Benjamin Biolay decided to bare himself in an interview with the magazine Marie Claire. An interview conducted in the sixth arrondissement of Paris in an Argentinian restaurant named Volover, which is also the name of one of his albums. A new one comes out on September 9, which partly explains the existence of this meeting. The 49-year-old singer, who recently spoke about his libido, took the opportunity to tell everything that went through his head, in particular his addiction problems related to alcohol.
“At 30, I was an alcoholic“, he confides, in complete transparency, adding this: “I was sure that I would be a cursed poet for life”. We also learn that he fills the rooms and the small water bottles with vodka. He would consume up to “five liters a day“. One day, a manager would have made the accounts. Verdict: thirty bottles of vodka per week.“I was scared to death, actually.It wasn’t nice, I was getting fat, I wasn’t even drunk.” he remembers.
In the studio, sometimes I get drunk
If he speaks in the past tense, it’s because he’s gone”by the sea with the children” and“for six months”, he “no longer touched a drop of alcohol. And no more hard liquor.” If he still consumes it, he seems to have greatly reduced his consumption and now uses his drunkenness as a “work tool“and not simply as a handicap.”In the studio, I sometimes get drunk. Two three drinks gon’ make me go, silence my fuckin’ brain, my hardness with myself that keeps me from fucking a song when I’m close to finding something“, he reveals.
He is often compared to Serge Gainsbourg, who was renowned for “transfigure his wanderings and his excesses into success, explains the magazine. To which Benjamin Biolay responds: “JI couldn’t have made forty albums for the others if I had been a wreck”. As a reminder, from a sentimental point of view, Benjamin Biolay is the proud father of a daughter named Anna, born of his relationship with Chiara Mastroianni, but also the father of a daughter who lives in Argentina cas he had revealed in Paris Match in June.