The author, composer, lyricist, musician and singer, Francis Cabrel is the exceptional guest of Le Monde d’Élodie Suigo from July 1 to 5, 2024. Through five of his most emblematic songs, this discreet artist, with a rare speech, opens up about his almost 50-year career. Last December, he released a single, a 45 rpm entitled “Un pièce de Sicre”.
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Reading time: 14 min
Francis Cabrel, it’s more than 45 years of career, 14 studio albums, eight in public, five compilations and hundreds of concerts. Author, composer, lyricist and musician, he has become an artist who counts in the landscape of French song. With his claimed Southern accent, Francis Cabrel has known how to impose himself with this musicality that has seduced millions of ears. He has also known how to take us by the hand, to dress our memories with songs like: Little Marie (1977), The ink of your eyes (1980), The lady of Haute-Savoie (1980), We will have to tell them (1987), Blowpipe (1989) or again Bullfighting (1994), which are now no longer his alone, but also ours. This artisan tube maker received franceinfo at his home in Astaffort, a founding place that has always been part of him and his creations, in particular that Astaffort Meetings a link with young artists, authors, composers, performers like his daughter Aurélie, who lives there and created the Baboo Music label under which her latest single was released, A piece of Sicre .
franceinfo: You were born in Agen and grew up with your parents, a brother and a sister. What was your childhood like in Astaffort in particular?
Francis Cabrel : I would say it was sunny. That’s the memory I have of it. It was very carefree. We had fun outdoor games, bike races, scooter races, everything we could get our hands on and that we sometimes made ourselves. It was resourcefulness, it was camaraderie. I have very good memories of it until I was ten years old because then I left for high school and life changed.
So you come from a modest family, originally from Friuli in Italy. Your father was a worker in a biscuit factory and your mother, a cashier in a cafeteria. They never forbade you anything. What did they pass on to you the most?
They passed on to me the stubbornness of these people who had nothing and who got by with three bits of string because we children did not realize that we were on the verge of breaking down. Every day was a struggle for them. They had to feed their three children and manage to dress them more or less properly with frankly next to nothing.
“My parents gave us this way of fighting silently, of being fierce.”
Francis Cabrelto franceinfo
I have a lot of endurance in what I do. I seem like a lazy person like that because I make a record every five or six years, but when I get down to it, I put myself so deeply into my work that I find that tenacity, that desire to get out of it that they had. And I want to get out of my project, to get to the end. I think that conviction comes from them.
Some people choose public school, others choose private school, you were more of a truant with a fairly high absenteeism rate. You were even kicked out for it.
Yes, I was fired because in fact, at the age of 15, I became a singer in a dance group, in a dance orchestra. We made people dance and we went to Dordogne, to Landes, to Lot-et-Garonne. So I went back to school on Monday morning, I was knackered. I had spent all Saturday, all Sunday, singing, driving around everywhere.
“My absenteeism from school was rather due to the fact that I already had a job at 16, being a singer in a group.”
Francis Cabrelto franceinfo
At 19, you were a storekeeper in a shoe store and you played a lot in these local dances. There was already this spark with Bob Dylan, but not only that, there was also this guitar that was given to you by your uncle. Playing an instrument and being able to express yourself through music was going to be a huge trigger.
Yes, it was a fairly slow trigger because I got the guitar when I was between nine and ten years old. I started to learn how to play when I was around 13 or 14. So, during all those years, it stayed in a corner, I didn’t really know how it worked. And when I got to high school, someone knew how to play and showed me how it was done. But my guitar was above all a companion to be able to try to express myself because I was so shy that you can’t even imagine. So, to talk to others, I constructed little poems, I’ve already made little songs out of them.
“The guitar was the key to my opening up to the world.”
Francis Cabrelto franceinfo
In June 1974, he will have this singing competition organized by Sud Radio. It is there that we will hear for the first time Little Marie on the radio. Do you remember that moment when you had to overcome that shyness to sing?
I remember it perfectly because there were about 350 of us in the street. I had heard on the radio someone saying: “If you write songs, come“. But in fact, everyone came, even those who didn’t write. I had still written my song. There weren’t many of us who had been songwriters that day. I had a bad cold. I had all the fears on my shoulders. Finally, they had at least heard something of my story. They told me: “OK, you are qualified directly“. There was a whole journey: quarter-final, semi-final, etc. I won everything, if I may say so, since even in the final, there were only four of us left and my song came first.
How this song was born Little Marie ?
I had just met my wife Mariette and I said to myself: hey, Mariette, what’s that? Mariette, it’s a little Marie. And this name, Marie, had fascinated me for a long time and especially since the song by Jimi Hendrix The Wind Cries Mary, So I wanted to do something with Marie and then it just made sense.
Mariette has always been there.
We met when we were 17 and things are still going well.