Hollywood Mon Amour 'Hollywood Mon Amour' album

Marc Collin, the Parisian composer who single-handedly changed the way we thought about Depeche Mode and Visage by – as Nouvelle Vague – daringly rearranging their songs with bossa nova beats and sultry chanteuses, is now chasing a very different ambition: to change the way we feel about 1980s soundtracks. From “Eye of the Tiger” to “Flashdance…What a Feeling),” Hollywood, Mon Amour strips away the dated bombast and overblown synthesizers, the shoulder pads and eyeliner, to reveal songs underneath that you could never even imagine existed.

Hollywood in the 1980s was the port of call for post-punk bands who had reached the mainstream. From Simple Minds to Blondie, the call up for a film soundtrack was the sign that you had hit the big leagues, and soon you too would be recording a slice of Giorgio-Moroder-pop hysteria, a scene where a stripper with a perm was dancing for her life or Rocky Balboa was pounding the streets of Philadelphia.

Even this Frenchman who loves to champion the musical underdog knew he had a challenge on his hands, a different kind of challenge. He was no longer dealing with the cool, underground songs of his youth. He was dealing with records that sounded dated and cheesy – some of which even he wasn't a fan of.

But Collin is a cerebral, curious man and he wanted to prove that there was something more. Like a musical archaeologist he painstakingly dug through the layers of garish production to find the forgotten bones of the song beneath. "Everything that was produced in the 80s sounds unfashionable now but if you take a song like “Flashdance…What a Feeling” and really break it down to the chords, you find a classic harmony there. You can interpret the emotion in another way -- maybe this girl is not winning but she has failed all her dance exams. You get a totally different feeling from it."

It may be hard to believe, but Hollywood, Mon Amour will turn songs you had forgotten into songs you will fall in love with. Where there was once a garish palette of squealing guitar solos and high-five vocals, Collin manages to find fragile colors and tender melancholy. Some of the coolest young female singers around were queuing up to work with Collin, too, including Skye from Morcheeba, Brazilian hipster Cibelle and appropriately Hollywood's own rock chick, Juliette Lewis.

"I tried to imagine what these songs would sound like if they had been recorded 20 years before. I had to excavate and imagine what chords or harmonies might have been taken out in the production. I'm not really sure if I am trying to find the treasure underneath -- I'm not sure some of these songs have treasure -- but I have striven to create something new and interesting."

He is serious about the philosophical investigation of his work, affectionate for the creativity and excitement of the decade of excess, and proud of how Hollywood, Mon Amour opens up infinite musical possibilities, "In modern life you can't do anything new. In Hollywood right now, old films are continually being re-made. What I am doing is the same: I am playing with all of musical culture and recreating songs with sounds from other decades. It is a very post-modern way to work. I have proved I can do it with good songs so it was good to prove I could do it with bad songs. Maybe, in the end, people will realize that what it is they like is what I do."

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Hollywood Mon Amour - Hollywood Mon Amour