On the radio, France Musique multiplies the programs in his honor.
On television, after a tribute from Pierre Lescure in
C à vous
on France 5, Mouloudji should again be in the spotlight on France Télévisions, in the
Basique
program on France 2 and perhaps in a JT.
For their part, his children Annabelle and Gregory Mouloudji and his publisher Laurent Balandras have prepared the release of three boxes.
At Universal Music, under the leadership of project manager Xavier Perrot of the Panthéon label, they put the finishing touches to a
Mouloudji a cent ans
box set consisting of three CDs and a DVD, as well as
Eternal Romance
, a twelve-track vinyl.
In addition to his titles such as
Un jour tu voirs, L'un à l'autre estranger
, and
Six Dead Leaves in San Francisco,
we will discover 2h05 of INA video archives with two portraits of the artist made in 1967 and 1975. and archives on the songs and poems of Jacques Prévert and Boris Vian, his favorite authors.
For its part, Sony Music Entertainment prepared
Crooner and poet Mouloudji a cent ans
.
Finally a third box of 5CD
Anthologie 1951-1977
with 109 “essential” songs is published by Marianne Melodie.
Four years ago, an advertisement for Intermarché illustrated by its song L'
Amour l'amour l'amour
(1963) caused a disaster and led to a sharp increase in sales of physical albums and listens on Spotify (29 million clicks!).
A whole new generation discovered Mouloudji.
On the Swedish platform, Mouloudji now has 362,000 listeners per month, which is not nothing.
If
L'Amour l'amour l'amour
prances far ahead, platform subscribers listen
to Reine de musette
(926,000 clicks) or
Un jour, tu
voirs (767,000 clicks).
The great forgotten of the band of Saint-Germain-des-Prés
Coming from a very modest background with an illiterate worker father of Kabyle origin and a Breton mother with a tragic destiny who died of psychiatric illness at St Anne Hospital, Marcel Mouloudji had a particularly rough start in life.
Luckily, “this child left to himself had a huge appetite for life and had had time at school to learn to read and write,” says Xavier Perrot.
Like many workers of the time, his father joined the Communist Party.
Mouloudji is sent to associations which take care of workers' children.
In 1935, at the age of thirteen, he was spotted and sent to Jean-Louis Barrault.
The latter installed him at his home and made him debut at the theater in a play adapted by Jacques Prévert.
As it is disarming, of a natural seduction, without any calculation, Prévert makes it start with the cinema.
Mouloudji becomes a star child”,
continues Xavier Perrot.
In Saint-Germain-des-Prés, everyone takes him under his wing.
Starting with Simone de Beauvoir who became his pygmalion and helped him publish his first novel
Enrico
in 1944 at the age of 22.
In the cinema, the role of street singer in
La Maison Bonnadieu
by Carlo Rim (1951) where he interpreted
La lamente des infidèles
made him take the turn of the song.
A pacifist, he was the first to sing
Le Déserteur
by Boris Vian in the midst of decolonization, which earned him banishment from the airwaves of RTBF in the mid-1950s.
However, he sings it in Parisian cabarets, not the original version but the one he had rewritten by Boris Vian.
"Monsieur le Président" is replaced by "Messieurs qu'on appoint grands", "my decision is made" becomes "wars are nonsense, the world has had enough" and the song ends on "I will not have 'weapons'.
The
Mouloudji a cent ans
box set is made up of three CDs and a DVD, as well as
L'Eternel Romance
, a twelve-track vinyl.
UniversalMusic France.
In the 1960s, like so many other text singers, he suffered the wave of yé-yé.
“He was not discouraged, created his own label and returned to the front of the stage at the end of the 60's with new successes like
“
Self
-portrait ”
”
, continues Xavier Perrot.
After crossing the decades of the 50's, 60's and 70's, he will stop singing in the mid-80s.
For his heirs, continuing to be talked about after so many decades is not always easy.
“Hating to put himself forward, which is quite comical for an artist, Mouloudji was pathetically modest,”
underlines Xavier Perrot.
“Mouloudji is the great forgotten of the mythical band of Saint-Germain-des-Prés
, adds Laurent Balandras.
At the heyday of the district at the end of the 50's, he was the child of Sartre and Beauvoir, the little brother of Boris Vian and Juliette Gréco.
In the collective image, we kept the image of a committed singer because of his interpretation
of Boris Vian's “
Deserter
”
, but he was also a singer of love.
He sang a lot of Prévert, Ferré,
Today, “Mouloudji is not one of the people we remember right away, explained his children on Monday September 12 on France Musique.
He was a kind of maverick, he already found it extraordinary to be paid to sing.
Its centenary is an opportunity to discover its natural eloquence, the precision of its interpretation and its quality repertoire.