Étienne Daho spends the week with us on franceinfo to relive the highlights of his life: five days, five songs. While Etienne Daho celebrates his 40-year career, he takes the opportunity to reissue his first album Mythomaniac, while blowing on the ten candles of his album The doomed man including a duet with Jeanne Moreau. He also just released, a few weeks ago, an unreleased single, Virus X. Today the song The first day (of the rest of your life).
franceinfo: In 1986, after Mythomaniac and The notte the notte, bring out your third baby, Pop Satori. On the cover, your gaze seems to be directed at us, we have the impression of being eye to eye with you. Was that your way of reaching out to us?
Etienne Daho: This album cover is special. I had an appointment with the photographer at Le Flore one morning, a little too early for me compared to the life I was leading at the time. I must have gone to the Bains-Douches or the Palace, I was making the most of my life as a young man who was being celebrated by music. I didn’t sleep much, 14 seconds a night and I arrived at Flore with a huge hangover and it was in front of a hot chocolate, with the first cigarette that the photographer took. He took lots of pictures and there was a studio shoot afterwards, but this was the one that seemed to speak the most.
In addition, it was the Flore… It told a bit about what was happening in this record which was a kind of fantasy of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. It was a mixture of many things, of Kerouac, of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, of existentialism, of Rimbaud. It’s a lot of things from my imagination that I wanted to put on this record.
The more you go, the more you are adored. We’re going to talk about “Dahomania”. So for you who wanted to keep a piece of the garden a secret, it will become very, very complicated. We actually felt that you had totally lost your footing.
Yes. At the same time, I was having fun. When I see myself in the interviews, you can see that I’m having fun. We can see that it is a gift that I was not expecting and that I am having fun. It happened after. I think until the mid-90s I took full advantage of it. All of a sudden making records that worked gave me the ability to do exactly what I wanted, even though I did exactly what I wanted from the start, but it gave me the strength to say yes. or say shit.
“It’s important when you’re an artist to have autonomy and freedom, and also that very pleasant thing which is that people trust you.”
Etienne Dahoto franceinfo
Even if Pop Satori was very, very badly received by the record company. When we brought it in after recording it, they thought: “The goose that lays golden eggs, it’s over!“Well actually, he finally worked. We organized a little tour too, with very average rooms and we had to change rooms every day, we ended up in rinks, well it was totally absurd.
In 1992, you will create the Urgence project. You will bring together 27 artists for AIDS research. The winnings will amount to 12 million francs, or 2,400,000 euros, which is enormous. You are going to wipe out this rumor which will give you for dead of AIDS. It will really touch you.
I didn’t really realize it because when you are exposed, you quickly learn that people tell a lot of things with a lot of confidence and you go over it. Except that this one really hung on. Afterwards, I couldn’t really say “Oh no, I have nothing”. I knew lots of people who were HIV positive and I didn’t feel the courage to pull away. It was impossible. And so, as I have not denied, it lasted a long time and it has above all become a certainty.
It damaged the release of an album that was very important to me a little bit, Eden. So I tried to make a little joke with an EP that I had recorded with the English group Saint-Etienne, that I had called Reserection. It was a response with a pouch where I was bloodied in the grass. I thought it was a humorous response, but it didn’t work out at all.
In 1998, you will publish your first compilation, Singles, and inside there is The first day (of the rest of your life). This song also says a lot about who you are.
Maybe it was subconsciously a second response because that was around the same time that this rumor had completely marred the album’s release anyway. Eden, which was for me really the best album that I had made. I really broke my ass.
It was music Sarah Cracknell gave me for the album Eden and that I had not used. I couldn’t find the text in French and there was another song in the album called Suddenly, which I found a little bit similar. So I waited and on tour, like that, listening to the song all the time, I found the text and I recorded it in stride. And it became the song we know.