Étienne Daho spends the week on franceinfo to relive the highlights of his life: five days, five songs. As he 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.
franceinfo: Mythomaniac, that was forty years ago, on November 10, 1981. This album marked your debut with the public, but the music has already lived in you for a very long time. You were born in Oran, in French Algeria, and the piece of furniture that marked your youth was a vinyl turntable. You would take a chair, wait for your grandmother to come and look for records.
Etienne Daho : It is true that I climbed on a chair. It was necessary to lift a cover, quite heavy by the way, and I knew exactly, I had a visual memory, which record I wanted to listen to.
You grew up in the small village of Cape Falcon. Your grandparents raised you very much. They opened a grocery store with a jukebox. Is this when music really comes into your life?
Yes, it’s true. I was fascinated by this sort of thing that looked like a Sputnik or a spaceship. And I remember, I would slip between people’s legs and when they put on a coin, like I knew all the numbers, I would put them on, so people would come and complain and say, “Yes there is a little boy who rushed to put on a record“.
“I was immersed in music from the moment I was born.”
Etienne Dahoto franceinfo
I also have music loving parents so there has always been a lot of music in the house. My father played the trumpet, he liked jazz a lot and was really very music and my mother also listened to it all the time.
Your grandparents arrived in France afterwards. There, you will really discover the groups, the stage, the fact of playing, of having an audience.
This is where I recorded a 45 rpm. At the time, there were like photo booths in which we put a piece of it, we recorded something and brought out a very thick vinyl. And I did a single for Mother’s Day. I have exactly the same voice, but small. It is quite astonishing.
You were capable of anything to get music and touch it with your finger. You will fall for a Pink Floyd record that you will pay for as you go, it will take months!
Yes. I paid a deposit every time I had a little bit of money. I was babysitting and came home after several months with the trophy.
“When I was a teenager, it was great to buy a record. It was really an event because then he would go around with friends.
Etienne Dahoto franceinfo
The first and most beautiful encounters you are going to make are in Rennes with the Marquis de Sade group in particular. They really supported you, carried you and even convinced you that you had to do something. They accompanied you on the first recording, in particular on this mock-up of five tracks to get you started.
In fact, the group was breaking up after a rough tour. Franck Darcel, who was the leader, told me: “Listen, we have a little bit of time so if you want, we can help you polish your models a bit“. I had made a few models on the guitar with guitarist Richard Dumas and his models became the fusion of Marquis de Sade and me. It became something a little bit peculiar, a little bit strange, a little bit singular And there you have it, that’s what we find in this first album, with songs that are a bit teenage too, because there are songs that I wrote when I was 15-17 years old.
He there is a title that is going to be very important to you after the release of Mythomaniac in 1980, it is The great sleep. This song will allow us to see a little further and to consider a second album (The notte the notte, 1984) which will happen very quickly. What does this song represent?
In fact, the first album was really a big failure, I sold four of them to my family. So I was in the hot seat, and at the time, Virgin was a very young French label that depended on England. The English looked a bit at the sales of the artists that Virgin France had signed, they were a little dismayed. Me, I was the first Virgin France artist and so they said to themselves: “But that is not possible. We can’t keep it“.
I was asked to make models for a second album and in them there was this song that I proposed, which was one of my own music, because I continued to work with Franck Darcel and Marquis de Sade. And of all the songs that we offered them, Virgin said, “Yes, this one, we record it and we will see“. We did a 45 rpm and this song started to air a lot on the radio. It saved my skin!