“The lion is loose. Listen to the roar… This one roars loudly and will roar for a long time…». This is how Jacques Brel saw Henri Tachan whom he had helped at the start of his career. The singer-songwriter with a libertarian vein – and texts sometimes ribald and scandalous, sometimes tender – died on July 16 at the age of 83.
It is difficult, in these times when words are counted and weighed before being broadcast on social networks, to grasp what libertarian and non-conformist spirit animated Henri Tachan’s entire life. For this mountebank, displeasing was not necessarily a fault. This character trait will seduce the historic caricaturists of Charlie Hebdo – Cabu, Gébé, Reiser, Willem and Wolinski -, who saw in him a kind of brother of protest. As for his colleagues from the cabarets on the left bank, Léo Ferré, Georges Brassens, and of course Jacques Brel who was amused by his excesses, they always showed him a beautiful complicity tinged with a touch of admiration.
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Henri Tachdjian was born on September 2, 1939 in Moulins in the Allier, dear to Commissioner Maigret de Simenon. After spending his childhood and adolescence in a Catholic school – a period of his life that would make him an “unrepentant priest eater” – he began to do odd jobs before, very quickly, the need for escape does not invade it. In 1962 he left for Montreal to work as a handyman in a cabaret. Claude Léveillée, a Quebec artist notices his sharp mind. Pushed by this pygmalion, Tachdjian becomes Tachan, takes up the pen and dares to go on stage. Brel, the night owl, stops one day in this lair of singers. He is blown away by the talent of this beginner. Never stingy with generosity, the Grand Jacques introduced him to Eddy Barclay in 1965. The same year Henri Tachan received the highest award in the profession, the Grand Prize of the French Record Academy.
His impertinence is then in tune with the times, in the spirit of May-68. Juliette Gréco, Félix Leclerc, Pierre Perret (with whom he sometimes shows a brotherhood of style but more caustic) and even Georges Brassens offer him the curtain raisers of their recitals.
But this systematic, almost outrageous provocation does not appeal to everyone. And especially not the bosses of public television who do not want it on the air. This banishment will amuse this cursed poet who will finally be able to give free rein to his anti-bourgeois, anti-cop, anti-everything non-conformism. Certainly not devoid of a sense of self-mockery, he laughed at it when he saw that he had passed without warning from the status of a committed artist to that of a “free” artist.
Followed faithfully or even adored by lovers of beautiful texts and those, whatever their ideology, who have retained a taste for impertinence Henri Tachan will continue until the 2000s to sing Mon C… sur la commode or J’ likes love stories… without ever really taking themselves seriously. And that was what made all his charm and his talent.
