Era

The lyrics of "Ameno" were not written by Éric Lévi alone. The credits on Era's first album split the track in two: the music is his and the text is signed by him and by Guy Protheroe, an Englishman who also sings it. Protheroe conducts the English Chamber Choir, the choir that recorded the project's albums, and he has a second profession that appears on no sleeve: he is a forensic musicologist. He has spent more than thirty-five years giving expert evidence in music copyright disputes —the University of Birmingham described him in June 2023 as one of the most eminent expert musicologists in the field— and he is listed in the British expert-witness registers as a forensic musicologist. The New York Times interviewed him as one on the eleventh of October 2016, in the profile headlined "The Man Musicians Call When Two Tunes Sound Alike", which was about his colleague Peter Oxendale. The syllables that sound sacred and mean nothing were written by the expert witness who gets called in to rule on whether one song sounds too much like another.

The expert witness who sings in the choir

Protheroe was born in Worcester in 1947, was a chorister at Canterbury Cathedral and studied music on a scholarship at Magdalen College, Oxford. He conducts the English Chamber Choir, founded in 1972, which before Era had already recorded with Vangelis on 1492: Conquest of Paradise, with Rick Wakeman on Journey to the Centre of the Earth in 1974 and on the stage production of Tommy, by The Who, between 1972 and 1973. On the Era records there are no monks and there is no star soloist: there is a professional London choir and session singers with first names and surnames.

They are in the credits. On "Ameno" the singers are Protheroe and Harriet Jay; the guitar, the bass and the drums are by Philippe Manca; the choral parts were recorded at Abbey Road, at CTS and at Metropolis, and the guitars, the keyboards and the voices at Real World Studios in Bath. Protheroe also co-writes the text of "Enae Volare (Mezzo)". And there is a third lyricist, Florence Dedam, who signs and sings "Mother" and "After Time", in English and with no pseudo-Latin. The bass on the debut is played by Lee Sklar, the session bassist of James Taylor and Jackson Browne; on later albums Chester Thompson and Daryl Stuermer, from the Genesis live band, turn up.

That the language means nothing is deliberate, and it is worth saying it precisely: "ameno" is a perfectly ordinary word in Spanish and in Portuguese, and amoenus exists in classical Latin. What does not mean anything is the whole of it, written on purpose so that every listener can put into it whatever they like. Out of that came a parallel phenomenon: there are lyrics websites that publish supposed Spanish translations — one of them titled "Libérame" — which turn the gibberish into a coherent text about liberation and pain, and on TikTok the idea circulates that it is a mantra or a hidden message. They are not translations of anything. They are inventions on top of a text written empty.

Two of Téléphone were in the first line-up

Lévi, born Éric Jacques Levisalles in Paris on the twenty-third of December 1955, is a guitarist, and he started out in hard rock. In 1975, in Paris, he founded with the singer Fabienne Shine a group called Speedball which immediately became Shakin' Street, after a song by the MC5. The initial line-up was five: Fabienne Shine on vocals, Éric Lévi on guitar and vocals, Louis Bertignac on second guitar, Corine Marienneau on bass and Jean-Lou Kalinowski on drums and percussion. Bertignac and Marienneau left early, after internal friction, and founded the group Téléphone with Jean-Louis Aubert.

What was left of Shakin' Street was two albums and an American tour. Vampire Rock (CBS, 1978) was recorded at Olympic Studios in London and sold more than twenty-five thousand copies in France; between 1979 and 1980 the group toured the United States with Blue Öyster Cult, Cheap Trick, Pat Travers, Journey and AC/DC. The second album, Shakin' Street (Columbia, 1980), also released as Solid as a Rock, was produced by Sandy Pearlman, who brought in Ross "the Boss" Friedman — the future Manowar — as lead guitarist; it reached number forty in Sweden and earned them a support slot on the Black and Blue Tour of Black Sabbath and Blue Öyster Cult. They broke up in 1981. Lévi went off to New York, where he worked with Marianne Faithfull, and returned to Paris in 1992.

