Out come les chic

The reanimated works of Ze’s poet, composer and world citizen. By Jim Irvin.

Raised in Lyon, France, Lizzy Mercier Descloux, was a 19 year old Paris art student when she visited New York in 1975 with her beau, Michel Esteban, publisher of Paris fanzine Rock News. The couple mingled in arty circles: Patti Smith and Richard Hell contributed to Lizzy’s book of poetry, Desiderata. After founding Paris punk clothes and record store, Harry Cover, the pair moved to New York permanently in 1978. Lizzy performed in a duo, Rosa Yemen, declaiming poetry over freeform guitar, for Esteban’s label Ze, started with their friend Michael Zilkha to document the No Wave scene’s meld of postpunk, dance music and performance art. Lizzy’s first solo release, an EP of the label’s trademark “mutant disco” called Press Color, depicted her as skinny, cropped, androgynous, the height of ’79 chic. Two years later, after Ze had been picked up by Island Records, the couple went to Chris Blackwell’s Compass Point studio in Nassau to redefine her sound. “We wanted to make post-colonial music, a new sort of hybrid, mulatto music,” says Esteban, in Vivian Goldman’s notes to a new set of reissues, through Light In the Attic, of Lizzy’s four full albums. At Compass Point the sounds of Tom Tom Club, Sly & Robbie and Grace