Françoise Hardy
French pop’s existential romantic. By Andrew Male. FRANCESTANCE
In 1962, as The Beatles were singing Love Me Do, an 18-year-old Parisian was on the outside, looking in. “I go alone in the streets,” sang Françoise Hardy on her debut EP, “a soul in pain.” Listen to Tous Les Garçons Et Les Filles now and it’s easy – especially if you don’t speak French – to hear a sweet young girl rocking gently to le yé-yé pop sound. 1962, however, was also the year of Jacques Brel’s Paris Olympia concert, Orson Welles’ The Trial, and the first English translation of Martin Heidegger’s Being And Time. Beatnik existentialism, the Cold War and Chanson Française were all big news and only one female songwriter was incorporating such “shadow of the bomb” ideas into teen chart pop: we underestimate Françoise Hardy at our peril. Born in Paris on January 17, 1944, this strictly-raised convent girl grew up chronically shy, with mere mendicant ambitions until music, in the form of Trenet, Aznavour, Brel,
“WE UNDERESTIMATE HER AT OUR PERIL.”
Gréco, and Piaf, and hazy Everly Brothers broadcasts on Radio Luxembourg, changed her world. But after being signed to Disques Vogue as a female Johnny Hallyday in 1961, she insisted on writing her own material. She also became a ’60s fashion icon, with admirers including Dylan, Jagger and Nick Drake. But independence didn’t come easy. She retired from concert performances in 1968, defeated by nerves. After protracted legal battles with Disques Vogue, she signed with the independent Sonopresse label in 1970, but the creative freedoms she’d longed for didn’t translate into record sales. This tension, between existential despair and romantic yearning, is what defines her finest records, which exist in a delicious suspended netherworld between freedom and compromise, forever waiting for the day, as she sang on Tous Les Garçons Et Les Filles, “when I will no longer be a lost soul/[when I] will find someone who loves me.”