album rating: ★★★★☆
Genre
Bubblegum pop, new wave, and synth-pop. The album fuses the then-emerging electronic sound of Telex with a playful, irreverent vocal presence, blending post-disco grooves, electro-pop, and a faint undertow of punk into a deceptively carefree whole whose lyrics frequently conceal erotic double meanings beneath a sugary surface.
Release
Released in 1980 by Ariola (Benelux and Spain) and Arabella (France), recorded in 1979–1980.
Production
Produced by Marc Moulin and Dan Lacksman, two-thirds of the Belgian electro-trio Telex, who were instrumental in introducing synthesizer-driven production into Belgian and French pop. The track "Le Banana Split" was separately produced by Jacno (Marcel Kanche), the French punk and new wave musician who had also composed the song.
Reception
The album was an immediate sensation in France and Belgium. The lead single "Le Banana Split", already a number-one hit in France in 1979, sold over two million copies. The follow-up "Amoureux solitaires" — a cover of "Lonely Lovers" by the French punk band Stinky Toys, with translated lyrics by Jacques Duvall — was also a major hit. The album established Lio as the defining pop starlet of early 1980s francophone Europe and launched one of the most distinctive careers of the era.
Lio
Lio (born Vanda Maria Ribeiro Furtado Tavares de Vasconcelos, June 17, 1962, Mangualde, Portugal) is a Portuguese-Belgian singer and actress. Following her parents' divorce, she moved with her mother to Brussels in 1968, where she was encouraged to pursue music by lyricist Jacques Duvall, a family friend. She took her stage name from a character in Jean-Claude Forest's Barbarella comic series. Her debut album made her the dominant female pop figure in francophone Europe during the 1980s. She later collaborated with Sparks on Suite Sixtine (1982) and with John Cale on Pop Model (1986), and pursued a parallel acting career in films by Chantal Akerman and Claude Lelouch. She was named a Knight of the Order of the Crown of Belgium in 2004. In 2018 she released Lio Canta Caymmi, her first album recorded entirely in Portuguese, her mother tongue.
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