Patrick Eudeline, provocation as we like it

Patrick Eudeline is a sort of Philippe Manoeuvre, a little too dilapidated to participate in a tele-hook show on the 6. Our friend publishes Lost to (Séguier).


Photo of baby Cadum on a candy pink background, we could mistake the object, from afar, for an advertisement for soaps vintages. But no, the latest book by Patrick Eudeline, Lost to Franceis not the cute little thing it appears to be at first glance. Spanning the decades, from the 60s to today, in a chronological jumble, the celestial tramp looks back on his birth into the world which coincides with the birth of rock in France.

Journalist at the magazine Best and singer and guitarist of the group Asphalt JunglePatrick Eudeline is a sort of Philippe Manoeuvre, a little too dilapidated to take part in a show on 6. In his story, we discover him as a sociological oddity. Growing up in the 6th arrondissement, studying at Collège Stanislas, Patrick Eudeline was born into a family in average France, with a father who was not very resourceful for business (nor for writing columns in the local RPR newspaper). The social UFO describes his existence, sometimes on the arm of some upper-class woman, sometimes in the street, sometimes skiing down the posh slopes of Switzerland, sometimes defrauding dentists with wooden checks, escaping from the office with half a -tooth patched up.

The kingdom of linoleum

Musically, the father has rather rubbish tastes (“ Only an old Marcel Amont (“that old Blue, white, blond” guy who I’ve always hated) hanging around the house, an awful François Deguelt (“Marjolaine”), someone forgotten by Isabelle Aubret (“La Fanette” ), the detestable “Bicycle” of Montand, a minor Aznavour and of little interest “). The family taste for linoleum contrasts with the sublime polished parquet floors found among classmates. The father-son relationship is in any case far from being driven by mutual admiration. A bit as if Sheila (“ While I, who am nothing/ Just an average little French girl/ I learn every day, while having fun,/ That experience comes with time “) had given birth to this snobbish Boris Vian (” I only hang out with baronesses / With names like paperclips “). Napoleon wondered if he was not rather the son of Pascal Paoli, or of Governor Marbeuf. Eudeline also wonders if he is really her father’s son. To become an emperor or a rocker, you have to have doubts about your father’s paternity.

Eudeline is a child of the 60s, old enough to have known the Latin mass and faith in progress. “ It’s time for absolute optimism “. The little boy dreams of robotic megacities and electric sheep. At Stanislas, he makes a bit of a mess, but the sympathy of the literature teachers saves him: “ You would have fired Rimbaud! I resign “. This was the time when de Gaulle, another former student of Stan’, refused to embassy Sartre, because ” we do not imprison Voltaire “. Later, Patoche discovers the shady, long-haired guys in the Luxembourg Gardens. Our protagonist in turn finds himself adorned, enough to arouse the father’s doubts about the possible homosexuality of his offspring. Doubt largely dispelled when he knocks up the daughter of one of his father’s clients, ” heiress to a large family ».

English cockroaches and rue Saint-Denis

We meet several rock monsters in the book. There are some that are better to have posted in your bedroom than on the sofa in your living room. Sid Vicious, Sex Pistolsand Spungen, as sassy as in the film that Alex Cox dedicated to them, in need of money and heroin, for example. The rocker’s companion suddenly gets up and goes to prostitute herself on rue de Saint-Denis to collect a few tickets. Bad idea! We don’t come to compete for market share with pimps already established in the area. We have to catch up with her by taxi. As for Sid, it doesn’t take long for him to take out his switchblade.

Several decades later, Eudeline found herself in England with Peter Doherty, tail of the rock movement (“ One of the most gifted pop singers of his generation. Certainly, given the general level, this is a very relative compliment. The man is not a new Ray Davies, but rather a slavish imitator of this lineage “). In the shabby apartment at the spartan decor » from Kate Moss’s ex, the cockroaches are running wild. Eudeline also mentions a story of a young man who fell out of the window, at Doherty’s, at the end of the 2000s. There are sometimes bulky corpses in rockers’ closets. The author returns elsewhere to a France Culture broadcast, where in front of Daniel Cohn-Bendit, he declared: “ Your hair was too short to be credible. You have done less to change the world and morals than Antoine with his rantings “. We close the work keeping the same idea we had of the character: a picaresque and talented stilt, endowed with a certain sense of provocation.

208 pages.

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