"My first texts are too bad",
had retorted Françoise Hardy, when she had been offered to unite her texts in one and the same collection.
But with age, modesty and low self-esteem have passed.
Fifty-five years after her debut, she published
Chansons sur toi et nous,
with Éditions des Équateurs.
Much more than a compilation.
The icon of the French variety shares some of his impressions, some of his comments, sometimes over several pages, sometimes in one sentence.
To read also: Françoise Hardy: "I no longer have a personal life, just friends and memories"
A year and a half ago, the seventy-seven-year-old singer, suffering from cancer and deaf in one ear, spoke of the end of her career.
She definitively endorsed this decision with
Paris Match
:
“As, thanks to the rays and immunotherapy, I became deaf in one ear and my head is dry - throat, nose, mouth - I will never be able to sing again.
“At the microphone of RTL, Françoise Hardy was happy Tuesday to be able to look back on her first years in the“ profession ”and was proud of some youthful daring.
All the boys and girls
During the recording, for example of
All the boys and girls
, on April 25, 1962:
“My editor and artistic director had taken, as orchestrator, the first to enter his office.
Unfortunately, he was someone who had no talent.
And then, above all, at that time, we did not yet know, in France, the planing guitars of the Shadows.
Me, I dreamed of that.
When I heard these musicians play in this stiff, mechanical, dry, cold way, I was disappointed, dissatisfied to the last degree!
I really felt like I was making a really bad record. ”
All Boys and Girls
is her first intimate song.
The young performer, barely eighteen years old, wants to make it the flagship piece of her first album, which will later take the same name.
“Everyone absolutely wanted to take the song
J'suis agree as a single.
[...]
I insisted a lot.
I said, "If you don't go out
all the boys and girls
I won't be promoting any."
Unpretentious, Hardy exclaims:
“What a force of instinct!
I knew that this song had something more than the others.
Mainly because it was my experience, the others had nothing to do with my experience. ”
To read also: Emmanuel Berl and Françoise Hardy, the improbable friendship
A young girl with complex and sentimental feelings, the artist who has become an adult will always reveal, in her work, a certain obsession for the sensitive experience.
“As I had a rather painful love life, being able to sublimate this pain saved me
,
” she
says bluntly, with frankness and fragility.
His feelings for Jacques Dutronc have, moreover, inspired most of his songs.
All boys and girls
,
“I certainly wrote it in that very long period when I didn't dare take the slightest first step towards him, nor him towards me.
I even wrote a song about it called
Avec des si
”
.
“Jacques was the man of my life, he still is.
"
Separated from the artist since 1987 without having divorced, she remained in Paris, when she won Corsica.
After twenty years of living together and having a child, Thomas, Françoise and Jacques have developed an epistolary correspondence:
“We send each other news every day
,” she enthuses.
It is very important for me and I think it is very important for him too.
[...]
There is a lot of love between us, but it is obviously not the love of our twenty-five years.
It's different.
But it is extremely important love.
Jacques was the man of my life, he still is. "
When the singer was on her deathbed in 2015, he himself would have made these comments.
“Which touched me a lot
,
”
Hardy confesses.
To read also: Françoise Hardy: "I was dying and I was resuscitated"
"Dried up everywhere"
This collection is also the occasion for reflection on the role of music, melody and texts:
“A melody must be magic.
You hear it once and you need to hear it again, and hear it again, and hear it again. "
From now on, few are those who carry it:
“You have a lot of melodies which are not magical, I hear a lot of them at the moment.
There are interesting texts but the magic is not there. ”
No doubt she is not the only one to feel this deep artistic void.
All the more so as the icon is capable, when one gives it a tune, to feel the responsibility which falls to it right down to its flesh.
“It's about being up to the task.
I'm a perfectionist anyway, in everything.
When someone offers me a beautiful melody, like Calogero,
[...]
until the last minute I don't know if I'll be able to write. "
She herself is very severe on the subject:
"The text is as important as the melody but it must be at its service, and not the other way around."
Fatigue, finally, wins this great lady of French song.
She confesses, a bit annoyed:
“I have trouble talking to you.
[...]
The rays crossed my head forty-five times, they burned my salivary glands, I am completely dry all over.
That's why I suffer so much from talking to you for so long.
It's not possible to sing when you have more saliva. ”
Nothing saddens him, however:
“I think I've had my time.
We all have a small vein in ourselves and I think mine is exhausted.
I wrote everything I could write. ”
But no question of talking about the end, or even of evoking the word:
“I don't like to think about it.
But I am not afraid of it, it is death that frightens me, although it is only the death of the body.
It is not the death of what animates the body.
What scares me the most is not death itself, it's the fact of dying.
In general, it goes through suffering.
I myself am in a nightmarish state of pain most of the time.
If it has to be even worse to give up the ghost… ”