Françoise Hardy, star of yeyé music, fashion and melancholy, dies at 80

The French singer Françoise Hardy He died this Tuesday at the age of 80, as announced by his son Thomas Dutronc on social networks. Is the goodbye of the shy and disenchanted artist par excellence that became a myth in the 60s without meaning to, almost by the natural imposition of his own different talent and personality. He made melancholy and nostalgia his personal trademark. Expelling the demons from him was his success and his therapy. All the garçons and the girlsfrom 1962, was his instant consecration in a career that lasted three decades.

A year later she participated in Eurovision (for Monaco, another elegant specialty) and was a model for great designers. The self-conscious girl who was told by her family that she was unattractive and that she lived a childhood marked by the shame of his economic difficulties. Her father was a married man with financial means who helped them very little, but he did give Françoise a guitar at the age of 16 that she asked for. She had tried it with the piano, but it hadn’t worked.

He went to university to study Politics, a major he changed to German. By then he was already performing in small venues and tried with record companies without success. She went to a singing school where she was discovered by her director, Mirelle Hartuch, the first person to see what the whole world would soon see. After All the garçons and the girls became the most famous and successful singer in France. Not long after she rose to international fame, even on the other side of the Atlantic.

In the 70s his melancholy was attenuated with the abandonment of the Disques Vogue record label and his signing with Sonopresse, which gave him great creative freedom and lesser sales successes, but later in the decade he returned to the top of the charts, despite worrying only about the music he wanted to make, regardless of whether it sold. Hardy was indomitable in his fragility, a fragility that was the essence of his success. A characteristic that was polished by its representatives to turn it into a symbol that caused fascination in many more areas than music.

In recent years he overcame lymphatic cancer with his royal strength and later asked President Macron for euthanasia due to other recurrences of the disease that ultimately ended his life. A life from which she was fleeing, without luck in love, escaping their different pigeonholing like that of the young woman close to high society who had rejected her when no one knew her and she was a girl without a father who only wanted to play the guitar so that all that would disappear while she composed languid songs that were herself.