Anne Pigalle - Biography

Biography

Anne Pigalle grew up in Paris (in Montmartre precisely). She was brought up in an artistic home, her father being a jazz musician and her mother an art/fashion student who made clothes for Brigitte Bardot.

Before she was ten years old, she was selected by the school choir who said she had 'the golden voice of an angel'. As a teenager, she played guitar in an all-girl band, hanging out with Punk musicians in Paris and London. She appeared in cult magazines such as ID Magazine No. 2, Grabuge and Facade, who nicknamed her 'Anne Baby Love'.

In the early 1980s, she moved to London, performed the clubs, made some recordings with Adrian Sherwood of On-U Sound and recorded for Channel 4 an opera called 'The Kiss', written by Michael Nyman and produced by David Cunningham from The Flying Lizards. She then signed a contract with Trevor Horn’s ZTT Records and released an album on ZTT/Island Records in 1985 called Everything Could Be So Perfect, which established her as the modern Edith Piaf. The poster for the single He! Stranger appeared all over London, picturing her in front of a red velvet curtain, and it has been mentioned to be reminiscent of Lynch's later Twin Peaks.

Anne Pigalle then appeared in many magazines, including covers such as ID Magazine.

In 1986, Miss Pigalle revamped the famous club, the Café de Paris in Piccadilly, London, with a new concept 'Les Nuits Du Mercredi'. It attracted thousands, including Andy Warhol. By then, Anne Pigalle favoured singing at vintage clubs of an old-fashioned glamour; in Tokyo, promoters found a similar club to the Cafe de Paris for her to perform in. She also played at Ronnie Scott's, before an audience including Joni Mitchell.

She was photographed by Lord Snowdon, Mario Testino and Nick Knight; her music and image were used in Japanese TV commercials for Jean-Paul Gaultier and Karl Lagerfeld. Around that time she toured Japan and Europe. In 1989, she performed for TV arts programme The South Bank Show for the anniversary of the French Revolution. Other TV appearances included The Tube (in the UK), Ardisson's Bains de Minuit (in France), Japan and Mexico, etc.

While in LA in the 1990s, Anne Pigalle played with Leonard Cohen's musicians, played with John Lee Hooker's musicians in South Central Babe's and Ricky's, and recorded some songs with Cypress Hill producer Jason Roberts. She was voted 5th Best Performer Of The Year by LA radio station KCRW Morning Becomes Eclectic. Following her idol Edith Piaf, Pigalle played an intimate show at Chateau Marmont, Los Angeles, where a few Hollywood celebrities attended, among them Iggy Pop and Courtney Love. Around that time, Miss Pigalle met Nancy Sinatra and Donald Cammell, the late legendary director of British cinema classic Performance (starring Mick Jagger), who loved her music and was interested in directing her screenplay.

From 2001 (mostly in London), Anne produced an incredible amount of work, including home movies and videos, electronic tracks, polaroid self-portraits, paintings, poems, curating events in nightclubs, writing an autobiographical screenplay, appearing in cult films, developing her art performances and the Amerotic Salons. The Amerotic Salon has been performed at The Colony Room (Francis Bacon's old club in London) and at the Glastonbury Festival. In 2005-2007, she had successful exhibitions with her paintings and self-portrait polaroids (for which she created visual sets, erotic masks and crowns of flowers) at the Charing Cross Gallery, the Michael Hoppen gallery (the show was voted 4th best in The Times), and the Aquarium Gallery. She called her art 'amerotic', 'âme' means 'soul' in French. In 2007, she launched a night at the Grill Room, Café Royal, called Spirit Of Ecstasy, where she performed a futuristic cabaret show along with bohemian poet friends. In 2009 and 2010, she was invited to sing sold-out shows in Mexico and at the prestigious Tuareg Festival au Désert in Timbuktu, Mali, Africa.

Anne Pigalle had travelled the world and had no fixed abode for twenty years.

In 2010 and 2011, Anne Pigalle released the trilogy, L'âmerotica Part I and II, which includes the song With My Blonde, a song famous for the fact that the accompanying video cost no money to produce (as seen on YouTube), and L'âme érotique was released on iTunes, 21 surreal and erotic vignettes of poetry put to music. In June 2011, she announced in Bizarre Magazine that her next recordings will be a collection of torch songs. In the September issue of Stimulus Magazine, she revealed her love for the Greek philosophers. In November 2011, The Quietus webzine supported and reestablished Anne Pigalle’s stature as a major force on the music scene, followed by the December 2011 issue of Dazed And Confused, which finally revealed an appropriate history of her life that previously few people knew.

She has been compared in many magazines reviews to Edith Piaf and Marlene Dietrich.