The epic choir came out of a comedy

He came back to work in the cinema, and that is where the origin of the project lies. Between 1991 and 1998 Lévi signed seven French film scores, five of them before Era's first album and five for the same director, Jean-Marie Poiré: L'Opération Corned-Beef in 1991, Les Visiteurs in 1993, Les Anges gardiens in 1995 and Les Couloirs du temps : Les Visiteurs 2 in 1998, plus commissions for Jeannot Szwarc, Patrick Malakian and Didier Kaminka. For La Vengeance d'une blonde, in 1994, he co-wrote the closing-credits song "People and Places" with Roxanne Seeman and with Philip Bailey, of Earth, Wind & Fire, recorded by Dee Dee Bridgewater and Bailey.

Les Visiteurs, released on the twenty-seventh of January 1993, was an event: almost fourteen million admissions in France and the fifth most-watched French film in history. For it Lévi wrote a choral piece in the manner of Carmina Burana mixed with electric guitars. That piece is called "Enae Volare" and it is, exactly, the complete Era formula three years before Era existed; it reappears as "Enae Volare (Mezzo)" on the project's first album. At the nineteenth César awards, in 1994, Lévi was nominated for best original score for that soundtrack and lost to Khaled for Un, deux, trois, soleil.

And he settled it himself, when he finally spoke: "the money from Les Visiteurs allowed me to record the first Era album". The project was not born out of a studio notion or out of a reading of the market. It was born out of a film commission, with the choir and the guitars already written into the score of a time-travel comedy, and it was recorded with what that box office paid for.

Radio came last, and the label wrote the script

The single "Ameno" came out on the first of June 1996 on Polygram, in France, and the album Era that same year; it was reissued in 1998. The two dates that keep coming up are both true and they do not say the same thing: the record is from 1996 and the wave is from 1997 and 1998. The single's chart table is headed by those two years, and Germany pushed it up to number twelve in January 1998. The album was number one in France, in Wallonia, in Finland, in Sweden and in Portugal, and number two in Germany, in Norway and in Switzerland; the single reached number two in Wallonia and number five in France and in Sweden. In 1998 the record was certified diamond in France, for one million copies.

The order of the factors was explained by the label without beating about the bush. Monica Marin, vice-president of continental repertoire marketing at PolyGram Europe, in Billboard on the twenty-ninth of August 1998: "we got the album into the charts before the first single", and once it was seen entering the top 20, she said, "then we got radio support". And radio only came to the party when it was confronted with the music's popularity. The same executive described the strategy — "We are definitely building a brand with Era" — and said that the Era logo was being used on every display unit and as the sleeve. The engine was the shop, the television and the advertising, and the invented language was a selling point, because it left no language barrier to get over.

On that same page is the contrast that defines the project. PolyGram declared three and a half million copies sold in a year, almost three of them in Europe, and barely thirty thousand or so in the United States, despite the MasterCard advertisement for the 1998 World Cup that used "Ameno". And there too appears the comparison that everybody repeats as if it came from the author: it was Billboard that placed the record in the footsteps of projects such as Adiemus, Deep Forest, Enigma, Sacred Spirit and Stone Age. Lévi speaks in that same piece and does not mention Enigma: he defines his music as "an imaginary soundtrack for a 21st-century movie". The Enigma trail was laid by the industry, not by him.

Afterwards he kept quiet for twenty-three years. Lévi did not give an interview until Le Parisien of the twenty-fifth of March 2019, and then he explained why: "contrary to what people believe, the media ignored us. So we decided to play the mystery card, with no radio, no television, no press and no photographs on the record". He also recounted that "for a year I was thrown out of every record company before I found the person who was interested in my project" — Yan-Philippe Blanc, of Mercury, who persuaded Pascal Nègre to sign it — and that his past and his present are not so far apart: "hard rock and Era's music have the same taste for the epic and for efficiency". On the eighteenth of April of that year Era went onstage for the first time, at La Seine Musicale in Boulogne-Billancourt, and in November and December a European tour followed that took in the Forest National in Brussels, with thirty-one people on the stage.

