“I’ve seen enough of the seagulls. Sometimes I’m jealous,” says the guest of Xavier de Moulins who would like think you’re a bird. Perhaps because he grew up in the great outdoors, in Quiberon, in Morbihan. The singer Bertrand Belin, also composer, poet, writer and even actor is currently starring in the film Le Roman de Jimfrom the Larrieu brothers.
Yet, he could have become a fisherman like his father and brothers or board a merchant navy freighter. But, he became a guitarist. It is moreover this instrument which changed his life at 13 years old. “I had this possibility of having a guitar on my lap and spending two hours in a kind of other world which gave me a lot of relief from the world in which I was usually immersed, made up of constraints, worries, anxiety and dissatisfaction”, recalls Bertrand Belin.
Today, his music is melancholic, playful and lively. Author of seven albums, many saw in him the hidden son of Alain Bashung and the little one brother of Australian singer Nick Cave. Bertrand Belin is a lover of language which he also uses in his books like Bulk, Shark or even Littoral. More the texts, he also writes them for others, as Vanessa Paradis and Olivia Ruiz.
I went through difficult periods where I could have said to myself “okay, I’m giving up”
Bertrand Belin
To get to where he is today, the 53-year-old artist hasn’t given up. “JI was 35 when I made my first record anyway. I had been writing since I was a teenager, writing songs. After, to go and sing them in his name, to assume his own voice and his lyrics, it was something that was only possible for me at 35, it’s late. So I was already happy, I had already managed to build an Everest when I made my first record.”
He adds: “The sacrifices to maintain myself in this environment, I have not counted them. But if I stop a little on the facts, I still realize that I played in the street, in the metro in Paris. I went through difficult times where I could have said to myself, ‘Okay, I’m giving up’.”
>> At the heart of creationa podcast presented by Xavier de Moulins. Every Saturday on RTL, in RTL Evening, the journalist takes us to meet men and women who have decided to devote their lives to an art. Writers, filmmakers, cooks or even singers and photographers, they reveal their secrets and will inspire you. Find the entire interview on podcast every Saturday, as well as a bonus episode, The Essentials, every Wednesday.
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