Elli and Jacno Hand in Hand

Elli and Jacno
Main dans la main

1980

During the 1980s, Lou Stathis was the self-anointed ‘rok’ critic for Heavy Metal magazine. He specialized in being pretentious, often by referencing obscure bands operating outside the mainstream of rock music. 

I don't believe Stathis ever mentioned ‘Elli and Jacno’ in one of his Heavy Metal columns. But they certainly belonged to the techno-pop, New Wave ecology that Stathis liked to fawn over.

Elli Medeiros was a Uruguayan national who moved to France to seek a career as a singer. In 1976 she joined a French punk band called ‘Stinky Toys’, whose keyboard player was a Frenchman named Denis Quillard, who went by the stage name ‘Jacno’. When Stinky Toys broke up in 1979, Medeiros and Quillard formed ‘Elli and Jacno’, a synth-pop duo that had success in Europe and released four albums over the interval from 1980 to 1984.

Their 1980 album, Tout va sauter (‘Everything Will Blow’), featured the song Main dans la main (‘Hand in Hand’). There are several video clips of the song on YouTube. 

These songs from Elli and Jacno are very listenable examples of early 80s EuroPop. Also worth a listen is another minimalist synth-pop tune called Tic Tac Tic.

With her vinyl / leather short skirts and long brown locks, the photogenic Elli was the inheritor of the style and appearance of classic French female vocalists like Francoise Hardy and Jane Birkin. Indeed, despite the passage of 40 years, Elli remains the exemplar of the New Wave chick........!