From Carmina Burana to amapiano

The work went on, and it was not the accident of a single song. Era 2 came out on the twenty-first of June 2000 and was number two in France and in Wallonia, number four in Switzerland and French platinum with three hundred thousand copies. The Mass, of the twenty-sixth of February 2003, was number one in Italy, two in Switzerland, four in France and ten in the Netherlands and in Sweden, with platinum in France and in Switzerland, ten years after the debut. Then came Reborn in 2008, number six in France; Era Classics in 2009, number three, and Classics II in 2010, both of them reinterpretations of Bach, Verdi, Vivaldi, Mozart, Beethoven and Tchaikovsky; The 7th Sword in 2017 and, in 2022, the first live album. The track that gives The Mass its title openly adapts "O Fortuna", from Carl Orff's Carmina Burana, the same reference Lévi had invoked in 1993, now with no disguise; and it dragged along a notable hoax, because in China it circulated for years labelled as a war song of the first SS Panzer division, to the point that Chinese encyclopedias have had to deny it in writing and recall that the origin is in Orff.

Meanwhile "Ameno" kept coming back every so often by routes that were not Lévi's. On the fifth of March 2001 a DJ Quicksilver remix took it into the clubs: number six in Wallonia, twelve in Spain, thirteen in Austria and eighteen in Germany. In 2012 Vincent Niclo recorded it with the Red Army Choirs. And on the seventeenth of December 2019 the "Dorime" meme was born, out of a montage with the dog Cheems uploaded to YouTube by a youtuber, with a resurgence on TikTok at the beginning of 2020.

The biggest leap came on the sixteenth of June 2021, and Era did not make that one either. The Ghanaian producer Nektunez, Noble Zogli, released the "Ameno Amapiano Remix" with the Nigerian singer Goya Menor, and the result overflowed any measure: number one on Billboard's World Digital Song Sales in December 2021, number one on the Shazam Global 200, seventh on the first Billboard U.S. Afrobeats Songs chart in March 2022 and, by February of that year, close to ten billion views on TikTok. David Guetta remixed the remix, Shaquille O'Neal and Paul Pogba did the dance and the track became the anthem of the Nigerian Detty December. It was not a lawsuit: Nektunez recounted on video that he had released it with a temporary licence without knowing that he needed full clearance for the sample, that when the track blew up the original's label claimed it, that the song was pulled from Apple Music and from Spotify and that it came back to the platforms once the licence was regularised, handled by Sony Music. Sony, he said, arrived at exactly the right moment.

What to remember

Era was not born in a studio: it was born in the cinema. The pseudo-Gregorian choir with electric guitars that everybody associates with the nineties was written by Éric Lévi for a French time-travel comedy released in January 1993, and the first album was recorded with what that film paid for. Before that Lévi had been a hard rock guitarist in a group whose first line-up lost two members who left to found Téléphone. And the story that puts him in Enigma's shadow belongs to the industry: in the piece where that comparison appears, he talks about an imaginary soundtrack for a 21st-century movie and does not name Enigma.

The rest is figures and a trade. Three and a half million copies in a year, almost three in Europe and thirty thousand in the United States; a French diamond; an Italian number one ten years after the debut; and a song from 1996 that keeps coming back in the form of a club remix, of a meme and of an amapiano hit with billions of plays on top of it. At the centre, the detail that puts everything in order: the words that mean nothing were written not by the composer alone but also by the choir director who sings them and who, when he is not conducting, rules in court on whether two melodies sound too much alike. When that enormous choir comes up singing a language that does not exist, there is the expert witness, setting down in writing the syllables that could not sound like anything.

