Recluse between Normandy and Paris, passing through the Var, Michel Sardou could croon: “You were no longer waiting for me, you had reported missing.” But it was Michel Polnareff who said these words in the album Coucou me revoilou released in 1978. However, Michel Sardou is back. In November 2022, he surprised everyone by announcing a return to the stage after having been missing from the musical screens since 2018 and a final concert at La Seine musicale.
He had sworn that no one would do it again: “Can you imagine me singing I’m going to love you at 80?” However, this will be the case from October 3 in Rouen where the artist with 100 million records sold begins a new farewell tour. At 76 years old, what else does the last sacred monster of French variety have to sing to us? Robot portrait, “singing”, of the man who makes people hum from “7 to 77 years”.
Michel Sardou was born in Paris in 1947. Yet his legend places him in the south of France, near Marseille – he also took on the lilting southern accent of his father, Fernand, on several occasions. The singer strives to pay homage to the Provence of his ancestors. In 1981, he signed a title of rare finesse carried by a beautiful melody by maestro Jacques Revaux. This text, written with a chalk line, speaks of the earth and the roots as a means of “setting the clocks of (s)her life back to time”.
Michel Sardou is also a philosophy of life. A roots that he reaffirmed in his last album, which sold more than 1 million copies, in 2004. In La Rivière de notre jeunesse, sung in a duet with Garou, he did not sign a line of the text (work of his old comrade Didier Barbelivien). But the strength of interpretation and the spirit of the verses make it one of his major pieces.
You’re not serious when you’re 20. Michel Sardou, yes. Annoyed by the anti-Americanism that is spreading to Gaullist France, the young artist with confidential songs signs a historical reminder in the form of a firebrand. A speech by Hitler opens the title. Then he begins: “If the Ricans were not here, you would all be in Germany.” The statement is strong and striking. In the meantime, General de Gaulle – Fernand Sardou’s idol – announces that he is closing the American bases in France. The song is banned and a certain curiosity effect begins. Sales were simmering, but not enough to launch the artist’s career. But he learned the lesson and that of Victor Hugo: “To be contested is to be noted.”
French song columnist, Sardou watches the news indignantly when he comes across the affair of little Philippe Bertrand, a 7-year-old child killed by Patrick Henry. The debate over the death penalty is growing. The verses flow: in three minutes twenty-eight seconds, he signs a violent plea for capital punishment. The controversy is growing. The left-wing press attacks the singer. His concerts are threatened, demonstrations organized, his work revisited (and criticized). Two sociologists write a firestorm: Should we burn Sardou? (the answer will be no, phew!). Marked, the committed singer, even enraged, some regret, takes a little distance and abandons the song with a message. To get back to it better…
In his sixty-year career, Michel Sardou has built a reputation as a sloppy bear who doesn’t smile. It’s true on album covers (only one smile in six decades, on the French album, his worst record sale) or concert posters where it’s not really The Sergeant’s Laugh. But behind the absence of a smile hides a cheerful man. As Martin Gamarra and Julien Baldacchino, the creators of the “Stockholm Sardou” podcast, noted, there was, in the 1970s, a gag song in each album.
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In Forbidden to Babies, he puts himself in the place of a kid who is forbidden everything: to have fun, to play, to walk. There will later be an aerial marital crisis (X Ray), a questioning of the role of Latin (Dixit Virgile), the invention of the first swear word (What did he say?), the arrival of an earthling on the planet Mars (UFO). In 2007, he even dared to create a “one singer man show”, with sketches based on his cult songs. Sardou, “gag singer”, who would have imagined it?
With one of its main lyricists, Pierre Delanoë, they delivered the most beautiful rants of French song. In 1975, when one of the flagships of the French navy was about to be decommissioned, Pierre Delanoë left a note on Sardou’s desk: “I am France, not France.” It’s up to Sardou to “make do,” according to the author’s famous words. The singer writes a text, then reworked by the lyricist. The artist uses the “I” to make the Gaullian liner speak. It’s astonishing, moving and powerful. To stunning music by Jacques Revaux, Sardou makes France cry. Right and left. The CGT will forgive him everything when she attends one of his concerts in Saint-Nazaire and he performs this hit which has sold 1 million copies.
A sweet melody that ignites. Raw and sensual lyrics. An incandescent virile singer. And you get an erotic-musical hit. In 1976, Michel Sardou, already adored by the fairer sex despite titles judged by some misogynists (Cities of Solitude, I Want to Love It for One Evening, Good Evening Clara), definitively conquered the hearts of women. For four minutes, he repeats the verb “to love” or the word “love” around forty times. A total and exclusive love. The macho Sardou uses his powerful and warm voice to raise the temperature. Less romantic and colorful than La Maladie d’amour, Je va t’aime marks the singer’s career. A title present in numerous concerts which, forty-five years later, puts everyone in turmoil.
Also read: Do you know these famous mistakes in French song?
