The Private Pepper band started recording 12 songs for the album at Studio Le Hameau in the Perche region (1:30 hr from Paris beyond Chartres) on August 31st. Left to right : Private Pepper, Seb (drums), Barbara (bass), Leo (keyboards) and Georgy (guitars). And this week, September 11th-13th, Private Pepper returns to Le Hameau for more vocals and overdubs !

J-7 : this morning's jingle, it's the final countdown !

https://soundcloud.com/eric-dufaure/the-final-countdown-jingle

It's this Thursday, July 3rd at 21h at the Très Honoré bar restaurant Place du Marché St. Honoré in Paris, with the duo Yé ! Join the party :-)

Tres_honore_picbis

Hello again dear KissBankers, past, present and future !

Here is the first commission from a Kissbanker, the request came from Down Under, from my dear friends Manuela and Michele. A song I love to sing, an amazing record by Ben E. King but also a great version by John Lennon, which inspired me a little : "STAND BY ME" !!!!

And have you stood by me, we're up there cruisin' :-) Well there's a lot more to come !!!!

https://soundcloud.com/eric-dufaure/stand-by-me

WHERE DO YOU GO TO MY LOVELY REVISITED TODAY !

This version is excellent for the shoulders :-)

https://soundcloud.com/eric-dufaure/where-do-you-go-to-my-lovely

A MESSAGE FROM PRIVATE PEPPER !

Thanks to some forty valiant start-up Kissbankers - dear friends, family, colleagues from the world of music, singers and musicians, web designers, film and video producers, without forgetting a few precious classmates from university days ! - we have managed to reach our target in barely 14 days.

That is really fantastic and wow, does that give powerful wings for the future !

In fact yesterday, it was one of those rare days since the start of the campaign when it seemed that Kissbankers were off duty or hiding out somewhere ! So to cheer myself up, and anybody else who might be interested, and to help us all cross the finishing line with a tough sprint ahead, I made a home demo on my piano with a little help from Garageband. The song I chose to cover was the appropriately named Hall of fame "Towering song" : "Fly me to the moon". And here it is :

https://soundcloud.com/eric-dufaure/fly-me-to-the-moon

And today, here we are, on the moon !

We still have 46 days to go, as from May 23rd, so let's stick together ! Please continue to spread the good word around you, to follow the project and help us bring new Kissbankers on board. So that we can cruise our spaceship to the next major stops : Venus and Mars. As in the song !

Every bit of extra support will allow us to promote even better the album : by making a good video, hiring an efficient promo team, underwriting the first series of concerts. And all that stuff is very precious to help "pepperise" with good music and good feelings new fans all across the universe !

So again, a thousand and one heartfelt thanks to all you Kissbankers out there, present and future !

Private Pepper can do it with a little help from his friends :-)

https://soundcloud.com/eric-dufaure/with-a-little-help-from-my/

Private Pepper

ps. here's a nice article to cheer us all up and a new jingle I wrote yesterday, May 27th to boost the troops, we still have 41 days to go as of today May 28th, and we can take this one step further (but not one bridge too far :-)

https://soundcloud.com/eric-dufaure/it-aint-over

Phare_de_r__2

***

After spending almost two years creating and fine-tuning new songs, performing in concert, in Paris,

Web-4740

and in summer resorts, like at the "Blue Cargo" near Biarritz,

Blue_cargo_2

or the club "La Pergola" on the Ile de Ré,

Private_pepper_pergola

also recording demos and playing at private events, or revisiting some vintage songs such as "Where do you go to my lovely ?", originally a hit by Peter Sarstedt in 1969,

Private Pepper is ready to record his first studio album, with a majority of original compositions, some with English lyrics, others in French, thus reflecting his Franco-Irish origins.

He has indeed taken his time. Piano lessons at 7, first rock group at 13, at a UK boarding school,

School_band

first public concerts at 15, first compositions at 16, first concert at the Biarritz Casino at 19 with his buddy Alain B. on drums,

Casino_biarritz_1967

and at the Casino round the corner, in Saint-Jean de Luz (he only made it to Vegas 8 years later, as a visitor !), singing basically the Beatles and Trini Lopez,

Eric_casino_saint-jean

first visit to the US at 19, here on a rock in Maine, basically doing what he knows how to do best :-),

Maine_eric

first knock on the door of the music business at 25 when, returning to the US for a 2 year stint to get an MBA at a prestigious university in Cambridge near Boston, he co-founded the very popular "Entertainment & Media Club" as it is named today (at the time he was a pioneer and it was called the "Communications, Leisure and Entertainment Club" !),

Eric_harvard

first hit produced at 28, a top 10 in the UK charts (Bill Lovelady's "Reggae for it now"),

first "real" job in the music industry at 29 (Island Records Group USA with Chris Blackwell, his mentor in the business, seen here together some years later in Miami, Florida),

Blackwell

first label at 30 (Whale Productions which soon became Cachalot Records, and later Beluga Productions, already that whale obsession !),

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and that very same year, 1977, he went out into the streets of New York, gathered together a dozen amongst the most interesting street musicians working the crowds in the Big Apple at the time - including the legendary harpist Sugar Blue - and recorded the album "Stars of the Streets", which was released in the US and Europe (photo David Gahr).

