L’atelier De Musique makes his anticipated debut on Discoholics Anonymous Recordings with this steaming slice of ero-disco magnificence.
By the late ’70s, Saint-Tropez was more than just a place. It was a myth, a fever dream set to the backbeat of excess. It had been Brigitte Bardot’s escape, the playground of hustlers and heiresses, the kind of town where the line between luxury and lunacy blurred under the weight of too much champagne and not enough self-preservation.
Somewhere between the cracked mirrors of Studio 54 and the sun-bleached docks of the Côte d’Azur, a song was born.
Belle de Jour wasn’t a real person, but she might as well have been. The name was lifted from Buñuel’s 1967 film—a portrait of a housewife moonlighting as a call girl, a woman torn between civility and the raw pulse of pleasure. The film was whispered about in the same salons where Bianca Jagger toyed with a cigarette holder and Mick leaned in just close enough to know he’d already won.
The producers of Saint Tropez – the band, not the town -knew that disco wasn’t just music. It was a transaction. A ticket to the night, a passage through the velvet ropes where the price of admission wasn’t just money, but allure. They crafted Belle de Jour as a soundtrack for those who lived in the in-between spaces: the models who had come too far to turn back, the playboys who would never outrun their debts, the dreamers still believing that a summer on the Riviera could fix what winter had broken.
And so the song became a quiet legend, not for its chart-topping success (it had none), but for the people who moved to it. You’d hear it in the neon glow of a South Beach penthouse or on the hushed speakers of a cab winding its way down Sunset. It was for the ones who danced with a kind of desperation, like the night might not last, like the music was all that kept them from collapsing under the weight of their own illusions.
In the end, Saint Tropez wasn’t a song. It was a moment—a time when love and ruin held hands under a mirrored ball, spinning endlessly into the dark.
Fast forward to 2025 where L’atelier De Musique crafts a spectacular, sensual and absolutely riveting rejuvenation of the 1978 gem.
