Hear
PARIS. –Françoise Hardywho rose to international fame at the same time as the Beatles and marked French song for half a century with an elegant and melancholic pop, He died this Tuesday at the age of 80. “Mom has left,” his son, fellow musician Thomas Dutronc, announced in a message on social media. The author or performer of classics such as “Tous les garçons et les filles” and “Comment te dire adieu” She had suffered from cancer for 20 years and had become an advocate for a dignified death. In 1991, she helped her mother die with an injection. “I want to leave as soon as possible,” she declared at the end of 2023. Until now, the causes of her death were not made known.
With Françoise Hardy, who died seven years after the other great French youth idol of the sixties, Johnny Hallyday, a year older, one of the last stars of the generation disappears. Those idolsthose copainsthose garçons and fillesboys and girls who imported the sounds of rock and roll and twist to Europe after the golden years of the chanson of the post-war period and ushered in another golden era of music in French. It was a unique moment: popular culture was already fully under Anglo-Saxon influence, but France embodied with it ―the yeyés, the new wave– the modernity. The cinematic icon Brigitte Bardot, the rocker Eddy Mitchell and Jacques Dutronc, who was Hardy’s partner for decades.
Without putting on airs, like someone who doesn’t want to, Françoise Hardy defined her era. Musically, with a sweet and sad voice, lyrics that sang with the passing of time and heartbreaks, and memorable melodies and arrangements. Aesthetically, with long hair and bangs, a feminine archetype of the sixties at the opposite end of the blonde Bardot. She was admired by Bob Dylan (“I realized, half a century late, that he had an adolescent fixation with me,” Hardy said in an interview with El País). She sang with Iggy Pop and recorded in the nineties with groups like Blur. Unlike contemporaries such as Sylvie Vartan either France Gall, she composed many of her lyrics, and some music. She collaborated with some of the greatest pop composers in France, such as Serge Gainsbourg (L’anamour) either Michael Berger (Message personnel).
Raised in Paris by a single mother, with an absent father who was married to another woman, Françoise Hardy never stopped being the same girl, somewhat insecure and extremely demanding of herself, who in 1962 burst onto the music scene and transformed herself overnight. in a star “I grew up with the conviction of being uglier than average, and therefore I cultivated complexes that I never managed to completely get rid of,” she wrote in her memoirs, Le desespoir des singes et autres bagatelles, published in 2008. “Aided by my guitar, I tirelessly tried to put my shortcomings and sorrows into music.” Regarding her beginnings, she also said, unfairly: “I was always lucid about the melodic triviality, the poor performance and the vocal mediocrity of my first albums, to such an extent that for me it is an ordeal to be told about them.”
She was rarely satisfied with her work and was more likely to admire other people’s songs than her own. Few of her albums pass her criteria, almost all of them included some of her, including the most elaborate ones that she recorded in the late sixties and seventies. In that, she has not been right, since she has left several albums that decades later sound like new and that have influenced artists of her time and later artists of hers as well. It is enough to listen to any of the singers who have emerged in recent decades in France to feel her imprint. She knew how to renew herself and connect with the sensibility of each era, from yeyé in her beginnings to guitar rock in the nineties, although her successes came half a century ago, or before. Some of her songs are part of collective memory.
From a young age, Françoise Hardy sought answers to her anguish in the supernatural and dedicated herself to the study and dissemination of astrology. The love of her life was Dutronc. “What was supposed to happen, happened,” he wrote about the meeting that made those youthful idols a fashionable couple: “Little by little I fell under the charm not only of his pale blue eyes, but of his disconcerting way of being: provocative, sometimes cynical, always enigmatic.” She lived with him, with intervals and repeated crises, from the late sixties to the early 2000s. Their only son, Thomas, is a renowned guitarist. She was not a politicized artist. “My political awareness was zero,” she wrote when remembering her youth. “I passed by feminism.” If she had a cause, it was to defend the legalization of euthanasia.
In the aforementioned interview with El País, in 2018, after publishing his last album, he said: “All my music is sad, but this time it is a little less sad. I know I have little time left. Ten years, tops. I’m not afraid of death. What I fear is physical suffering.” In 2022, Hardy declared on the RTL network: “After my 45 radiotherapies, the definitive absence of saliva and the lack of irrigation of the skull and the entire ENT area have made my life a nightmare.” And last December he published an open letter to President Emmanuel Macron in which he told him: “You know that a large majority of people want euthanasia to be legal. We all count on your empathy and we hope that it will allow the very sick French people with no hope of getting better to stop their suffering, when they know that there is no longer any relief possible.” The dissolution of the National Assembly, announced on Sunday by Macron, frustrated this wish, by stopping the adoption of the so-called law on the end of life.
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