Louis Bertignac is a musician, lyricist, singer, guitarist and co-founder of the rock band Telephone. In 1986, when the latter was dissolved, he created the group Les Visiteurs and pursued a solo career in parallel. Between 2015 and 2017, he reunited with two of his Telephone associates, Jean-Louis Aubert and Richard Kolinka, by founding the group Les Insus. His solo career continues and even if the pandemic deprived him of a tour, he took the opportunity to write.
Louis Bertignac publishes an autobiography, nice little story, published by Cherche-Midi.
franceinfo: You were born with a feather in your hand and your book nice little story is written in the singular. Does that mean your life is a fairy tale?
Yes. My life, I take it like that, really. I take this as a wonderful opportunity. So obviously, there are more difficult times, but that’s part of life.
“Happy times made me happy and tough times made me stronger.”
Louis Bertignacat franceinfo
Child, teenager, adult, father, husband, lover, you scan all the subjects in this book, in particular a Louis Bertignac, a good student at the Lycée Carnot.
Yes, I was a good student, but I didn’t have much merit because my grandmother was a teacher. She absolutely wanted me to be excellent. At the time, we went to school around five, six years old and I already knew how to read and write. And the first classification, I was tied for first. She went to see the teacher asking him: “But why is he tied for first? Why isn’t he first on his own?“
There has been a balance in your life, it’s that your parents have always been very supportive of you. Your mom was benevolent, lived more for others than for herself, and your dad considered you a bit of a darling.
They were loving parents. It’s true that I was the darling, but it may be due to the fact that I was the second ‘Louis’, the first having died at birth. So they gave me maybe twice the love and my mom was still calling me, “My king“.
Your first steps on a stage happen precisely at the Lycée Carnot.
I was taking advantage. I was fourteen in 1968 and there were strikes and I was playing. I was told: “Since you play a little guitar, you will attract people to the room and then we will hold the general meeting to discuss politics.“I didn’t care about politics, but I took the opportunity. I came with my guitar and my amp and I played really loud. And, that attracted people. And in fact, after that, every times they fired me, but they had a hard time doing it, I didn’t want to get out.
There is an epilogue in this book about the boat the baby boomers had embarked on in search of a new world: “The Beatles shouted ‘Land’ first and me when I arrived later in the oar, it was the Stones who made me discover the Promised Land where I was going to spend my life“The Stones, it’s really the starting point and especially the album”let it bleed“.
Exactly. This album blew me away. I said to myself: there is nothing that will ever be so beautiful. I spent my days listening to this record and then my grades in class started to drop gradually until I was in high school where I failed the first time because I was so in love with it. And suddenly, I took out my guitar and I started to learn, to play this stuff and I was flying like crazy with my guitar, in my room, at my parents’ house.
“I was putting on the Stones albums and I was playing guitar at the same time. I closed my eyes and I felt like they were smiling at me, the Charlie Watts, Jagger, saying to me, ‘You’re progressing , it’ll be OK’.”
Louis Bertignacat franceinfo
Your parents always trusted you, but at some point they got scared because they knew you were a Stones fan. Since the Stones were on drugs, it was complicated. And the day your father comes to talk to you about his fears about it, he’s waiting for a break in the music, between and there, what happens?
He sees me smoking a big firecracker and suddenly he’s convinced that I’m screwed, that the boy he was hoping for as a minister, doctor or lawyer was going to become a tramp. And five minutes later, my sister said to me: “You know, daddy, he cried in mommy’s arms“. It gave me a shock. I never saw my father cry. It hurt me a lot, but I couldn’t help but play music. I was trying to please them, I passed my baccalaureate, I tried to do a few months of medicine, but it wasn’t my thing. I couldn’t do it and I didn’t know what I wanted. The more anxious I was, the more I was in uncertainty, the more I played music because it was the only way to forget that it was wrong.
Louis Bertignac will be in concert on June 25 in Mutzig, on July 8 in Divonnes-Les-Bains and on July 29 in Civray.