The word repeated in the title and the chorus is not the noun «a journey» but the imperative of the verb voyager, addressed to one person: «travel!». Because verbs ending in -er lose the final -s of the tu form in the imperative, the command looks exactly like the noun, and the song repeats the same pattern with the verb regarder. There is also a negative imperative with a reflexive verb, a poetic inversion that puts «never» before the verb, and the spoken habit of swallowing the unstressed e in au-dessus. Almost everything else is concrete vocabulary of landscape and weather — wind, rain, clouds, wings, rivers, islands, dunes — which makes the text easy to picture even for a beginner.