Forty-six years after the success of the hit “The Ballad of Happy People”, Gérard Lenorman released his 18th studio album called “Le Goût du Bonheur”. In this new opus, the singer surrounds himself with other stars of French song namely Vianney, Serge Lama or even Bénabar to sing about his own life. Born in 1945 to an unknown father, Gérard Lenorman learned at the age of 35 that he was the son of a German soldier. And if he suffered from the paternal absence, he also did not count on the love of his mother.
“I live with my mother in rue Damrémont, in the 18th arrondissement of Paris. Place Pigalle, there is a jazz orchestra, Americans who stayed in France after the war. I will listen to them in secret and to the working girls. there, very nice, sometimes offer me a glass of milk. I am always alone at home until the age of 9-10 years. My mother works here and there, she often changes jobs. there is no music with us, she is against. She is against everything that concerns me, moreover. I am her problem. Basically, I am a cumbersome child, so to speak. I live with it. We get used to it, we don’t die of it! Already, I sing songs by Line Renaud, Henri Salvador all the time. My first audience was my grandmother when I go to her house in Turqueville in La Manche. Fortunately there are these three months of vacation and happiness! Over there, I am the child of the country, the grandson of Augustine Lenorman. ” he explains in the columns of Gala.
A tragic accident
During his adolescence, Gérard Lenorman is still not considered by his mother: “My mother gets married in Issoire, in the Puy-de-Dôme, and takes me to boarding school. I am a disruptor, I play the clown. I need to express myself and adults don’t like it. The boarding house is run by priests with stupid, abusive authority. They hate me, but when the bishop visits us, they come to get me to sing and recite poems. Somehow, I hold there a form of revenge because I do what others do not know how to do. At 14 years old, after the Certificate of Study, I follow training as a fitter, a turner … My parents had neither the desire nor the capacity to give me a long education. While working at the factory, I sing, I became a little known in the area as Jerry Wells. At 18, with my money, I bought my first car, a rotten Renault 4 Chevaux. For my first trip, I then took the direction of Normandy to re join my grandmother. In a long straight line bordered by trees on the Montluçon side, I fall asleep at the wheel and hit a huge truck head-on. I was between life and death, broken all over the place, but I was lucky enough to come across a virtuoso surgeon, a master of repair and reconstruction. Result, I am pretty much normal! I was immobilized for almost a year. “
After his convalescence, Gérard Lenorman begins to really invest himself in song: “I know that my father was a musician, a violinist, but I did not know him. Then I met a friend in Switzerland who offered to go with him. in Paris, and everything is going really fast, I play in the musical Hair, and in 1971, I was number one with the song “Il”.
A complicated family situation
“My family? I definitely cut ties with my mother and my stepfather when I left. Yes, I remained friends with my half-brother, I never saw my half-sister again. is like that. There are sufferings that it is difficult to reject. And age does not matter, even if these same sufferings are easing. For some time now, I have also really enjoyed walking in mountain. I never tire of it, and I find somewhere else that does me the greatest good “.
Eleanor de la Fontaine