Yé-yé was France’s homegrown response to rock’n’roll: fairly younger singers – nearly all feminine – performing a light-weight Francophone adaptation of American music with lyrics about teenage issues. And at first sight, the 18-year-old Françoise Hardy was the epitome of a yé-yé woman. She was strikingly lovely (“I used to be passionately in love together with her,” recalled David Bowie a long time later, “each male on the earth, and quite a lot of females, additionally had been”); she was by no means off the airwaves of France’s premier yé-yé radio present, Salut les Copains, and by no means out of the pages of its accompanying journal. Her first hit was the suitably innocent-sounding Tous les Garçons et les Filles, a wispy tackle a rock ‘n’ roll ballad.
But it surely transpired that Hardy was a distinct sort of yé-yé woman. For one factor she wrote her personal materials, like her idol, the black-clad chansonnière Barbara. Eschewing the gauche makes an attempt of France’s skilled songwriters to imitate American rock’n’roll or translate its lyrics, 10 of the 12 tracks on her debut album had been her personal compositions, written with arranger Roger Samyn. This was a rare state of affairs for pop music in 1962: the next yr, the Beatles – the band usually credited with cementing the notion that artists may write their very own materials fairly than counting on cowl variations – would launch their debut album, with simply over half its contents penned by Lennon and McCartney.
Hardy’s songs had been invariably melancholy, which maybe had one thing to do together with her sad childhood. Her largely absent father was closeted, and ultimately died, Hardy believed, after being assaulted by a hire boy. Her sister suffered with psychological sickness and killed herself in 2004. Hardy appeared diffident at finest about business success and celeb. In distinction to her bubbly friends, unhappiness appeared to seep out of her: regardless of how light-weight the preparations sounded, her voice introduced a sure chilly tristesse to her releases.
Hardy got here to search out the preparations an issue too, later professing to hate the music that made her well-known: “I had such dangerous musicians, such a nasty producer … I believed these recordings had been horrible.” She wrested management of her personal classes, transferring operations to Pye Information’ well-known Marble Arch studio and surrounding herself with London’s hottest session musicians, future Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Web page amongst them. (His future bandmate, John Paul Jones, incurred Hardy’s wrath by trying to make her preparations sound extra Gallic.)
It goes with out saying that this was not how yé-yé ladies had been anticipated to behave. They had been imagined to be fairly however pliable receptacles for older male songwriters: witness poor, harmless teenager France Gall, unwittingly tricked into singing about blowjobs by soiled outdated Serge Gainsbourg on Les Sucettes (1966). But when Hardy’s early recordings had been wistfully charming, the music she made after she took cost was one thing else. Her mid-60s albums (for some purpose, they’re nearly all titled Françoise Hardy) are fabulous, refined pop confections that shift between superbly orchestrated ballads and experiments with jangly 12-string folks rock, harpsichord-bedecked baroque pop and, sometimes, fuzzed-out guitar.
An English-language single, All Over the World, was a UK High 20 hit in 1965. That Hardy didn’t make extra impression on the charts right here tells you extra about the best way audiences struggled to attach with something not sung in English than the standard of her work. However, she moved among the many 60s rock aristocracy. It will be good to suppose they recognised somebody lower from the identical groundbreaking material, however it’s arduous to keep away from the impression that her appears typically overshadowed her expertise. As if to show Bowie’s level, Bob Dylan wrote lovelorn poems about her, and Mick Jagger declared her his “ultimate girl”.
Hardy transitioned with ease into the late-60s singer-songwriter period, protecting Leonard Cohen’s Suzanne on 1968’s Remark te Dire Adieu (with a sure inevitability, its authentic title was Françoise Hardy), an album to which Gainsbourg additionally contributed two notably high quality songs: the surprisingly effervescent title observe, and the attractive L’Anamour. But it surely was her 1971 album, once more known as Françoise Hardy however identified by followers as La Query, that proved her masterpiece. A collaboration with Brazilian singer-songwriter Tuca, it was sparse and dreamlike, its sound sitting someplace between folks, jazz and bossanova, its breathily intoned lyrics coping with each suicide and sensuality. It’s not precisely a extremely contested discipline, however Mer could be probably the most drowsily erotic-sounding tune ever recorded about suicide.
She adopted it up by working with the cream of London’s folk-rock scene, together with Richard Thompson, recording a shocking model of revered the acid-folk band Timber’ The Backyard of Jane Delawney. In one of many nice what-ifs of rock historical past, Fairport Conference producer Joe Boyd tried to hook her up with one other of his prices, Nick Drake. Hardy was an enormous fan of the then largely ignored singer-songwriter, however a plan for the 2 to make an album collectively floundered once they met: the painfully shy Drake “got here to the studio the place I used to be recording in London, and he sat within the nook, nearly hidden, and he by no means mentioned one phrase”, recalled Hardy. “I used to be so filled with admiration for his work, so I didn’t dare to say something, and he didn’t dare to say something.”
Her subsequent albums had been wealthy and impressively numerous. She was as able to essaying a Gallic tackle nation rock on the 1972 album Françoise Hardy, AKA Et si je m’en vais avant toi, as she was dealing in supremely cool jazzy funk on Gin Tonic (1980) or, maybe most unexpectedly of all, grungy alt-rock (1996’s Le Hazard). These aren’t albums terribly well-known within the UK – the 90s anglophone re-evaluation of French artists, which noticed Gainsbourg remodeled from a novelty artist to a justly revered determine, appeared to cease in need of Hardy’s oeuvre – however they should be. And Hardy clearly had her admirers exterior the French-speaking world. Blur collaborated together with her on a model of To the Finish, renamed La Comedie; so did Iggy Pop, on a 2000 cowl of the American Songbook normal I’ll Be Seeing You. Everybody from Cat Energy to Weezer hailed her as an affect.
She remained a defiantly uncategorisable determine till the tip. Her ultimate album earlier than in poor health well being pressured her retirement from music, 2018’s Personne d’Autre, discovered her writing French lyrics to music by Finnish indie band Poets of the Fall and confronting mortality head-on. You would nearly think about her singing the melody of certainly one of its tracks, Prepare Particular, as a yé-yé tune in a distinct period, however its lyrics handled impending loss of life. “What an individual sings is an expression of what they’re,” she advised the Observer on the time of its launch. “Fortunately for me, probably the most lovely songs should not completely happy songs. The songs we bear in mind are the unhappy, romantic songs.”
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