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 he tells the headlines: Weekend in Rome and Fell for France.
franceinfo: Yesterday we were talking about the song The great sleep, from your second album The notte the notte, 1984. Therefore, you write a lot. Has this success boosted you?
Etienne Daho: Yes. In fact, I made my first album saying to myself: There, I’m doing a first album and then I’ll go back to college. And in fact, the rage took hold of me, I thought to myself: Okay, Mythomaniac… We can do better in life. I was driven by the desire to do better all the time. I looked at the people I admired and said to myself: It’s so high! I would like one day to be able to do a work like that.
You knew anyway that the English studies you had undertaken were not what appealed to you at all.
No. It would have led me to be a teacher or something and I didn’t want that at all.
In 1984 therefore released the album The notte, the notte with titles To go out tonight and Weekend in Rome. What does this Weekend in Rome in this course?
All of a sudden it went very quickly. I didn’t really realize because I was with the same friends all the time, I didn’t earn any money, I didn’t know many people in Paris. I was still in a little microcosm, I didn’t realize at all, at all what was happening.
“‘Weekend in Rome’ has this kind of bubble of lightness and I think it has marked a lot more over time than it was then.”
Etienne Dahoto franceinfo
It was a little hit, I think, but not a phenomenal thing. I think it’s time that made you quote songs from that period. It wasn’t the most famous song at the time.
The notte the notte will therefore be double gold in 1985 and you will receive the Steel Bus for rock artist of the year. Your audience is there, you meet them and immediately marry them. He also adopts you with an Olympia which will be sold out. Do you remember that?
Love now! We had no idea how it was going to turn out. I had started a small tour where we did very small venues. The Olympia seemed the obligatory passage, but we still had in the head all the people who had passed before and that counts. It’s big and then we have its neon letters. It was crazy. My whole family had come, so there was a row of elderly people and then around only young people and girls jumping around. They were relieved because they had summoned all their friends, because they too thought that no one would be there.
I reviewed pictures that a childhood friend had taken and you can see how I look behind me wondering if there is someone very famous who is really walking by. It was phenomenal. It was an incredible thing, especially since I had few songs with my two albums. I ended up singing them all because there was a lot of “Again“, so I re-sang almost everything I had ever sung!
Building on this success, you will record Fell for France, a title that will generate a lot of ink.
I remember one thing. We recorded it and I went on vacation with friends for ten days. I called my manager to find out how it was going and he said to me: “But we sold 40,000 records today!“It was a little unreal. And when I arrived in France at the airport, I was signing autographs. There was the before and the after. All of a sudden, the doors opened very big.
With a clip directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet.
Yes. It encapsulates all these years of lightness anyway.
Whether you lost or not? Has notoriety never absorbed this lightness in you?
When the notoriety is too important and we have to step over people in the morning when we leave our home, it does not go, neither for oneself, nor for the people who are in this situation. It made me very uncomfortable. I loved being adored on stage. I let myself be adored with ecstasy, but that’s all. Once out of the stage, it’s over, we close.
“There was a time when it was too much. It was really necessary for me to take a step back.”
Etienne Dahoto franceinfo
After having tasted a popularity, an exposure too important for me, for the person that I am, I did everything to put the brakes, to have a career which, later, was perhaps a little more in The shadow.
I continue to work well, it’s going well. I do a lot of concerts, my albums are doing well, but being a little less exposed is important to me. Back then it was all about survival and then it became mostly a lifestyle issue, doing what you love while being in something that is comfortable and not something that weighs heavily. .