We've concluded that on the whole it is better for us to try to avoid the initial mourning throng that coalesces around dead stars. So often anyhow, we have been mourning them while they're still breathing. Immediately of course came an exception. For Françoise Hardy, five tunes plucked by our writers from an incredible career. Is incredible enough to describe her work? Françoise, hardly.
DJ Fuzzyfelt
Je fais des puzzles
Je Fais Des Puzzles was co-written by a then top session guitarist on loads of great 60s French songs Mick Jones who went on to form Foreigner and wrote all those awful songs like 'Cold as Ice', and 'I Want To Know What Love Is'. Bizarre or what. 'I Do Puzzles' is pure Hardy lyrically...a spurned lover sits alone doing puzzles in her apartment hoping,but knowing in her heart of hearts it will never happen,that the man who ran away will return.
John Robinson
I Will Change My Life
An English language performance of a beautiful song by a team including herself and Ennio Morricone, the duality of passion being both desirable and crazy, the lack of one's own agency in a state of love... "I would change my mind and tell myself that until you, I was wrong"... the clarity of expression, emotion, warmth and humanity in her voice while evoking and toying with our desire for her... matchless.
Duncan Jones
Fleur de Lune
A touch of the systematic derangement of the senses here. Blood waves and a cage with an open door. I guess all the boys and girls had moved on. That same soft steady voice though with all the calcifying vulgarities of work shook off. 1970. A different, fractious world
Le temps de l'amour
C'est le temps de l'amour
Le temps des copains
Et de l'aventure
Quand le temps va et vient
On ne pense à rien
It's the time for love
a time for your pals
a time for adventure
When times come and go
You don't think about anything
Well, time has come and gone and doesn't work anymore. That Shads twang must have thrown our friends across the way. How ever could a song penned for the kids sound so sad?
On ne pense à rien
Ancient Champion
Comment te Dire Adieu
Françoise is diffident in the midst of the commotion, sitting and swinging gently in an Aarnio Bubble chair, impervious to the noise, the composed certainty of knowing her place, indolently shuffling a pile of 45s over her gorgeous handwoven Boujad rug with a bare foot. The chaos everywhere but here.
"Comment te Dire Adieu” fades away and Françoise says, “No more of me.”
How does it feel when the finest two and a half minutes of your life are owed to Serge Gainsbourg?
Momentarily and uncharacteristically ungainly,Françoise steps out of her bubble to change the record. The sonically violent opening guitar chords of the Beatles’ Revolution gets nodding approval as it almost shakes the room. Despite De Gaulle decamping to Germany this very night, despite the protests in the streets, the unity on the left, this Montmartre set is virtually the last group in Paris that can envisage benefitting from a tectonic ideological shift. They wear their revolutionary zeal. But they are not what they wear. They breathe the status quo.
(from the Death of the Author of the Death of the Author a shortt story in revolutionary times by Ancient Champion)
essential information
main image Françoise Hardy in Amsterdam, December 1969
