Hubert-Félix Thiéfaine is an author, composer and performer. It was in 1978 that we discovered him with his first studio album: … any living body connected to the sector is called to be moved. Since then, virtually all of his albums have been Gold Disc. Today after leaving Vacuum geography, his 18th album with 12 new titles, he is touring all over France.
franceinfo: Vacuum geography, it’s a bit like the itinerary of an inhabited and revitalized poet, isn’t it?
Hubert-Félix Thiéfaine : It depends on the hours. It was ataraxia that touched me, there are ups and downs, like everyone else.
Your words resonate, they hit the mark. The pen is sharp, precise, the verb high. The blank page does not seem to exist with you. On the contrary, we discover the black page which, for its part, is enthroned. It’s a sort of dose of musical absinthe.
The first title, which is called Black page, was a blank slate at first and it was just a blockage that lasted for a few months. It came from the fact that what I felt deep inside me was a lot of sadness and that through the other albums, I had been criticized a little for this sadness.
“I had fantasized a bit about stopping at the 17th album because in my first album there is a song called ‘Le chant du fou’ and I start by saying: the madman to sing 17 times . So I thought it was nice to end up on the 17th album. “
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And then there was a conversation one day with my son Lucas, who made the album, and who told me that there was a lot of melancholy and that he really liked this melancholy side that hadn’t nothing to do with sadness. I understood that I no longer had to fear sadness. I was going to replace sadness with melancholy and then there is again energy which was produced and which made me start to move, to take a pen, to write.
I was talking about musical absinthe earlier, but it’s true that there is this Verlaine, Pierre de Ronsard side and in any case, this respect for writing. Have you always been in this?
I do not know. We learn, perhaps, François Villon in fourth and there, I was turned on by him with The Hanged Man’s Ballad. For a 13, 14 year old kid, that’s impressive. And I started writing little poems around that time, but I was already writing funny songs: Alligator 427, Long live death!
In this album Vacuum geography, you are celebrating life once again. It is true that you have always done it, especially with this song which marked a lot, The joint cutter’s daughter, released on your first album, on cannabis consumption. Are you still a free artist to your fingertips?
I find it difficult to be otherwise. I really like the solitude, also the silence. These are my two great passions. Finding myself, making songs, singing songs to me inside like that and stuff. So yeah, I’m even ready to defend myself for that.
Where does your passion for words come from? It’s true that you from the start was really passionate about writing, about reading too. You went to try your luck in the left bank cabarets, it was in 1971, in particular at the Club des poètes.
“As a child, I read very late because I spent all my free time writing songs and listening to other people’s songs as well.”
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It’s strange because I wrote and read afterwards. I could hear people talking, some of them spoke really wonderfully. I wanted to talk like that, only I couldn’t do it at all. So I got the words back and did something else with them. For me, it’s easier to sing them, actually. And it started very young when I discovered yéyés in the early 1960s.
At first you wanted to be a priest, but when you were 10 you knew you wanted to be a singer.
No. In fact, I wanted to be Pope! I entered a school specializing in this purpose and after 15 days, my neighbor at the desk who was crazy, ravaged by yéyés and who had 45s, gradually converted me to the song of the 60s.
How does it feel to be considered today as one of the last sacred monsters of rock song?
This is not really what I was looking for initially. At first, for me, the ideal was what I was going through in 1980, that is to say that I had my first three albums which were starting to sell. I started to fill small rooms. I was starting to, say, eat three meals a day, two and a half say, and have a roof over a room in town to change the guitar strings. I was able to make a living from my music and my poetry somewhere, so that was fabulous because that’s what I wanted. I had such a hard time in the ’70s that all of a sudden these little things that people don’t pay much attention to were very important to me.
I thought about Hunger by Knut Hamsun (1890), this apprentice novelist who dies of hunger, but who forgets hunger by writing, by writing, by writing. And that’s what I did during the 70s, I spent my time crossing Paris in all directions, on foot and taking pictures everywhere and writing.
Hubert-Félix Thiéfaine is currently on tour. It can be found, among other dates, on January 13 in Clermont-Ferrand, on January 15 in Besançon, on 19 in Bordeaux, on January 26, 27, 28, 29 in Paris (Théâtre des Folies Bergère, Salle Pleyel, L’Olympia, The big Rex) etc …