“I’ve been in love with words since I learned to listen.”

Author, composer and performer Bernard Lavilliers is the special guest of Le Monde d’Élodie Suigo from August 19 to 23, 2024. Five days, five songs to get to know this indomitable, committed artist, imbued with musical and human harmonies. Last November, he released an album: “Métamorphose” and a book: “Écrire sur place” (Writing on site) at Éditions des Équateurs.

Bernard Lavilliers is the special guest of Le Monde d’Élodie all this week. The opportunity to look back on five highlights of his life with five songs from his repertoire. Bernard Lavilliers, a prolific author, composer and performer since 1965, has never stopped taking 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: Commitment is a bit of a common thread in your career. What does being committed mean to you?

Bernard Lavilliers: There was a time when being engaged necessarily meant being a member of the Communist Party. For me, that doesn’t mean that. Witnessing reality is a commitment to describe. Being engaged like a priest in the faith is not my style. I am rather someone who is critical and doubtful. I think that ideological engagement, that is to say someone who can only think between two blinkers, who cannot dialogue with anyone, is the opposite of me.

When do you fall in love with words?

Since I learned to read, not even, since I learned to listen. And music, it’s so connected for me! Why? Because I listened to a woman called Marianne Oswald on the old radio. She recited Lautréamont’s poems, for example. And for me, the words and the voice that carries them, it made me feel a melody. The voice is essential in singing as in speaking and there are people who have a superb voice to recite texts, poems in particular, which rhyme or not by the way, but which hook you or not. It’s like on the radio, there are people who have a voice that comes across perfectly and others much less so.

What’s crazy is that finally, thanks to your parents, you were able to have access to the radio, to music. They also had a culture that was very broad, that is to say that there was both classical and texts, with this love of poetry and this love of “music lovers”. All that transported you, it still plays a huge role.

For modest people like my parents, very modest even, it was included from the start. My father loved jazz, opera, voices and my mother loved classical music and poetry. So I was immersed in a history of workers. They were carried by this love of music, poetry and adventure.

You searched for yourself for a long time, you spent time in prison and your father was quite uncompromising. He told you: “There are two solutions: either you continue like this or you learn a real trade.“.

He still told me that there were two! Either I continue to go to prison, or I work. Indeed, everything I learned, in any case, it still serves me today: first of all, respect for a job well done, hatred of bosses, no God, no master, no foremen, and solidarity. Solidarity is not necessarily natural in a human being.

“In the world of the factory in which I worked, 7,000 workers, I was ‘solidaritude’, that is to say a loner, an outsider but united.”

Bernard Lavilliers

to franceinfo

Do you remember your first song?

No. I must have written some stupid love songs, no doubt… I must have been rejected by a girl. But I didn’t insist too much in this area because quite quickly, I said to myself: “Now that you know how to play four chords, you’re going to write some nasty stuff against the government.”. I didn’t hang around too much with the desperate love songs.

The album The poets was released in 1972. Three years later, we have The Stéphanois with strong titles like Saint-Etienne, San Salvador, The Great Tide. There is a song that marked this period in your fourth album, The Barbarians, published in 1976, which reveals it, it is Fensch Valley. It is aimed at bourgeois students who supported and carried the cause of the workers. How did this samba come about?

Because of the bourgeoisie, obviously. Because when they spoke for the working world, they didn’t understand anything.

“When I see labor ministers who have never worked in a factory, how can the guy understand? Intellectually, okay, but it’s all so physical.”

Bernard Lavilliers

to franceinfo

So, yes, there were petty bourgeois who came to visit the rolling mills. I experienced it. They didn’t come to complain to us, they found it so cinematic. The workers handling molten iron at 1,500 degrees, it’s magnificent to see. Well, they didn’t get too close either, otherwise we would have thrown molten iron at them.