We are in the early 90, Etienne Daho leaves a concert in Los Angeles and joins the luxury hotel Château Marmont. The public had a good evening, but the singer is exhausted. During the evening, he climbs onto his balcony and hesitate to let go, to finish in full glory. What holds him back at the last moment? “A flash of terror. I realized there was a momentum pushing me to get it over with, a sort of raptus, but it wasn’t me at all. Like when you see the madman in yourself, when you imagine yourself doing something absurd or violent“, he confides this week in Madame Figaro.
However, the whole world is far from imagining what is going on in his head during this dark period of his life. Since the release of Paris Elsewhereone of his most famous albums in 1991, he is indeed in full “Dahomania” : his concerts attract crowds of hysterical fans. But he can’t take it anymore.
“If I had continued at this rate, I would have died. Too much work, too many parties, too much of everything“, he continues, very frankly. “And then those moments of total hysteria, where people were sleeping across my doormat, it was not possible. I’m not cut out for that. Even though I loved the joyful side, the incredible gift that it works so much. So many projects, requests…“
A burn-out that he finally digested little by little
A world that he can no longer bear and from which he will take a long time to recover. “We live in a place where we are perched most of the time. It’s an addiction. So we continue. Until I found myself on the edge of the precipice without realizing it“, he says, explaining that he has “took two or three years to [s]recover from this period“.
“I went to London, I made the album Edenit was really a cure“, admits the singer of Duel in the Sun, who also needed the help of psychotherapy. “I couldn’t have done without. Especially since once we have solved a certain number of problems, dad, mom, etc., it helps to better understand others“.
Also marked by the death of a father who had abandoned him, and whom he ended up rejecting, Etienne Daho is doing much better today and continues to rely on his relatives, in particular Jane Birkin with whom he collaborated. many times over the past thirty years. Moreover, between them, it’s a family affair: Etienne Daho also wrote songs for and with Charlotte Gainsbourg and Lou Doillon, the two daughters of the British artist.