Love Is Blue

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Love Is Blue
Written by André Popp and Pierre Cour, 1967; English lyrics by Bryan Blackburn

“Love Is Blue” began life in France as “L’amour est bleu,” with music by composer André Popp and French words by lyricist Pierre Cour. The two were already a proven team: in 1960 they had written “Tom Pillibi,” which won the Eurovision Song Contest for France. The French lyric paints love in colors and weather. Love is sweet and blue as the sky while the beloved is near, then turns gray, with rain falling and the wind crying, once they go away. When Bryan Blackburn later wrote the English words, he kept only the colors, using blue, gray, red, green, and black to trace the story of a love that has slipped away. That gives us the familiar opening, “Blue, blue, my world is blue.”

The song made its debut on April 8, 1967, at the Eurovision Song Contest in Vienna, broadcast live across Europe. Luxembourg chose it as its entry and gave it to a 17-year-old Greek-born singer billed simply as Vicky. Today we know her as Vicky Leandros. She sang it second that evening and finished a respectable fourth out of seventeen. The winner was Sandie Shaw’s “Puppet on a String.” Vicky recorded the song in several languages, including English, and it became a modest hit in parts of Europe, Japan, and Canada. She went on to win Eurovision for Luxembourg five years later with a different song. In 2026 she returned to the contest to sing “L’amour est bleu” once more, as part of the celebrations for Eurovision’s 70th contest.

The song’s real fame came from an unlikely source. French orchestra leader Paul Mauriat recorded a lush instrumental version in late 1967 for an album of the past year’s hits. By his own account, he wasn’t especially fond of the tune. He picked it because his record label, Philips, published it. Then a disc jockey in Minneapolis played the record and asked his listeners what they thought. The phones lit up, and interest spread across the country.

What those callers were hearing was a sound unlike most orchestral records of the day. Mauriat’s arrangement is built around the bright, crisp notes of a harpsichord, an instrument most of us link with music from centuries past. In the mid-1960s, though, it had become a fashionable sound in pop music. The Left Banke built “Walk Away Renée” around one in 1966, the Beatles used one on “Fixing a Hole,” and the Doors gave one a starring role in “Love Me Two Times.” The Beatles’ “In My Life” even has a solo that sounds like a harpsichord but is really a piano recorded at half speed and then sped up. Mauriat’s twist was to set the harpsichord against sweeping strings, with guitar and drums keeping a steady pop beat underneath. Easy-listening orchestras usually stayed soft and smooth, so his record had a fresh, modern sparkle that appealed to young listeners and their parents alike. The sound proved lasting. Rock guitarist Jeff Beck recorded his own version modeled on Mauriat’s in 1968, and more than thirty years later an English electronic duo, J Walk, borrowed the harpsichord riff for a 2002 track.

In February 1968, Mauriat’s “Love Is Blue” reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100 and stayed there for five weeks. It was the first record by a French artist to top that chart. No other French song managed it again until 2017. The record also spent eleven weeks at the top of Billboard’s Easy Listening chart, a record run on that chart for the next 25 years, and Billboard ranked it the number two song of 1968. In a curious twist, it sold fewer than 30,000 copies back home in France but about two million singles in the United States.

So many singers wanted a piece of the song that several versions climbed the charts at once. Among the vocal recordings, Al Martino’s was the most popular, reaching number 3 on Billboard’s Easy Listening chart and number 57 on the Hot 100. He made it the title song of a 1968 album. His warm, full voice suited the bittersweet English lyric, and his version is the one many of us still hear in our heads when we sing the words. Martino would find a whole new audience a few years later, playing the singer Johnny Fontane in The Godfather. Claudine Longet’s French-language version also charted that year, and the soul group The Dells later had a hit pairing it with “I Can Sing a Rainbow.” For a song that didn’t win its contest, “Love Is Blue” has had a remarkably long and happy life. It remains one of the very few non-winning Eurovision entries ever to become a worldwide hit.