Every day, a personality invites herself into the world of Élodie Suigo. This week, Julien Clerc, author, composer and singer is the exceptional guest of Le Monde d’Élodie. He looks back on the highlights of his career through five of his cult songs.
Julien Clerc is half a century of songs, concerts, love of a faithful public now made up of several generations who have fallen under the spell of the artist he is. It is told all this week through five episodes, five titles that have become essential. After releasing a 26th album: earthlingJulien Clerc is on an acoustic tour with the show Happy Days in which he covers songs by artists like Barbara, Bécaud and Trenet.
franceinfo: Being an earthling means first and foremost succeeding in keeping your feet on the ground. Have you always kept them during all this period or sometimes, have you lost your footing a little?
Julien Clerc: Rarely. There were times when I came across as difficult and unpleasant, especially on television. It was Michel Drucker who told me that one day, but it was more for questions of perfectionism. So it’s true, maybe there were times when I was less pleasant than others. But otherwise, I still really had my feet on the ground most of the time.
You were born Paul-Alain Leclerc, in the 19th arrondissement of Paris. Your father worked at Unesco. On the one hand, your mother made you discover Brassens and Piaf, on the other hand, your mother-in-law, a harpsichordist, made you discover classical music. It was the latter who put you on the piano from the age of six, who took you to the Champs-Elysées. This is where you will have your first auditory shock and your first crush.
It’s something called the Musigrains. It was a lady who was behind a speaker’s table on the stage of the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées, behind her, a symphonic. She took a composer, told us about his life, his work, and it was illustrated by the symphony orchestra behind her. It was a discovery for the formidable classic.
What is surprising, moreover, is that you were immersed in music through your parents.
My mothers, because my father couldn’t hear anything.
But at the same time, they were very skeptical of the idea that you could embrace this profession of “acrobat”.
Yes, but that’s normal! Especially my mother who came from a working class background. She loved singers, but at the same time, basically, to put it simply, she would have preferred me to be a lawyer or a doctor.
“My father, who had given him very scholarly studies since he was a normalien, was strangely much more understanding than ‘my mothers’ when I told him that I had decided to be a musician.”
Julien Clercat franceinfo
Everything changed place de la Sorbonne, at the Café de l’Écritoire. You spend more time there than in English class. Did you understand very quickly that music was going to and should be part of your life?
Let’s say it happened twice. The mothers had made me play the piano, finally my mother-in-law with my mother’s agreement of course, and I had stopped at 13 years old. And thank God, around 16 or 17, I went back there alone, to this piano. And it is there, I believe, that I invented my first melodies. And the second very important experience is when I sang. I was on vacation in Corsica with a friend. Musicians landed and they had no singer. They came to the place where all the young people meet in Calvi and asked if there was someone singing. So there, it’s incredible, I said: if I can sing. And the same evening, I sang and I saw that my voice did not leave anyone indifferent. So there, I started to invent music and then at some point I had to find lyricists because I didn’t have any.
His name will be Étienne Roda-Gil. Your first 45 rpm was released on May 9, 1968, The Cavalry. How did you experience this success, this incredible interest?
Me, what remains to me of all this adventure of The Cavalry, those are two things. On the one hand, we leave in the middle of May 68 and there is the strike, in particular in this House of Radio and Music. And the strike makes the songs pass without being announced or unannounced. I think I will spend a lot, especially on France Inter. And on the other hand, what remains is a feeling thing:
“When I put the headphones on my ears and first heard my music played by someone other than me on the piano, it was an emotion that has never been repeated.”
Julien Clercat franceinfo
There is a title which is unavoidable, it is It’s nothing. What does this song represent for you?
I understood the song, as often with Etienne, later. When I receive a text, I immediately have a musician’s reflex: What music am I going to put on it? So I’m looking for a hook. If you want, I can see roughly what the text means, what it says, today I have simpler texts, but in Etienne’s time, the meaning did not come to me right away. . So I learned later that it wasn’t such a happy song, it was a song he had written because someone from his wife’s family, Nadine, had died and so he wrote : “It’s nothing, you know it well, time passes, etc.“I only found out afterwards.
Julien Clerc will be, among others, on March 4, 2023 in Vittel, on March 9 in Gap, on March 18 in Cap d’Agde, on April 25 in Boulogne-Billancourt, on April 6 in Bollène, on June 29 in Bayonne, on June 30 in Bouillargues etc…