"L'amour est bleu" (Love Is Blue") is a song whose music was composed by André Popp, and whose lyrics were written by Pierre Cour, in 1967. Bryan Blackburn later wrote English-language lyrics for it.
First performed in French by Greek singer Vicky Leandros (appearing as Vicky) as the Luxembourgish entry in the Eurovision Song Contest 1967, it has since been recorded by many other musicians, most notably French orchestra leader Paul Mauriat, whose familiar instrumental version (recorded in late 1967) became the only number-one hit by a French lead artist to top the Billboard Hot 100 in America.
The song describes the pleasure and pain of love in terms of colours (blue and grey) and elements (water and wind). The English lyrics ("Blue, blue, my world is blue …") focus on colours only (blue, grey, red, green, and black), using them to describe components of lost love.
The English version by Vicky Leandros also appeared as "Colours of Love" in some locations including the UK.
PAUL MAURIAT VERSION
According to Paul Mauriat, who conducted/recorded an orchestral "easy listening" version of "Love Is Blue", he chose the song because it was published by his label, Philips Records even though he was not fond of the song. A DJ in Minneapolis played the recording and asked the audience to respond, and was inundated phone calls about the song, and interest in the song then quickly spread around the country.
The song became a number-one hit in the USA for five weeks in February and March 1968, the first recording by a French artist to top the Billboard Hot 100. (It remained the only French song to top the chart until 2017, when Daft Punk was a featured artist on Canadian artist The Weeknd's number-one hit "Starboy".)
Mauriat's version became a gold record, and its five-week run at the top is the second longest of any instrumental of the Hot 100 era, after "Theme from A Summer Place". The song also spent 11 weeks atop Billboard's Easy Listening survey, and held the longest-lasting title honours on this chart for 25 years. Billboard ranked the record as the No. 2 song for 1968. It is the best-known version of the song in the United States.
The Mauriat recording also reached No. 2 in Canada[14] (No. 12 Year End) and No. 12 on the UK Singles Chart. The Mauriat album containing "Love Is Blue", Blooming Hits, also reached No. 1 on the Billboard Top LP's and Tapes chart for five weeks. The song sold fewer than 30,000 units in France, but 2 million singles and 800,000 LPs were sold in the US.
Mauriat's version was featured repeatedly in an episode of Chris Carter's television series Millennium titled "A Room with No View", which originally aired on 24 April 1998 on the Fox Network. During the episode, the omnipresent melody is used by a kidnapper to brainwash a group of youths.
His version is also briefly heard in The Simpsons episodes "There's No Disgrace Like Home" and "The Blue and the Gray." It was played over the closing credits of Mad Men's sixth-season episode "The Flood", which takes place during April 1968. The harpsichord riff from Mauriat's version was also sampled by the English electronica duo J Walk in their song "French Letter", as part of their 2002 album A Night on the Rocks.