Grand Popo Football Club

Grand Popo Football Club is Ariel Wizman (b. Morocco) and Nicolas Errera (b. France), a DJ/book-loving television presenter/chat show host and producer/classically trained pianist who studied at the National Conservatory in Paris, respectively. The duo apparently adopted their unusual moniker after Wizman visited the West African village of Grand Popo to film a television programme and decided that the community was missing a football club. After studying piano, composition, and electronic music, Errera became involved in theatre and successfully directed short films (winning the Clemant Ferrant prize for his Going To Dieppe Without Seeing The Sea) as well as becoming half of pop duo 2 Source. Wizman, meanwhile, DJed at Colombian parties in Paris. He became renowned for his show on Radio Nova that mixed easy listening, soundtracks, and electronic music. When the show transferred to television, Wizman brought in guests as disparate as Johnny Rotten and German philosophers: fortuitously, his guests also included 2 Source, an invite that rekindled Wizman and Errera’s previous friendship. Grand Popo FC’s first recording appeared on the Source Lab 3 compilation in 1996, but they did not release their debut, Shampoo Victims, until 2000 (the album was re-released two years later). Together the duo creates Gallic pop that seems to revere and revile the music of peers such as Daft Punk, Air, and Cassius in equal measure. They dubbed a song that sounded curiously like the former ‘One More Song On The Market’ while ‘Nothing To Say In A House Song’ railed against the duo’s perceived vacuousness in house music by (vacuously) repeating the title over and over. Shampoo Victims also included a duo of collaborations with friends/heroes Sparks. Russell and Ron Mael provide both lyrics and vocals on the album’s best tracks ‘La Nuit Est Là’ and ‘Yo Quinero Mas Dinero’. As if to accentuate this fondness for 70s/80s pop, the duo also sampled Giorgio Moroder’s ‘Love Fever’ on ‘Each Finger Has An Attitude’. Nevertheless, Shampoo Victims seemed curiously slight and never as clever as Wizman and Errera probably imagined.