Axel Bauer is a singer, songwriter, author and guitarist. His song Cargo marked the year 1983 in the French charts, a huge success that he again experienced with the song Turn off the light in 1992 then In my place in duet with Zazie in 2001. Today, he returns with a new single Here London, the first single from his future and ninth album to be released in May.
franceinfo: With this record, you begin a path of personal refocusing based on transmission. It is a very nice tribute that you pay to your father, Frank Bauer, last announcer of Radio London, the same one who pronounced: “The French speak to the French“, 517 times. Was it a necessary tribute?
Axel Bauer: It was necessary to do it for me. My father came to see me a few years ago and we talked about his book being released at the time: 40 in London, where he recounted his past in London, where he was announcer, spy, under the blitz as a young jazz enthusiast. I asked him lots of questions, of course, since it interested me, I wanted to feel what he had felt.
I, too, was in London when I was 22, but not for the same reasons and not under such dire circumstances. In the discussion, the microphone was left open, he recorded and he said to me: “This is how I said the sentences, ‘The French speak all French’ “, and so he re-recorded them for me. I kept this conversation with which Boris Bergman, who also has a vibrant past with his family in relation to that time, was able to find the words We did some fake Radio London messages and we did a song called Here London.
Indeed, we hear your father’s voice. It’s true that he influenced your life a lot, he was Django Reinhardt’s drummer.
Initially, it was a young man who left to join the forces of Free France in England. Then, he was war correspondent, then secretary general of the Comédie-Française. He set up the first public relations firm in France. He organized the first big jazz festival in France.
“My father, Frank Bauer, was kind of a jack of all trades, he was a wonderful being.”
On the family side, there is a musicality that has really accompanied you throughout your childhood. With indeed your father, but also your great-grandfather who was an organist. Your aunt was a pianist and classical concertist, first Prize of the Conservatory, having had as teachers Edwin Fischer, Nadia Boulanger and Rudolf Serkin. They really brought you that musical side, of course, but that free side too.
My father used to say that in his day, if you wanted to listen to music, you had to know how to make it. Everyone was playing music and so I was immersed in this atmosphere which means that the music, I heard it from the cradle. Learning an instrument was completely natural. I was taken to see my aunt who played at the ORTF or at Carnegie Hall, they were also prestigious places. My father had played drums with Django Reinhardt, he had a piano and an organ at home. Music was part of my life, then one day he came up with tickets to go see the Who, that was the revolution for me.
I found my music. I was 12, 13 and he comes with this ticket to see the greatest rock band in the world! My father, moreover, liked the Who, it was fabulous.
One evening, while playing the piano in a jazz club, he was approached by Jean Oberlé, the host of the Free France team, at Radio London. It was he who invited her to join Radio London. In this title, it is also what we discover or rediscover, the power of Radio London. There is this hope side, it was a real weapon of war, it was also life in this France occupied by the enemy, and your father embodied this resistance. You talk about it a lot in this title.
It was Boris Bergman who came up with this sentence that I found magic, it is “In other times, we were more resistant“, which is at the same time, a play on words, and at the same time which poses the question:”What are we resisting today?“Me, I ask myself the question. Where is this freedom that we finally have? Shouldn’t I realize that I still have a lot more freedoms? That’s what I realized when I spoke with my father is that I had a lot more freedom than he had fought for that freedom.
What does this title represent for you? Knowing that he asked that you could do a song together.
It always makes me funny to sing and to hear his voice answering me.
“It always moves me to hear my father’s voice.”
What do you keep from your father then?
Already, the passion for music. He had a look at my music that I liked too. He was very open-minded, so I listened to him like a son listens to his father. He was a man who worked a lot, so he wasn’t there all the time, of course.
When I was little I remember we had Lego and with my brother we would unpack the box and do some vague stuff. He would come in and build an aircraft carrier. Very quickly, I understood that with very little, he was able to do a lot. He gave me these values a little and I think it’s already bad already.