“1964”, the album between two faults by Miossec, celebrates its 20th anniversary

Recorded as always in pain, with a half-neglected symphony orchestra, the record was his greatest commercial success. We rediscover it twenty years after its release in a beautiful vinyl reissue.

TEverything has always come down to the wire, and Christophe Miossec is undoubtedly the first to be surprised that the score is so round. On Christmas Eve, he will be 60 years old and he is celebrating, in the fall of 2024, the 20th anniversary of an album that he bravely named 1964, proclaiming to the world that he was what he never thought he would become: a 40-year-old singer. The reissue of this record, which has become his greatest success to date (thanks in particular to the song Brest), is sumptuous.

In carefully engraved vinyl, a format which was hardly in circulation in 2004, it is a double album with, full frame, black and white cover, the elegant shaded portrait of the new wave photographer Richard Dumas, a Rennes companion. On a gray wallpaper background, in room 304 of the Vauban hotel (as for Drink ten years earlier), in Brest, the one who sings “stay alive/It’s just music hall/An expensive show” looks young, almost boyish, with smooth features, narrowed eyes, a gentle oriental air, a little clever.

The thick interior booklet offers other clichés which temper the innocence and mischievousness of the facade and make us guess the faults, the wounds and the mood swings which led to the difficult recording (as always) of this fifth album. And besides, the big thing about the reissue (besides the beautiful restoration of the tapes), is a second bonus disc on which appears a very orchestral version of 1964, a symphonic impulse, an attack of lyrical fever, a strange ambition which was partly abandoned along the way, put away in the drawers. To start all over again.

Between two ages, between two lives, 1964 is one of Miossec’s great successes, but it is not impossible that the album still remains to be discovered. At the start of the 2000s, the Brest singer scoured the French countryside until he was thirsty. It was fueled by comfortable success, but the early fans had sometimes become detached, not to say disinterested. The botched concerts ended up tiring, like the staggering poses of a fighter out of breath (and voice) and the records which sought to reinvent themselves by all means but no longer invented much. When it’s time to head back to the studio, the singer of Recovery was not the least tired of himself. We read it these days in the columns of Parisian : “I wanted to bite into it, I was vengeful. I released records that worked but disappointed me. I was mostly disappointed in myself. »

Piano and electric guitars in tension

The idea of ​​recording in symphonic mode is not his. It comes from the request of the Avignon Lyric Orchestra to cover its old pieces and make a show of them. After ten years of career, this type of initiative improves the ordinary, but the vengeful and frustrated artist demands more. Since we offer him strings, he provides songs. And even finds a new lease of life with conductors cut out for the abrupt cadences of his poetry. Joseph Racaille, the former accomplice of Hector Zazou, Dick Annegarn and Bashung. Jean-Louis Piérot, the male part of the Valentins, who accompanied the singer of vertigo of love for the composition of his masterpiece, Military fantasy. The two musicians are not known for walking straight and they set a baroque setting for Miossec’s sharp lyrics and atonal singing.

In this great turning point strong and singular moments emerge, the original version of I’m leaving, in particular, which we discover today, a funny game of hide and seek between the singer and the big orchestra, where everything is played out in chiaroscuro, between sea and great storm (“I’m leaving to start all over again/I’m leaving to never settle down”). Miossec slashed it to return to a more raw and stripped-down version, piano and electric guitars in tension. Song of breakup, regret and self-loathing that opens the album and puts the record on the right track. Lost time, missing friends, broken loves, dark romanticism: “It’s not for lack of politeness / Just the wear and tear of the clouds and your caresses […] Thunder, thunder, thunder from Brest/ Even the earth is turning upside down. »

There are no unreleased songs for the commemoration of 1964. Miossec rarely wrote more than he needed to complete the exercise. Of Broken jaws has Stay alive, exposing writing is not an easy job. Miossec outlines in measured and powerful words the evil (the male?) of quarantine, the headlong flight, the attraction of disaster and the miracle of survival. And when Miossec shows himself inspired, the critics are too. Telerama speaks of a “cape full of hopes”. Philippe Barbot, the special correspondent in the Great West salutes the best album since Drink (“imbued this time with romantic spleen more than alcoholic complaint”) and delights in setting, from the first lines, the colorful scene of the singer’s wanderings: “This Friday, February 13, on the ferry that connects Le Conquet to Ouessant, a hearse, a three-legged dog and Christophe Miossec boarded. The first is taken in a procession towards the small cemetery on the island, the second hobbles along with the procession and the third congratulates himself on not being superstitious. »

1964 (20 Ans)remastered version. Pias Recordings