Singer Jean-Louis Murat died at the age of 71 – rts.ch

The singer-songwriter and performer was to release a best of his songs this Friday. Jean-Louis Murat was born on January 28, 1952 in Chamalières, in the Puy-de-Dôme, in Auvergne.

Forty years of rock belles-lettres, around thirty albums including some French-speaking gems (“Cheyenne Autumn”, “Le Manteau derain”, “Mustango”) which motivated a generation of singers to take up the pop-rock maquis in song. Jean-Louis Murat is an inspiring stature, a heritage of versified spleen who succeeded in making Mylène Farmer, Carla Bruni or Isabelle Huppert sing.

The Auvergne bard brought up by John Lee Hooker, Neil Young, Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen or Swell rather than Brel, Brassens and Ferré has produced one of the most elegant, intriguing, touching, literate and constant works of contemporary song. despite the reversals of fortune.

>> “Regrets” by Jean-Louis Murat and Mylène Farmer:

Several reversals of fortune

He thus had to find discographic exile on several occasions to pursue his romantic destiny, felt “put away in the closet” ten years ago when his small singing company experienced the crisis. Blame it on sales at half mast of his recordings, which he published at his frenetic biennial pace, with limited radio airplay, on concert dates becoming scarce.

Morale at half mast, the singer who had then retired to a farm in the Auvergne mountains not far from Clermont-Ferrand, confided to us: “I think I no longer understand the time, people. Everything seems unreadable to me. democracy has favored mediocrity, in politics as well as in music. It even becomes difficult to write songs, to paint, to simply create in such a context of globalized gloom”.

>> The title “If I had to miss you” by Jean-Louis Murat, his first success with the album “Cheyenne Autumn”:

Murat’s disenchantment

Despite his highly stylized and musically subtly uneven poetry, Murat was no longer successful. The fault also, it was said in the middle of the music, with a tarnished reputation of man “gruff, silent and unpleasant”. He had therefore resolved to sing “I would like to lose sight of myself” in the heart of “Grand Lièvre” to try to be heard.

The disenchantment of the artist who was undesirable for a time at the Victoires de la Musique and censored by certain media following a few cathodic altercations will thus have been recurrent. The maverick, as romantic as he is casual, was in turn touched in the heart. To the point that Murat even said he was condemned to keep his more outrageous, bawdy and sexual songs in his drawers to avoid becoming a definitive “pariah”. It is true that he then published three surly albums, including a poem of 1000 verses and a tribute to Pierre-Jean de Béranger (1780-1857), songwriter and leading libertarian poet of the 19th century whose corrosive rhymes earned him renowned admirers. such as Victor Hugo, Lamartine, Flaubert, Stendhal or Chateaubriand.

Already in 2006, on the release of “Taormina”, he confided to us a tenacious bitterness: “I always manage to put a little intensity in life. From there to say that life is exhilarating… If I do records, the stage, painting, it’s because I find life deeply boring. Otherwise, it would make me sick and I would go straight to suicide. Since I was very young, I tell myself that we is made for things you don’t do. So we’re bored. I had to be made for conquests, an Alexander the Great life maybe. We have low voltage lives and I try to bring intensity to mine through the stage, the recording studio, painting. To kill boredom. But it’s not to pass the time, otherwise I’d be a pure contemplative “.

I always manage to put a little intensity in life. From there to say that life is exhilarating… If I make records, stage, paint, it’s because I find life deeply boring. Otherwise, it would make me sick and I would go straight to suicide.

In the end during the last ten years, while continuing to record seven albums despite everything, the scholar and self-taught preferred to devote his life to his family, poetry, fixing up his farm and walking in the forest. The rest followed the usual work methodology with virtues that are as nourishing as they are depolluting and furnishing: reading poetry, classical and contemporary authors. The Murat heritage has taken refuge in beautiful things and the essential.

From “Suicide, the people are dead” (1981) to “The real life of Buck John” (2021) via the notables “Taormina” (2006) or “Great Hare” (2011), his repertoire of life and death with captivating spleen, his thin voice of a staggering sensuality, will certainly survive him.

Oliver Horner