Le Téléphone Pleure

"Le Téléphone Pleure" was a 1974 hit single by French artist Claude François. It was released on Disques Flèche/Phonogram. The song was re-recorded in English as "Tears on the Telephone" and was a hit in the British charts[1] in 1976.

"Le Téléphone Pleure"
Single by Claude François
from the album Le Mal-aimé
B-side	"Quand la pluie finira de tomber" "Heureusement, tu penses à moi"
Released	October 1974
Recorded	1974
Genre	French pop
Length	3:58
Label	Disques Flèche, Phonogram (France) Nobel (Canada) Poplandia (Spain) Bradley's Records (UK)
Songwriter(s)	Frank Thomas (lyrics) Jean-Pierre Bourtayre, Claude François (music)
Claude François singles chronology
"Le Mal-aimé" (1974) "Le Téléphone Pleure" (1974) "Toi et moi contre le monde entier" (1975)

Italian singer-songwriter Domenico Modugno recorded an Italian version of the song, "Piange... il telefono", in 1975. This version was so successful that a film was made based on its lyrics, Piange... il telefono. It was directed by Lucio De Caro and starred Domenico Modugno, Francesca Guadagno, Marie Yvonne Danaud, Claudio Lippi and János Koós.

Argentine singer King Clave recorded a Spanish version of the song titled "Mi corazón lloró" ("My heart cried"), which topped the Mexican charts in 1975 and was also a hit throughout Latin America. The cast of the musical Belles belles belles also covered Claude François' song.

The song is built on a melodramatic story, in which a man calls his five-year-old daughter on the phone, but without her realizing than the heartbroken caller is actually her father - as he is the estranged husband of the child's mother, who left him before their daughter was born, six years earlier. The end of the story is left ambiguous: the man, faced with his wife's final rejection (as told to him by the child), says: "je serais demain au fond d'un train" (literally, "tomorrow I'll be at the bottom of a train"), which may be interpreted as meaning that the man is either moving away permanently, or that he about to commit suicide. This was made clearer in Modugno's version, where, in his final sung line, he clearly says goodbye to the child - in that version, the last sung word is "addio", usually meant in Italy as "goodbye for ever".