Tragedy framed the brief and enigmatic path of the French female duo Deux Filles, whose very name seemed fitting for the pair. As teenagers, Gemini Forque and Claudine Coule first connected during a pilgrimage to Lourdes, where Coule’s mother succumbed to an incurable lung disease while Forque’s mother perished and her father suffered paralysis in a horrific car crash. United by loss, the two channeled their mourning into music, eventually issuing two critically acclaimed albums and performing across Europe and North America. Their story ended abruptly when they vanished without a trace in North Africa in 1984 en route to Algiers, the city where Forque had spent her first five years. Speculation ranged from abduction or murder to a deliberate vanishing or even spontaneous human combustion, yet the only subsequent clue was a cryptic letter attributed to Coule describing a spiritual journey to India that brought further ordeals. The duo’s brief, profoundly unhappy lives fueled the intense cult following that later formed around them, all the more striking because the calm, mostly instrumental sound of their records reveals nothing of that personal grief.
None of it, however, actually occurred. The real Deux Filles were Simon Fisher Turner, once a child star and teen idol who later became a soundtrack composer, and his collaborator Colin Lloyd Tucker. After departing an early version of The The in 1981, the pair invented the Deux Filles project from an idea that came to Turner in a dream, sustaining the elaborate pretense for the project’s entire run. They appeared in drag on the album sleeves and even performed live once, with no one in the audience suspecting the “tragic French girls” were two men from south London enjoying the ruse. Through their own Papier Mache label they issued Silence & Wisdom in 1982 and Double Happiness in 1983 before abandoning the concept and releasing two ambient pop albums under the name Jeremy’s Secret.