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Sources

Era is a French musical project created by the composer and guitarist Éric Lévi, real name Éric Jacques Levisalles (b. 23 December 1955, Paris), its only permanent member: it is not a band but a composer with session musicians and singers. Labels: Polygram, Mercury and Philips in France, later Universal. Lévi is alive and active; he gave interviews in 2019 and in 2026 and has performed live with Era since 2019. Before that he founded in Paris, in 1975, the hard rock group Speedball, renamed Shakin' Street after a song by the MC5, with Fabienne Shine (vocals) and, in the initial line-up, Louis Bertignac (second guitar), Corine Marienneau (bass) and Jean-Lou Kalinowski (drums and percussion); Bertignac and Marienneau left the group after internal friction and founded Téléphone with Jean-Louis Aubert. Shakin' Street albums: "Vampire Rock" (CBS, 1978), recorded at Olympic Studios, London, more than 25,000 copies in France, and "Shakin' Street" (Columbia, 1980), also released as "Solid as a Rock", produced by Sandy Pearlman and with Ross "the Boss" Friedman — the future Manowar — on lead guitar, no. 40 in Sweden. American tour of 1979-1980 with Blue Öyster Cult, Cheap Trick, Pat Travers, Journey and AC/DC, and as support act on the Black and Blue Tour of Black Sabbath and Blue Öyster Cult. The group broke up in 1981; Lévi settled in New York, worked with Marianne Faithfull and returned to Paris in 1992. Film scores: "L'Opération Corned-Beef" (1991), "Les Visiteurs" (1993), "La Vengeance d'une blonde" and "Pourquoi maman est dans mon lit ?" (1994), "Les Anges gardiens" (1995), "Ma femme me quitte" (1996), "Les Sœurs Soleil" (1997), "Les Couloirs du temps : Les Visiteurs 2" (1998), "Les Filles du botaniste" (2006) and "Les Visiteurs : La Révolution" (2016); five of them for Jean-Marie Poiré. "Les Visiteurs" was released on 27 January 1993 and totalled 13,782,991 admissions in France, the fifth most-watched French film in history; at the 19th César awards (1994) it had 8 nominations and won one, Valérie Lemercier's for supporting actress, and Lévi lost the best original score award to Khaled for "Un, deux, trois, soleil". For that film he composed a choral piece "in the manner of Carmina Burana" mixed with electric guitars: "Enae Volare", which reappears as "Enae Volare (Mezzo)" on Era's first album. Lévi: "the money from Les Visiteurs allowed me to record the first Era album" (Le Parisien, 25 March 2019). For "La Vengeance d'une blonde" he co-wrote "People and Places" with Philip Bailey (Earth, Wind & Fire) and Roxanne Seeman, recorded by Dee Dee Bridgewater and Philip Bailey. The single "Ameno" was released on 1 June 1996 (Polygram, France): music by Lévi, lyrics by Lévi and Guy Protheroe, production by Lévi, vocals by Protheroe and Harriet Jay, guitar, bass and drums by Philippe Manca and choir by the English Chamber Choir; choral parts recorded at Abbey Road, CTS and Metropolis (London), and guitars, keyboards and vocals at Real World Studios (Bath). Chart placings of the single: no. 2 Wallonia, no. 5 France, no. 5 Sweden, no. 12 Germany (entry on 5 January 1998), no. 32 Iceland; no. 100 of the 1997 Eurochart Hot 100, no. 42 of the 1998 Border Breakers Top 50 and no. 61 of the 1998 German year-end chart. Certifications for the single: 3× platinum in Switzerland (150,000), platinum in Poland (100,000), gold in Belgium (1997) and gold in Spain (1998). The album "Era" (Tranman/Mercury/Philips, 1996; 40:23; reissued in 1998) was no. 1 in France, Wallonia, Finland, Sweden and Portugal, no. 2 in Germany, Norway and Switzerland, no. 4 in the Netherlands, no. 9 in Hungary, no. 20 in Flanders, no. 41 in Austria, no. 52 in Italy and no. 53 in Australia; no. 3 of the French year-end chart for 1997, no. 7 of the Swedish year-end chart for 1997 and no. 25 of the 1997 European Top 100 Albums. Certifications: diamond in France in 1998 (1,000,000), 2× platinum in Argentina and in Sweden (1998), platinum in Belgium (1997), in the