Scintillating. Velvety. Sensual. Symphonic. Intimist. Iodized. Étienne Daho's thirteenth album, Tir la nuit sur les étoiles (1), is a splendor set with a few gems, including "Boyfriend", future pharmacopoeia of summer nights. A quintessential modern young man of the 80s who became godfather of French pop, Daho is a serene, secretive and feline sexagenarian who nicknames himself with self-mockery "Dorian Gris" by pointing to his (rare) silver hair. Interview with a great living.
In video, the clip of Boyfriend, by Etienne Daho
Love always
Madame Figaro. - This album title, Pull the night on the stars, it sounds like Rimbaud: "I stretched gold chains from star to star and I dance"?
Étienne Daho. - I love it! I haven't thought about it but it's there, in me.
It's all my early adolescence, Rimbaud's poems. But I mostly thought about Ava Gardner and Frank Sinatra, their crazy passion, the beginnings of their relationship, the elation. I had noted this image related to the couple, "pulling the night on the stars", for the opening of the album, with this song a little edgy played by two drummers!
Avalanche of collaborations on the twelve tracks, including Vanessa Paradis opening?
I love him. She has moved me since I heard her sing "You who are the only double of me" (in "Dis lui toi que je t'aime", in 1990). I have a strange sense of brotherhood for her. I offered her to sing, she accepted right away. Our voices intertwine well.
See alsoÉtienne Daho celebrates free love in his brand new song Boyfriend unveiled for Valentine's Day
"The lighthouse" is the climax of the album?
This is the beginning of love, the glare. I was in Brighton, I found a DVD of John Maybury's film Love is the devil, about the crazy and destructive relationship of the painter Francis Bacon and his lover Georges Dyer, who committed suicide in 1971 in Paris. And I wondered about this infernal binomial, the artist and his muse, how the artist dismemberes the muse, what he does with it, in the name of the creative impulse. The muse ends up like an old dressing gown in general! To survive, never take on this role...
Shooting the Night on the Stars, by Étienne Daho. Press
Vitality
Are you careful? You take care of yourself, after having experienced the exquisite excesses of all kinds of the 80s and 90s, after having almost embodied these words of Françoise Sagan "speed, the sea, midnight, all that is brilliant, all that is black, everything that loses, and therefore allows to find oneself" in I do not deny anything?
That's this need for perpetual intensity... I knew Sagan, we had dinner at Bettina Graziani's with Yves Saint Laurent and Alexis de Redé. I was young! Intimidated! We talked about Algeria, Cape Falcon, with Saint Laurent, also uprooted from Oran. Sagan was so funny. She left and came back, she didn't know where she had parked her car. She said, "Kitty, come and help me find her." We're still looking for it! Going back to the excesses, I am very careful. I cherish my vitality, I take care of my body. I love what I do so much, this job, that I need to protect my vehicle, this 67-year-old guy's body, so that it takes me as far as possible.
Retirement?
We take it when we have no more inspiration, when the body says "Stop". Mine says "Encore". The proximity to Jeanne Moreau was a source of optimism. She lived, desired, sang at more than 80 years old. I have niac. But I know my vehicle doesn't last forever.
Are you worried about death?
I have lost so many loved ones in the last fifteen years. Like Dani, whom I thought was indestructible. I have a rather complicated relationship with death, between terror and denial. But I live with my dead. I swallowed them! They live in me.
In this regard, your friend the singer Françoise Hardy took a stand two years ago in favor of euthanasia. Do you share his vision on the end of life, and active assistance in dying?
I think you have to be able to choose the moment of his death. If I had the misfortune to suffer one day from an incurable, degenerative disease, I would go to Switzerland, where assisted suicide is possible, to put an end to it. But it would be better to be able to do it here, to benefit France active assistance in dying.
Without borders
Your rule in existence: travel light?
Yes, that's my way of life. A bag on my shoulder, and pfff, I decamp! I was forever marked by exile, the tearing away from my native land, Algeria. Since then I am everywhere at home and I have lived in Ibiza, London, Lisbon, New York.
Did you sacrifice a lot of things to music? Couple life, family life, parenthood? Is there an assumed sacrificial dimension?
I find myself in what the wonderful singer Barbara said, singing: it's taking the habit. To enter into orders, because vocation is like a calling, something that is beyond you. For 40 years, I have given the greatest space to this. Except when someone crosses me. There, I stop! Otherwise, it's the music, the song, the albums above all. That's what I'm made for. But as I am a great lover, it is a part-time sacrifice!
In love and not looking at the sex of the loved one, you said nicely.
It's true! We should immediately label ourselves, say what we are, and what we are not. I fall in love with a person, not a sex assignment. My discretion on the subject does not mean that I have a secret. Only, to explain oneself is a little too much to apologize. And that's not an option. I am a great lover, which gives me phenomenal strength.
Love has many faces?
Yes! The love of the public, eternal source of disbelief and gratitude, carnal passions, romantic friendships, platonic loves. It takes so many forms. I don't think I've ever been so honest... Finally, let's say I'm not pansexual, I'm a sexual being. Na!
See alsoThe pop-rock wardrobe of Étienne Daho enters the museum
'Happy to be alive'
You sing some songs, including "Boyfriend" with a crooner's sweetness.
My mother and sisters loved Dionne Warwick, for whom the great Burt Bacharach composed dozens of songs! "Walk On By", we listened to it until the record melted. The death of Harry Belafonte also caused me a lot of pain. A family idol! We listened to "The Banana boat song" and every time I heard his famous "Day-O", I thought it was me, "Daa-Hoo"! I later realized my mistake! In 1991, in the song "Disaster Attractions," the choir sang "Day-O," a nod to this lord, this civil rights hero.
You bequeathed to the Palais Galliera, the Paris Fashion Museum, 38 of your street and stage outfits. Daho heritage, musically and also on the clothing side?
I tidied up my cupboards during the lockdown! I came across clothes not seen in decades. Elli Medeiros advised me to give them to Galliera. She had done the same with 800 outfits! I contacted the museum, I gave them everything. Glittering stage outfits designed by Hedi Slimane, and street clothes.
In life, you are in black and navy blue, the uniform has never changed?
Wall pass! Sailor sweater, caban, perfecto, hoodie. The invisible guy...
The invisible star when it sings to him? Eternal young man and godfather filled with French pop?
A man happy to be alive.
(1) Étienne Daho, Tir la nuit sur les étoiles, Polydor Universal.
