A new release by Alain Bashung, “On n’a pas l’air”, to discover on the occasion of the 15th anniversary of the artist’s death

A guitar, a bass, a cheerful saxophone and a harmonica freed from constraints. Fifteen years after the death of singer Alain Bashung, a new track will be released on March 1, We don’t seemone of the pieces in an anthology offered to fans of the artist, to be published on March 8 under the title The Album of his life. A crazy song, with ribald lyrics, written in 1981, unearthed and mixed 40 years later by Mitch Olivier, the sound engineer for the sessions at the time.

The unreleased track was composed during the period when Alain Bashung was playing with his group KGDD. Without really being set aside, the song is radically rearranged and appears in German on the album Play Injuries. This new version titled Junge Manner, in French “young boys”, has little left of the original version, then relegated to the singer’s drawers.

This unreleased title is an important piece of Alain Bashung’s career. Born from the words of Boris Bergman, We don’t seem prefigures the artist’s musical metamorphosis. The piece still lets us hear its founding influences – a saxophone, a harmonica – and reveals a few hours in advance, or perhaps forty years late, the electronic sounds of the new wave music towards which the singer is heading.

In 2019, eleven unreleased tracks by Alain Bashung were revealed with the release of the posthumous album Upstream. These were pieces left out during the recording of his album Blue oil, the singer’s last album appeared in March 2008, almost exactly a year before his death.