abroad, artists salute a French pop icon admired on the international scene

From Bod Dylan to Blur, via Jimmy Sommerville, Françoise Hardy has left her mark on her peers across the Channel and across the Atlantic with her artistic singularity.

Often in French, several artists and pop figures have paid tribute to Françoise Hardy since the announcement of her death on June 11, 2024 at the age of 80. Starting with Blur guitarist Graham Coxon (1988 to 2002, then again from 2009), who said he was happy to have known her “A little”. In 1993, the British group invited Fançoise Hardy to sing To The End.

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Farewell, Francoise. Nice to have known you for just a little while.x pic.twitter.com/1ocBBhJbZY

— graham coxon (@grahamcoxon) June 12, 2024

It is in the language of Molière that Tim Burgess, singer of The Charlatans, said goodbye to the French singer of the Sixties most adored abroad. His repertoire was as much in English as in Italian or German.

Success never denied since again in 2023, the American magazine Rolling Stone made her the only French artist to appear, at 162nd place, in the list of the 200 best singers of all time. A rare composer in her time, the review notes that her interpretation of Suzanne by Leonard Cohen is “perhaps the most evocative ever recorded, including his own”.

The review recalled the admiration, artistic among others, that the singer and Nobel Prize winner Bob Dylan had for him. The latter dedicated a poem to him on the back of his album, Another Side of Bob Dylan. And when he came to Paris, in May 1966, to give his first concert, says Françoise Hardy, he refused to go back on stage if she did not agree to meet him, recalls Variety.

He was not the only one to have fallen under the spell of the artist and the woman. David Bowie openly admitted to having been in love with her and Mick Jagger believed that she was his “ideal woman”. Like Blur in the mid 90s or Jimmy Somerville who took over How to Say Goodbye to You in the 80s, she continued to have young fans like Greg Gonzalez, leader of the group Cigarettes After Sex. He says he was “distraught by listening to The Question”, indicated Le Figaro.

A mutual admiration since Françoise Hardy had confided to Franceinfo, to the release of his latest album, Nobody elsein spring 2018, having found in the sound of Cigarettes After Sex the elements she was looking for since her beginnings in 1962: beautiful melodies set with soaring guitar.

In this young generation of artists, the American actor Elijah Wood paid tribute to her, also in French, reminding us that Française Hardy also left her mark on world cinema.

Recently, in Moonrise Kingdomhe American filmmaker Wes Andersen suggested notes of When the time for love.

Always at the cinema, underlines VarietyAmerican audiences remember her in the film Grand Prix by John Frankenheimer in 1966.

Françoise Hardy also made a brief appearance in What’s new, Pussycat? by Clive Donner where she opposite Romy Schneider and Peter O’Toole.