The author, composer and performer, Bernard Lavilliers, is the exceptional guest of Le Monde d’Élodie Suigo from August 19 to 23, 2024. Five days, five songs to better know this indomitable, committed artist, imbued with musical and human harmonies.
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Published
Reading time: 13 min
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Bernard Lavilliers is the special guest of Le Monde d’Élodie all this week. The opportunity to look back on five highlights of her life with five songs from her repertoire. Bernard Lavilliers, a prolific author, composer and performer since 1965, has never ceased to take us on a journey by mixing rock, reggae, salsa, bossa-nova and French song. Fensch Valley (1976), The Samba (1975), Saint-Etienne (1975), Stand The Ghetto (1980), Kingston (1980), Dark thoughts (1983) or again On the Road Again (1988) so many songs that have become for the most part hymns, the words of those who were not and are not heard, a freeze frame on certain conflicts or difficult periods.
Last November, the Saint-Etienne native with the iconic voice and phrasing released an album: Metamorphosis and a book: Write on the spot at Éditions des Équateurs. He will be in concert at the end of September.
franceinfo: In 1976, the album was released The Barbarians. The power of the titles that compose it seduces Eddie Barclay. This meeting will change the course of your life.
Bernard Lavilliers: Oh yes, completely. I was never Eddie Barclay’s adopted son. I didn’t go to Saint-Tropez. I saw him very rarely. It turns out that Richard Marsan was artistic director and let’s say that he was the one who took me to Eddie Barclay, who gave me the means, an advance on receipts, mind you, not a gift, to make real music, to have a real truck and real posters. Everything that the producer Francis Dreyfus didn’t have. I had found a band, decided to take action, that is to say to do concerts, expecting nothing from radio or television at the time. We did a lot of concerts. We did around 300 concerts a year, something like that.
The album was released in 1976. The following year, you performed at the Olympia for the first time. At the same time, you met Léo Ferré. It was immediate between you, he really became your mentor, someone who counts.
He’s not my mentor.
“I have a lot of admiration for Léo Ferré, but above all we were like two anarchist poets with a lot of humor.”
Bernard Lavilliersto franceinfo
Leo seemed angry all the time, but he was very funny. He said fundamental things for me often in songs and other times in very long texts. He said things that still exist, so a whole bunch of things that still bring us closer today, even if he is dead, it is as if he was not, for me.
You had a lot in common with Léo Ferré, this poetic side and also this need to “denounce” the horrors of power. You made an album about it, Powerswhich came out in 1979. It was just after 15th Round. Is this a way of saying things, definitively, that others cannot say?
I’m not sure they would think about it. It’s not that they don’t dare say it, they can’t find the words. They have too many worries in their daily lives. I spent a good time looking at all the fringes of power. I started with my autonomous friends from the Red Brigades, all those people I knew. Which was a way of seeing things that wasn’t great. And then, the power over women, all that. All that history, and those who suffer, so the people, who are afraid and who are being scared. The last song is Fear. So, yes, it can be painful to listen to because it’s not so simple, it’s perhaps a bit direct, but it’s very sophisticated despite everything and I haven’t sold any, even if everyone knows it, no one has bought it, in any case.
In the 1970s, you will discover reggae thanks to one of your musicians who was into ska. With this discovery, you will decide to go to Jamaica and you will meet Marley there. He had already listened to a track by 15th Round and that’s when it will be born Stand The Ghetto. What do you remember from this meeting with him who was rather taciturn?
He was listening all the time The dancer of the South who is on 15th Round and which is a kind of blues, a love song, but quite special. So since I spoke Czechoslovakian English, I couldn’t explain it to him too much. I learned English in Jamaica. You have to understand why the English don’t understand me at all. Afterwards, he gave me advice. He told me to go and record in such and such a studio and to take such and such a group.
“Bob Marley is a kind of character who doesn’t talk much, it’s true, he was a very internal guy.”
Bernard Lavilliersto franceinfo
In 1979 he had crab, cancer, which he did not want to treat, so he died in 1981.
Do you remember the moment you write? Stand The Ghetto because it has become an essential, cult song?
I wrote it the night before I went to the studio. I only had one, it was Kingston and I said to myself, damn, I have to have at least two. I found the chords and I wrote down what was happening. People loved their lives of course, but it was very difficult to bear the ghetto. Basically, the Island is beautiful, but the ghetto is hard. What happens is that with this song, it’s the first time that I’m on the radio, while I’m telling the same thing as in The Barbarians. Except that it’s Jamaican. In reggae, what is also in calypso, there are choirs, soul and there is mento which is the starting music, the origin. It’s true that it’s a seductive music, you can dance to it quietly, no need to dance fast. This music is a bit made for lazy people, that’s why it has been so successful!