There is a misunderstanding with Sardou. We believe him to be arrogant, proud and arrogant when he promises to die of pleasure or explains that if women “dream of living with (him), it’s because there’s something to it” (J’habite en France). When we explore his 330 songs, we realize that he likes to denigrate himself. In this powerful title, he describes himself in turn as a bad son, bad husband, bad father. Like an echo of what he experienced: a fickle man – two children born to two different women a month apart – and an absent and distant father with his daughters Sandrine and Cynthia. From the 1980s, the singer admitted his marital lapses and faults to explain that his love stories ended badly.
Between Michel Sardou and his parents, there is a deep love. His mother Jackie gave him part of his temperament: a friendly big mouth. His father Fernand, love of the profession. An only child, the singer is a child of the ball who, neglected during his teenage years, sought to impress his parents. In 1982, five years after his father’s death, he described the sensation he felt in the presence of his “first day spectator”. The title, carried by a still masterful melody by Revaux, is a praise of transmission within a family of artists.
“He was there in that chair where my oldest son goes to sit. Four generations welcome him and he already knows that one fine evening I will be there in this armchair, his spectator from the first day. Like a father overflowing with pride for the one who will take his turn.” His parents and children are at the heart of a dense discography. Even if the artist does not talk about Jackie in The Girl with Clear Eyes where a man discovers that his mother could be a desired woman. “Apart from the heavy breast, it has nothing to do with my mother…” he laughed. Phew, one less poorly cared for Oedipus to deal with.
Singer-traveler, Michel Sardou has traveled a lot in songs: Italy, Austria, America (Canada, United States, Argentina), Africa… And in his personal life. He moved to the United States, fascinated by the American dream. To finally quickly return. “I lived in the United States for a while (…) First, you have to make an effort to speak English. And then, what do I have to say to these guys? They don’t have our way of living. There, it’s not “how are you?” but “how much is it?”” Same for his residences in France. Paris ? Too noisy. Normandy? Too much rain. Direction the Var. Sardou is ultimately an immobile Traveler, as he sang in 1985, a homebody and disillusioned. Does he not say in Escape and After, a subtle title from 1997, “As far as we go / We leave with ourselves / We never forget ourselves.” Sometimes hell is yourself.
Who would have thought that this Irish wedding would celebrate its pearly wedding anniversary with a great controversy? Last August, singer Juliette Armanet attacked Les Lacs du Connemara, seeing in this 1981 title a right-wing and sectarian song. “It disgusts me,” says the author and performer of Le Dernier Jour du disco in a Belgian media outlet. Yet there is no ideological bias with this song which smacks of celebration and communion.
Pierre Delanoë and Michel Sardou took advantage of a heat stroke suffered by Jacques Revaux’s synthesizer to tell in more than six minutes the union between Maureen and Sean against a backdrop of political division. “We still believe that the day will come, it is very close, when the Irish will make peace around the Cross,” the singer wants to believe, optimistically. The title will be a success: 1 million copies, but above all will cross generations to the point of becoming a hit for young people, students or wedding parties.
The 1980s were the decade of all success and consensus: popular hits, sold-out shows, and even awards. Chase away the natural, it sometimes comes back at a gallop. In 1983, he wrote with Pierre Delanoë a rather subtle indictment against the USSR. Instead of attacking communism head-on, he uses the (pseudo) ideals of Vladimir Ilyich to explain how the regime led them astray. “Lenin, get up, they have gone mad.”
Passionate about history – he notably sang the Year 1000, Danton and Napoleon – Sardou shows that song can be cultural, referenced and marked. This exit in the middle of the Cold War, while part of the French intelligentsia remained fascinated by the USSR, denotes. As with Les Deux Écoles, against the end of free schooling in 1984, Sardou invented the committed, rhythmic and less violent song Je suis pour.
Michel Sardou did not wait for Sandrine Rousseau to deconstruct himself. Guest of the Collaroshow in May 1981, the singer considered macho and misogynist by some appeared in cleavage and with a beautiful blonde wig to promote his new title, Being a woman. A visionary song where the artist imagines women reaching all positions of responsibility – which will eventually happen. “Settle into the presidency and make France horny” – which almost ended up happening in 2007.
Michel Sardou and women: a long relationship and a gap. On the one hand a very feminine audience who revere the artist and the man; on the other, feminist associations which attack each polemical verse. Strangely, the 2010 remix, with updated lyrics, did not make too many waves, as if the singer, who had become the security blanket of all popular culture, was no longer able to shock. Enough to prove an article in Elle magazine in the 2000s: “Michel Sardou like a lamb”.
“I remember a farewell”, start of the tour on October 3 in Rouen. In Paris, at La Défense Arena, March 16 and 17, 2024.
Forthcoming: Michel Sardou. Truths and legends, by Florent Barraco, Perrin, 192 pages, €13. In bookstores October 19.