Dillinger Girl & Baby Face Nelson 'Bang!' album

“Bang!” is the first project to come from Helena Noguera and Federico Pellegrini. Recorded by Primal Scream-producer Jim Waters in Tucson, Arizona, the project tells the tale of the exploits of a couple of gangsters roaming The United States. Helena Noguera, alias Dillinger Girl, already has three other albums to her credit. Federico Pellegrini, alias Baby Face Nelson, is the guitarist from the Little Rabbits, with whom he conceived and recorded the albums Grand Public and especially Yeah! (1998). Destiny united them one fine spring when both of them chose the same bank, on the same day, and at the same time. They found themselves facing one another, and decided that they’d never separate again.

Few gangsters were as intriguing as Dillinger Girl and Baby Face Nelson, and few hold-ups ever caught the attention of both police and public as much as the heists committed by this mysterious tandem.

Wanted in 10 different States, they became Public Enemy N°1 and fascinated public opinion: tee-shirts featuring their faces circulated in schools; magazines had them on their covers; and the shock-duo even recorded songs between bank-attacks. Such was their popularity that, during their escapes, bystanders would warn them the police were coming. The reputedly-scatterbrained pair had a habit of evaporating into thin air that earned them a supernatural reputation; public sympathy for them increased to the point where their hostages wanted their photographs taken with the pair, while others pleaded for autographs. Their popularity actually started to scare the authorities, who feared that public sympathy might complicate their task…

Both multimillionaires, Dillinger Girl and Baby Face Nelson can already pay more than the reward offered to anyone leading to their arrest… if it ever happens.

Be warned....

Biography

Dillinger Girl, (real name Helena Noguerra) was born in Brussels one fine month of May. At first a model, she recorded her first single "Lunettes noires” in 1989 before letting a little more water flow under the bridge. That didn't make her happy either and she toured the world, modelling for a living. Every time she came back through Paris she met up with musicians, made some demos, and still she couldn't find shoes that fitted.

She had to wait until 1996 and a call from the group Ollano (Marc Collin and Xavier Jameaux) before she got the chance to sing two songs on their album: Latitudes and Partir revenir.

In between, she became friends with a young singer named Doriand who was also bringing out his own first album at this time: Au diable le paradis.

From those two meetings came Helena's first album (for Warner) in 1998, a project called Projet Bikini. The music was by Marc Collin & Doriand, and they also produced the record, giving it a pop sound, while Helena & Doriand wrote the lyrics.
Projet Bikini was an album that saw Helena doing her pretentious-Nancy-Sinatra number, with songs like "Il me faut un homme" ["I need a man", with lyrics in the vein "One man minimum / one of those earthlings in my dreams / a modern little monster"], or else "Tout, tout" ["Everything, Everything", lyrics: "Everything, everything / Will bring you back to me / Everything, everything / Everything revolves around me"]. But it was also on this album that she unveiled some of her melancholy, with "Comme si de rien n’était" or "Le chagrin liquide" ["I am chagrin / Liquid and I'm coming / To take you softly / Without asking for anything… Mandrax valium / Those exquisite elixirs / Won't stop me / From invading you…"].

There were several collaborations on that album: the first took the form of a "Tout, Tout" remix by the Pizzicato Five, whom she'd met in Japan at a concert she gave at the Quattro club (the story goes that Japan was the first country to release the Projet Bikini album, when the French release was delayed for reasons known only to the singer). In a cover of Elvis Presley's "All shook up", you could also hear Perry Blake trade lines with Helena in a very "hot" version.
Projet Bikini was also the occasion for Helena to give Philippe Katerine a call, and he wrote the music of Cyber Baba for her, a song that told of an erotic meeting between a human and a female alien, played by Katerine and Helena.

Their meeting gave birth to two quite different-sounding albums. Azul, released by Tricatel-Universal Jazz in 2001, and Née dans la nature, (Universal Jazz, 2004). On both these projects, most of the lyrics were written by Helena, with most of the composing and producing being the work of Katerine.

Azul was recorded in four days at the studios of Bertrand Burgalat's label Tricatel.
Accompanied by the Recyclers trio (Christophe Mink, Steve Arguelles and Benoit Delbecq) Helena recorded a bossa nova album singing in Brazilian. Azul was the fruit of a kind of impromptu mutation, the result of a graft that had flourished between Helena the real French singer speaking & writing fluent Portuguese, and the Helena who dreamed of Brazilian music. So Philippe Katerine, leaning over this beautiful child's cradle to write the music for it, saw it as a kind of utopia, a Brazilian record made far from Rio de Janeiro and its sandy beaches, yet still filled with the feeling contained in this hedonistic, melancholy music. With an elegance that masked a great deal of work, this record spoke of love; not the love that creates separation and suffering, nor the neurosis of love and its repetitions, but rather the sort of love that is inseparable from pleasure, the love of the hedonist, a love tinted with intoxicating eroticism even if the shadows of jealousy lurked in the background. It was a discreet way of adopting a stance that went against the run of fashion.

A few years later in 2004, the pair was in the La Frette studios, making an album of songs that were more pastoral than anything else. This time with Philippe Eveno on guitar, Christophe Lavergne on drums and Christophe Mink (again) playing bass, other instruments, and taking care of the programming, they recorded French titles that still spoke of love but which, beneath a misleadingly inconsequential outward appearance, carried a certain melancholy, a certain assumed irony. There was "L’âge de ma mère", in which Helena asked her fiancé if he'd still love her when her breasts hit the ground after she'd reached her mother's age… or "Mary Poppins", in which Helena showed how cruel she could be after first making us believe she was such an adorable young woman… You could also find the Kylie Minogue hit "I just can’t get you out of my head", in a highly sensual, tired-late-evening version, and a duet with lingerie-designer Fifi Chachnil, a very old friend.

While still going her own way, Helena crossed paths with other singers and composers, taking part in duets and concerts with personalities as varied as Daugas, Dr. Feelgood, Charlélie Couture, Jacno, Alain Chamfort, Dimitri From Paris and Alex Gopher; she was also seen in films, where she was in turn "Priscille" alongside Jean-Pierre Daroussin, Richard Berry and Valéria Bruni Tedeschi in "Ah! Si j’étais riche" directed by Munz & Bitton (2002); "Ines" alongside Bérénice Béjo and Aurélien Wick in "Sans elle" (directed by Anna da Palma); "Claudia" in the same Anna da Palma's "Telma demain"; and "Soraya" in the Richard Berry-directed "La boîte noire", with José Garcia and Marion Cotillard.

Helena has also published two novels for Denoël: "L’ennemi est à l’intérieur" (2002) and "Et je me suis mise à table" (2004).

And here we are in 2006; Helena met Federico and they became Dillinger Girl & Baby Face Nelson, whose story they're now telling.

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Dillinger Girl & Baby Face Nelson - Bang!