She left home at 17, volunteering to drive an ambulance during World War One, and afterward moved to Paris, where she became the pet project of a wealthy lesbian antiques dealer. Solidor opened her own nightclub in 1932, but after keeping her establishment open during the occupation in WWII, stood trial as a collaborator – one reason, Walker suggests, that her legacy has been squashed. Solidor returned to France, however, opening a new club in the Cote d’Azur. Later in life, she began cross-dressing as a man and demanded to be referred to as ‘the admiral’.

Celebrity allure

Plenty of material for a show, then – and a fun back catalogue too, which Walker translated into English. “People are really shocked, because they’re rude: she sings about not only her desire for women but what’s she’s going to do them; what bits she’s going to touch. It’s amazing she was such a big recording artist – they’re explicit and yet she’s mainstream.”

Solidor’s number Ouvre, for instance, which invites a lover to “open your trembling knees, open your thighs”, became a “sort of lesbian anthem”, claims Tirza True Latimer, a US academic, in Women Together/Women Apart: Portraits of Lesbian Paris. While there was a rather avant-garde, Sapphic intelligentsia in the city at the time (think Gertrude Stein, Claude Cahun, Djuna Barnes), Solidor wasn’t part of it. She was more showbiz celebrity, a regular in the gossip columns and taking odd roles in the movies (she played a nightclub proprietor who introduces a young flapper to opium and same-sex eroticism in La Garconne in 1936).