Étienne Daho spends the week with us on franceinfo to relive the highlights of his life, five days, five songs or five photos. While Etienne Daho celebrates his 40-year career, he takes the opportunity to reissue his first album Mythomaniac, while blowing out the ten candles of his album The doomed man including a duet with Jeanne Moreau. He also just released a new single a few weeks ago: Virus X.
franceinfo: You have always approached music as on the first day. You knew how to cross by renewing yourself the 80s, 90s, 2000, 2010 with a beautiful Victoire de la musique for your album The invitation, in 2007 and the SACEM Grand Prix for The songs of innocence found, published in 2013. Another nod to your childhood, because you owned the first edition of William Blake. It’s an album that is very important to you.
Etienne Daho: Yes. It’s an essential album and then there are songs in it that I find incredible for my taste, like The man who walks. I think it’s the song I’m most proud of because it has a construction, a text …
When we’ve been doing songs for so long and we manage to surprise ourselves, to say: ‘There, really, we did something that we had never done’, it’s exhilarating.
Etienne Dahoto franceinfo
It’s an album that has been celebrated as your best album. Do you agree with that?
Yes, I think it’s probably the best. Or one of the best with Eden and Blitz.
It was said, after that, that you had become the godfather of French song. What does it mean to you?
I do not know. In any case, that makes me happy because if I am the godfather of people that I like, as I am, that is perfect.
In 2018, you received a victory of honor for all of your work at the Victoires de la Musique and on December 2, the great medal awarded by the French Academy for all of your songs. Are you happy with this union with the public, with the stage, with the music?
Yes, because it’s a story that has been written for a very long time with songs and hits. And I realize when I’m playing, when I’m on tour, especially when I’m at festivals where people don’t necessarily come to see you, but all of a sudden there’s an intro, people throw them up. arm and something happens. It makes a connection with others and that is quite magical.
It’s quite wonderful to see this handful of songs that make you enter the lives of others.
Etienne Dahoto franceinfo
What are you most proud of after all?
To last. It’s a fear, we always want good things to last. It’s a fantastic gift and I want it to continue, but that, I am not the only one to choose it. It is the others who choose if you are in their life or not.
What do these 40 years of career represent? What look do you have?
It is a huge gift. It is perpetual happiness. It’s the joy of doing what you love. It is the joy of being free, the joy of making absolutely exceptional encounters with artists that we listened to in our teenage rooms.
When you look closely, you have almost met them all. It started with Françoise Hardy, you started singing with her.
Invited by John Cale to sing the Velvet album at the Philharmonic. Finally, things like that, we cannot forget them. It’s extraordinary !
I would like you to tell me about the song Virus X, a new single or how relationships can turn toxic.
I’m not going to explain the text, but it’s music that an Italian duo, Italoconnection, gave me. They are the kings of Italian disco. Their names are Paolo Gozzetti and Federico Di Bonaventura, they are crazy names. And so, they gave me this music, I turned around and I had this text on a form of toxicity that I really superimposed with the time that we went through and that we still go through with the masks, to unmask, to be intoxicated. It was a funny way of doing something.