As for the Plastic Bertrand lawsuit, the accents of singers can vary between recordings, live performances and normal speech. For example, I have observed that British singers with strong regional accents often sound a lot more RP in recordings than when they perform live or in interviews. I suspect that there was and perhaps still is pressure to suppress the accent for the recording, but it comes through again in less controlled circumstances. Some also lose their regional accents over time. Compare interviews with members of the Beatles or Rolling Stones from the 1960s with those from today. Or look at how Daniel Craig (not a singer, but same thing) used to sound before he landed the Bond role with how he sounds today.

I’m not a specialist in French at all, but even I know that the people of Northern France, i.e. the region around Calais and Lille, have a distinctive accent, recently popularized by the Dany Boon film about the “ch’tis”. Plastic Bertrand, meanwhile (and I can’t believe I actually googled the man), was born in Brussels which is on the Northern edge of the Wallonie, the French speaking part of Belgium. If he had hailed from the French-Belgian border, his accent might have resembled that of the ch’ti on the other side of the border. But Wallonian French is different from French French, even Northern French French.

Besides, it’s not exactly new that the people on stage are not necessarily the ones singing. Frank Farian, the producer mastermind behind Milli Vanilli and Boney M., has been doing this since the 1970s. And there are one or two international pop stars whose voices sound so different between their earlier and later career and between recordings and live performances that I have my suspicions.