Down Through The Top: Gary Moore, "Parisienne Walkways '93"
A rigorous inquiry into why an oft-kilter and out-of-time Irish blues classic somehow became a hit single in France.
Charts History: stayed 15 weeks in the Top 50 ; entered at #34 on June 7, 1993 ; peaked at #9 on June 20, 1993
“Parisienne Walkways ‘93” is a paradoxical song. The sole Gary Moore entry in France’s Top 50, peaking at number nine in June 1993, is both an anomaly and a typical single of that era. For the most part, it’s a blues instrumental, backed by an orchestra, and decorated with two brief verses—far from an obvious hit. And it’s actually an old song, the live recording of a Moore single from 1979. These two traits should make “Parisienne Walkways” a charts oddity, but in the early nineteen-nineties, it was not completely out of the ordinary for an outlier to capture the mainstream. Not in a country where “Song of Ocarina”, an instrumental duet by French cello player Jean-Pierre Audin and Argentinian flutist Diego Modena, could chart for 32 weeks. And not in a country where “Black Betty”, a hard rock song from 1977, could peak at number two 17 year after its release, thanks to a late placement in a TV ad for a perfume brand.
Yet still, there is something truly strange about the French success of “Parisienne Walkways ‘93”, something that the song’s timeless sheen, nor its Parisian backdrop, can fully explain. Unlike “Black Betty”, the song wasn’t propelled by shrewd TV licensing. It was not a movie song. It was not an international hit, not even in Ireland, where Gary Moore was already a rock deity. Moore wasn’t a commercial titan in France, and he was very much alive, unlike icons like Bob Marley and Freddie Mercury, whose labels had been mining posthumous hits out of older songs.
Even the song’s relationship with the French capital seems incidental. Born in Belfast, Gary Moore had moved in Dublin as a teenager during the conflict in Northern Ireland. He joined a blues rock band named Skid Row, where he met a singer and bass player called Phil Lynott. Neither stayed long in the group. Moore moved on to a role of session musician, while Lynott, on his way to be a rock legend, became the lead singer of hard rock band Thin Lizzy.
The pair reconnected in 1978, when Moore joined Thin Lizzy as a back-up guitarist while the group was touring the US in support of Queen. At the time, Moore was recording his first solo album, Back On The Streets. Phil Lynott contributed to three tracks, including the 47 words of “Parisienne Walkways”, Gary Moore’s soon-to-be signature song (the original version reached number eight in the UK).
Phil Lynott was born in 1949 from an Afro-Guyanese father and an Irish mother. His parents parted ways when he was four. A rock star at 26, Lynott had briefly, and reluctantly, reconnected with his dad, but the two never got really closer. The “Parisienne Walkways” lyrics, that Lynott suggested, are a short poem about bygone days in Paris, with an undisclosed “you” and some “old Beaujolais wine” (a reference it took me 28 years plus one Google search to finally understand). The song was reportedly Lynott’s own enigmatic way to address the absence of his father, named Cecil Parris.
That detail was probably lost to the French audience in 1993, the mention of “Champs-Élysées” being just enough for us all to believe “Parisienne Walkways ‘93” was only a black-and-white postcard. In hindsight, the Paris/Parris double entendre adds a layer of mystery to the song, the two verses barely sketching the scene before vanishing away without offering any resolution.
I remember Paris in '49
The Champs Élysées, Saint Michel
And old Beaujolais wine
And I recall that you were mine
In those Parisienne days
Looking back at the photographs
Those summer days spent outside corner cafes
Oh, I could write you paragraphs
About my old Parisienne days
Phil Lynott would never witness the success of the “Parisienne Walkways” reprise, nor the enduring popularity of Thin Lizzy, a group that went through several incarnations and was still planning for a new tour in 2022. The singer, who suffered from heavy drug addictions, died in January 1986, at age 36.
Prior to Lynott’s contribution, “Parisienne Walkways” had been envisioned as an instrumental ballad, riffing on the melody of “Blue Bossa”, a jazz standard from 1963. Gary Moore recorded the ‘93 version during a concert at the Royal Albert Hall in London. The radio edit is five-minute long, and consists mostly of an unrestrained guitar solo that functions as a response to Moore’s Parisian nostalgia. (Shouts to the crowd member who sneaks in a perfect whistle right before the first verse. He almost deserves a songwriting credit for that.)
I actually remembered the song as a full-on instrumental, because my memory got stuck on its signature moment: two minutes in, after the second verse, Gary Moore sustains, for twenty-seven seconds, a high note on his guitar, a Gibson Les Paul. If you listened to French radio in 1993, twenty-seven seconds of a screeching note was a glitch in the system, and “Parisienne Walkways” certainly became a litmus test for many impatient listeners (when the song played in our car, my father would resist for maybe ten seconds before skipping to another station).
All of these elements—the structure, the high note, the mild anachronism—make the charts success of “Parisienne Walkways ‘93” all the more uncanny. Even though it was already Moore’s definitive song, France is the only country in the world where the single made a dent. It came and went in the UK, peaking at number 32 in May 1993, and it didn’t really register in Ireland either, based on my own survey of one (my good friend Enda, a proud Irishman who told me about the Phil Lynott statue in central Dublin, had never heard about it). And we’re talking about a time when dance god Haddaway was number one, so… why?
A possible explanation could be that Virgin Records, the label behind the song, propelled it out of sheer gusto. At the time, Virgin had a knack for out-of-nowhere hit singles: “Mets de l’huile”, a Virgin-produced reggae curiosity recorded by Toulouse band Regg’Lyss, was number two in the Top 50 when “Parisienne Walkways” exited the charts in September 1993. Maybe Virgin turned the song into a hit just because they could.
To get to the bottom of it, I reached out to a former Virgin A&R. He pointed me to another record exec who, at the time, was in charge of international repertoire at Virgin, and shall remain anonymous. I sent him a message on LinkedIn, then on Facebook. I was certain he would be glad to share some stories about the good old industry days, but as it turned out, not really. His reply was brusque, and the fact that in took place on Facebook, of all places, gave his answer an air of boomer anger that felt completely at home among posts from old acquaintances turned crackpots who raged about COVID vaccines. When I asked him why “Parisienne Walkways” had been such an insular hit, his exact response was:
“I have no idea! Who are you? And why do you care about this?”
There you go. For a while, I was frustrated not having a satisfying explanation—my email to a Gary Moore fan club also went unanswered—but somehow that A&R guy said it all. Let’s translate it with kindness: sometimes hit songs just happen, and easy marketing ideas just works, like pushing a single containing the word “Parisienne” to French radios. There’s no science to that, so don’t ask about it. And rudeness is very French, and French are world-class chauvinists, so yes, maybe, in the France of 1993, all it took for a foreign song was to name-drop les Champs-Élysées to become an everlasting classic. Sometimes, the greatest mystery is no mystery at all.
If you like aimless digressions about older pop singles, Down Through The Top is a series of essays on songs from the French charts in the nineteen-nineties. It’s a tribute to my golden years a Top 50 enthusiast, and an excuse to follow vintage pop songs into the rabbit hole. The series is inspired by Stereogum’s The Number Ones, by writer Tom Breihan. The previous entry, published only two years ago, was about Genesis’ “Hold On My Heart”.