Stars_of_the_streets

He then proceeded to record some East Coast rock bands such as Brooklyn-based Just Water with this energetic rendition of the classic "Singing in the rain" which became an item on New York's WNEW radio and in Europe with the release of the single on the innovative London label Stiff Records.

He composed his first hit song at the ripe age of 32, "Why" in the original English version, which became "Pigalle la Blanche" in the French version, sung by Bernard Lavilliers who wrote his own lyrics...

In the next 3 years, he released several albums on his Cachalot label by creative New York City or State artists such as Robert Derby, Ian North, Die Hausfrauen, the Comateens, the Swollen Monkeys and Personal Effects. He also made a deal with the UK label Cherry Red to release albums by Thomas Leer and by the ground-breaking funk rock group Medium Medium. Their "Hungry so angry" single was a big item on the US club scene, and still rocks !

At 35, he made a trip to Germany for a festival as producer of New York group Die Hausfrauen, which led to the release in the US of a Deutsche Neue Welle compilation called "Deutschland Deutschland" with included many of the most interesting emerging German bands such as Einstürzende Neubauten, Der Plan, Palais Schaumburg and JaJaJa...and also female proto-punk group Malaria. Eric invited them to the States for a mini-tour : they made several recordings together, including the club hit "Your turn to run".

One of the stops on the tour was an amazing concert at Studio 54 with Nina Hagen,

Studio_54

and there were frequent round trips between New York and Paris leading to the discovery of the new French Rock scene and release in the US by Cachalot Records of a 12 track compilation "Made in France", spear-headed by an East-Coast tour of two of the artists involved, Sapho and Etienne Daho,

Made_in_france

Before signing off and returning to France, our man produced in 1984 three tracks with Soma Holiday, a talented Franco-American boy-girl duo based in New York. One of the songs, "Shake your molecules", has over the years gathered cult status, in particular amongst the DJ community, with a new vinyl release programmed for summer 2014 on the hip New York label, Minimal Records.

Then came a 10 year tenure with French rights society Sacem, in charge of communications, writer and publisher relations and repertoire promotion, before joining EMI Music Publishing where the budding Private Pepper had the pleasure and honor of working with both French and international artists/writers such as the great voice of Senegal, Youssou n'Dour,

_0051_youssou-eric-nov.-1999.bmp

the amazing Brazilian rocker Lenine,

the legendary Supertramp member Roger Hodgson,

Noa, the unforgettable singer from Israel,

and the talented French DJ Saint-Germain who blended the sounds of the Blue Note label with the dance floors of the 21st Century.

Saint_germain

And many other creative personalities such as bassist and singer Richard Bona and percussionist singer Mino Cinelu...

The soon to become Private Pepper departed from EMI in 2001 and founded a new label, Beluga Productions. He has since had the pleasure of working with many talented French artists such as Isabelle George and Frederik Steenbrink, with whom he recorded a tribute album to Judy Garland, Claire Diterzi, Lio, Martine City Queen, Blue Garden, Yé and recently, singer Margaux Simone.

He also embarked on several interesting international projects, involving :

Mexico, with the release in France of the first album by the all DJ group Nortec Collective from Tijuana,

Nortec

India, with an album recorded in Bombay featuring Pascal of Bollywood, a French singer and great afficionado of the legendary songs from Bollywood movies, who made waves in France, England and Germany (here he is seen working on his Bollywood version of the French standard "La vie en Rose"),

and Japan, with the production and release of Tomuya Endo's album "A Japanese in Paris", a Tokyoite's tribute to the art of French song (here in a live TV performance of Yves Montand's French standard "La Bicyclette", originally written by Pierre Barouh).

So it took all this time to mutate into Private Pepper - in fact the name is a tribute to the Beatles whom our character celebrated with friends at a 4 hour concert in the Basque country in 1997, the year he joined EMI Publishing -

Arcangues

and it also took a mishap to write enough powerful songs to feel comfortable recording an album of his own. Here's a song of his he filmed in 2011 in a rehab center, while mending his leg, with the residents as co-stars !

The Beatles were still on his mind during that period and as there wasn't much to do apart from exercice on machines, eat and sleep, to prove his point, he made a recording of a Lennon song on his tablet !

"I'm only sleeping" (Lennon/McCartney) by Private Pepper

So for Private Pepper, the time to generate new music is now ! He's what one calls a "late-bloomer". But isn't the important thing to bloom at any time, whatever the age, place, period, or one's origins ?

With his merry band of musicians, some quite young and all coming from an island (the Carribean, Mauritius, the Ile de Ré), Private Pepper will soon enter a recording studio somewhere in France. And there he will give birth to the powerful melodies that keep him up all night sometimes. There will also be special guests invited to join the party.

The songs are about travel (My China), physiotherapy (Ma kiné), growing up in the Basque country (Collé à mes Basques), musical nostalgia and emancipation (Back in 1964), love (I know a place), holidays (La fille en Ré), having a good time (Let's party) - here's a live version of the song :

Plus other songs that have had their baptism of fire at recent concerts.

As a parting gift, here's a new Private Pepper video of "WHY", directed by Amaury Voslion and featuring Franco-Senegalese rapper Abass Abass, a song composed by Pepper with lyrics by Tony Hambro.

Private Pepper's album release is due at the end of 2014.

See y'all soon !

PRIVATE PEPPER : PREMIER ALBUM