singer Dave confides in his memoirs

Dave is a Dutch singer considered to be the French’s favorite Dutchman. His voice and his self-deprecation were able to conquer the public, which was always there. He achieved success in the 1970s with French-speaking songs, such as Vanina And Near Swann. He has just published his memoirs, How not to be in love with youat Talent Editions.

franceinfo: The starting point for writing this book was the accident you had on January 29, 2022 and which almost cost you your life. Was that a trigger?

Dave: I actually ran down the stairs of my house and fell backwards ten feet. And afterwards, I don’t remember it anymore, so there you have it, no bad memories.

“The title makes me laugh because I’ve had immediate memory problems since my fall, so it was better to write it before than after.”

What makes me laugh the most is when I told the editor that there had already been two bios about me, he replied: “They are dead, the people who read this!”

You start this work with your childhood. You were born, Wouter Otto Levenbach in Amsterdam. So your first name was neither Dave nor David, it became that later. But what you learned was that the day you were born, your father wasn’t there because he was hiding from the Nazi German militias because he was Jewish. What memories do you have from this childhood?

I have memories that couldn’t be happier until the day I realized that my father was cheating on my mother with our cleaning lady. I came across some very explicit letters and threw them on his desk, very angry, not for myself, but for my mother. I was 18 and found it all the more incredible because this cleaning lady came home to us when she was fourteen. She didn’t have a mother and my mother treated her like she was her daughter. So there was almost an incestuous side. And a few months later, I heard screaming downstairs and I thought: “that’s it, she knows”. It was hard for my mother because she never had other guys, because my mother was like me, a one-man woman. I am not a woman, but I am only a man.

You wanted to be a pastor at first. Was your goal simply to be listened to?

My father was therefore of Jewish origin but he had converted to Protestantism. My mother was a total atheist, my two brothers and my sister too. So it was just him and me going to church. The pastor was a very beautiful woman who spoke very well. And there, I think it was also a form of narcissism and egocentrism, but I wanted to be in his place so that people would listen to me and I entered university with that idea. .

You studied theology, then law, and it took you a while to tell yourself that music was going to become your passion?

Yes, that is to say that very quickly, I wanted to sing in front of people. So when I was in high school, I sang at small parties. But I didn’t think it could make money. So it was really a pleasure. And it’s flirtatious when you sing so there was a narcissistic side too, it must be admitted.

Have you lost your footing in this career with all these successes?

One day, I arrived at the Maison de la Radio with a hit, I sold almost 20,000 records per day. And the parking lot gates were closed. I honked the horn and the man said to me: “You’re not coming back.” And there, I heard myself utter this sentence that I regret, which is a sentence from someone with a big head: “But anyway, you don’t see who I am?” So I said to myself, calm down and since then I’ve thought I’m fine.

You say that you would like to be on stage to celebrate your 80th birthday and record an album. In this book you say: “I’m already an old singer, but I can’t imagine for a moment stopping singing and ending my career. Singing on stage is one of the best moments of my life.” Does this mean you want to die on stage?

Not necessarily. If I have to be in a bed, it might be more comfortable. But I don’t know how you can say: I don’t want to be an old singer. I’m an old singer and I’m going to sing on June 21 at the Grand Rex to celebrate.

You write that you would like as a conclusion to write ” phew!” on your ballot box. For what ?

The last thing that really made me almost want to cry were the photos from Ukraine.

“When I saw photos of World War II in the 1950s, I was very young and it scared me.”

And I said to myself, fortunately that will never happen again. Well, it always happens today and tomorrow, there are always wars. How do they manage to do horrors? We are all the same, even if we don’t have the same defense, the same skin color, the same religion. I don’t understand and it scares me. So that’s why I say “phew!”, because it will be the end of fear and it will be rest. And then there’s the crazy verlan, so I like that too!