Netherlands, in Norway and in Finland (52,717, 1998), 2× gold in Mexico (1999) and gold in Canada (1999). PolyGram declared 3,500,000 copies sold in a year, almost 3,000,000 of them in Europe, and some 30,000 in the United States, despite the MasterCard advertisement for the 1998 World Cup that used "Ameno" (Billboard, 29 August 1998, p. 101); Music & Media gave 3,500,000 in Europe on 19 December 1998. In that Billboard piece, Monica Marin, vice-president of continental repertoire marketing at PolyGram Europe: "we got the album into the charts before the first single… then we got radio support", "Radio only came to the party when confronted with the music's popularity" and "We are definitely building a brand with Era"; and Lévi defines the record as "an imaginary soundtrack for a 21st-century movie". The comparison with Adiemus, Deep Forest, Enigma, Sacred Spirit and Stone Age is Billboard's, not Lévi's: no statement of his about Enigma was found. Other lyricists and voices: Florence Dedam (lyrics and vocals of "Mother" and "After Time"), Eric Geisen ("Cathar Rhythm"), Murielle Lefebvre ("Enae Volare (Mezzo)") and Lena Jinnegren (four tracks on "The Mass"); Lee "Leland" Sklar on bass and Philippe Manca on guitars and mandolin on the debut, and Chester Thompson and Daryl Stuermer, from the Genesis live band, on later albums. Guy Protheroe: British, b. Worcester, 1947; chorister at Canterbury Cathedral, music scholar at Magdalen College (Oxford) and director of the English Chamber Choir, founded in 1972, which recorded with Vangelis ("1492: Conquest of Paradise"), Rick Wakeman ("Journey to the Centre of the Earth", 1974) and the stage "Tommy" of The Who (1972-73); he is also a forensic musicologist: an expert witness in music copyright disputes since the Vangelis "Chariots of Fire" High Court case in 1987, listed in the British expert registers (expertwitness.international) as a "Forensic Musicologist" (MA Oxon, MAE), and described by the University of Birmingham on 26 June 2023 as "one of the most eminent expert musicologist working in this field for over 35 years in the UK and beyond". The New York Times profile of 11 October 2016, "The Man Musicians Call When Two Tunes Sound Alike", by Alex Marshall, is about Peter Oxendale: Protheroe appears in it as one of the experts interviewed, alongside Joe Bennett, not as its subject. Later discography: "Era 2" (21 June 2000, Mercury; no. 2 France, no. 2 Wallonia, no. 4 Switzerland, no. 4 Hungary, no. 8 Sweden, no. 12 Germany, no. 13 Netherlands; platinum in France with 300,000; gold in Argentina, Belgium, Mexico and Switzerland), "The Mass" (26 February 2003, Mercury/Universal; no. 1 Italy, no. 2 Switzerland, no. 4 France, no. 5 Wallonia, no. 9 Portugal, no. 10 Netherlands, no. 10 Sweden, no. 13 Hungary, no. 17 Austria, no. 43 Flanders, no. 53 Germany; platinum in France and in Switzerland), "Reborn" (24 March 2008, Mercury; no. 6 France, no. 10 Wallonia, no. 18 Switzerland, no. 25 Italy; gold in Russia), "Era Classics" (2009; no. 3 France, no. 3 Wallonia), "Classics II" (2010; no. 14 France, no. 10 Wallonia), "The 7th Sword" (2017; no. 42 France, no. 45 Wallonia, no. 98 Switzerland) and "Era The Live Experience" (2022), the first live album. The track "The Mass" adapts "O Fortuna", from Carl Orff's "Carmina Burana" (1895-1982); it is not verified whether Orff appears in the legal credits of the track, nor whether the adaptation was licensed with Schott Music and the Orff estate, and there is no record of any litigation or any formal accusation of plagiarism. In China the track circulated for years falsely attributed to the 1st SS Panzer Division, an attribution that Chinese encyclopedias deny, pointing to Orff as the real origin. Reappearances of "Ameno": DJ Quicksilver remix (5 March 2001, Polydor; no. 6 Wallonia, no. 12 Spain, no. 13 Austria, no. 18 Germany, no. 20 Switzerland, no. 30 Netherlands, no. 75 Eurochart), Vincent Niclo's version with the Red Army Choirs on "Opéra rouge" (2012, Universal; no. 87 SNEP), the "Dorime" meme (17 December 