While Françoise Hardy left us this week, Gillette Aho would like to share with the readers of Zinfos 974 the chapter that she devoted to her in her future work to be published this year.
Headphones on, the intimate voice of Françoise Hardy escorts me over hill and valley. My idol’s songs are playing on a loop in my walkman:
VIP most important person to me
VIP welcome to Paris-Orly
Duty-free, just, just him and me
VIP first class, welcome guaranteed
VIP like a glass of Glenmorangie.
The ineffable timbre is in the background of my musical moments. My idol doesn’t give concerts…. I would never see her on stage, nor would I come across her on television sets, nor in the streets of Paris. She only offers her voice, her texts and pretty clips to her fans. It’s enough for me. I live on Île Saint-Louis, a few streets from his old apartment. I learn from local shopkeepers: “that she lives on another planet, that she has a bad temper, that she practices yoga”. I like her more. I continue to glean information about him here and there.
A true artist, talented, cryptic. She composes her texts herself. Reading, listening, watching each of her different interviews, I will never know in what conditions she writes her songs. In collaboration with other singers? Alone at your desk or in a studio? Would she be inspired or perhaps would she like to pass messages? She repeats to anyone who will listen “that she is surprised by her own successes and recognizes that she plays the guitar very badly”…
In 1987, she offered another facet of her talent: she sang with Etienne Daho. This makes for a surprising duo.
And if I leave before you
Tell yourself that I will be there
I will marry the rain, the wind, the sun and the elements
To caress you all the time
The air will be warm and light
As you like
And if you don’t understand it
Very soon you will recognize me
Because I will become wicked, I will marry a storm
To hurt you and make you cold.
She also says that she doesn’t see herself singing after 40. She learned about graphology and astrology. She has her own show on Radio Monte Carlo “Between the lines, between the signs”. Without doubt, she must have asked herself existential questions like all of us. Probably also because of the tormented lives she witnessed. That of his single mother who never stopped waiting for a married man. That of his sister Michèle Hardy crushed by psychoses. Françoise Hardy herself suffers from various complexes betrayed by a lack of confidence. The song allowed him to forget his many annoyances. Now she is choosing astrology.
She deciphers the stars, the stars, the planets. From his point of view, an astrological sign would only be an alternation determined by the specific relationship between the length of the day and that of the night! she searches, she questions, she makes mistakes, she seeks assistance from an expert in graphology.
In 1988, she wrote the work “The Rhythms of the Zodiac” published by Monte Carlo Editions and in 1990 “Universal Astrology” by Albin Michel.
She will close the astral parenthesis (phew) and return to the song. In his discography my favorite title is “the house where I grew up”. I adopted the melody as soon as I heard it on the radio. I must have been 10-12 years old. Is it the melancholy released by the words? The celestial voice of the interpreter? the guitarist’s tempo? A song by Adriano Celentano that the singer reworks before performing it.
A Parisian musical composer explained to me the success of “the house where I grew up”: “the words, the music, the voice of the performer are in harmony. That’s alchemy, musical fluidity. Artists have a vital need to sublimate their torments. The cadence is cheerful. Listening to it makes you want to go back to the past, to find your loved ones.”
I have listened to this hit song over a thousand times over the years. I still keep doing it. To which past do I want to return?
When Françoise Hardy takes up the musical pen, she composes for Louis Chedid and Julien Clerc sweet melancholy as she knows how to convey…
Leave me a place
At the bottom of your bubble
And if I annoy you
If I’m too bad
I will become
Very pale, very mute, very small
So that you forget me
Leave me a place
Deep in your heart
So that I kiss you
When you cry
I will become
All crazy, all clown, nice
So that you smile…
(Extract from the manuscript: Finding the path to writing again. G. Aho éditions Lu&Apprové to be published in October 2024).