2019, a doge/Cheems montage posted by the youtuber MurdockCakeLie, with a resurgence on TikTok at the beginning of 2020) and the "Ameno Amapiano Remix" (16 June 2021) by the Ghanaian producer Nektunez, real name Noble Zogli, with the Nigerian singer Goya Menor, real name Bright Goya (b. 4 May 1995, Edo State): no. 1 on Billboard's World Digital Song Sales in December 2021, no. 1 on the Shazam Global 200, no. 7 on the first Billboard U.S. Afrobeats Songs chart in March 2022, no. 117 on SNEP and close to 10,000 million views on TikTok in February 2022; David Guetta remixed it in 2022 and Nektunez and Goya Menor won the 2022 Headies award for best street-hop artist. Nektunez stated on video that he had released the track with a temporary DistroKid licence without knowing that he needed full "sample clearance", that the track was pulled from Apple Music and from Spotify and that it came back after a full licence handled by Sony Music, which signed him; there was no lawsuit and no ruling, and there is no public statement by Lévi or by Era about the remix. Lévi gave his first interview in 23 years to Le Parisien, published on 25 March 2019: "contrary to what people believe, the media ignored us. So we decided to play the mystery card, with no radio, no television, no press and no photographs on the record"; "for a year I was thrown out of every record company before I found the person who was interested in my project" — Yan-Philippe Blanc, of Mercury, who persuaded Pascal Nègre, of Universal, to sign it —; "hard rock and Era's music are not so far apart; they have the same taste for the epic and for efficiency". Era performed live for the first time on 18 April 2019 at La Seine Musicale in Boulogne-Billancourt, with around 40 musicians and singers onstage (Music Waves review, Christophe Meng, 21 May 2019: "Pour la première fois en Europe, Era monte sur scène pour nous présenter 'The Live Experience'"; announcement in Sortiraparis and in the venue's programme). The European tour continued in November and December 2019 — Nantes, Amnéville, Lyon, Geneva, Aix-en-Provence, Bordeaux, Montpellier, Toulouse, Lille, Brussels and Strasbourg, plus the Salle Pleyel in Paris on 26 and 27 December — and at the Forest National in Brussels, on 7 December 2019, there were 31 people onstage: nine musicians, a choir of 18 and four opera and metal soloists (Branchés Culture, 8 December 2019, which describes it as Era's only concert in Belgium). No lawsuit, conviction, formal accusation of plagiarism, addiction or scandal associated with Era or with Éric Lévi was found. The lyrics of "Ameno" are pseudo-Latin deliberately stripped of any exact meaning; the supposed Spanish translations circulating on lyrics websites — one titled "Libérame" on lyricstranslate.com, another on letras.com — and the readings of it as a "mantra" or as a hidden message spread on TikTok are inventions, not translations. Sales figures in circulation, with their origin: 3,500,000 in a year (PolyGram via Billboard, 1998), 5,000,000 for the first album (French Wikipedia and Lévi in Le Parisien, 2019), 6,000,000 and "the most exported French album of its time" (RFI Music, the most quoted and the least verifiable figure) and 12,000,000 across the whole career of seven albums in 23 years (French press, 2019). Profile compiled for Rebobinados with fact-checking; interpretations of the meaning of the work are offered as the author's reading. No song lyrics are reproduced, for copyright reasons. Information drawn from Billboard (29 August 1998, p. 101, and 26 June 1999), Music & Media (2 May 1998, 19 December 1998 and 27 December 1997), The New York Times (11 October 2016), Le Parisien (25 March 2019) via Purepeople and Chartsinfrance, Casting.fr, Music In Belgium, Ameyaw Debrah, GhanaWeb, Premium Times, Pulse Nigeria, Pulse Ghana, TheCable, BBC News Pidgin, Know Your Meme, Baidu Baike, Music Waves (21 May 2019), Sortiraparis, Branchés Culture (8 December 2019), the credits of the Era albums and Wikipedia in English, French and German.