Françoise Hardy

On se dit qu'à vingt ans

On est les rois du monde

Et qu'éternellement

Il y aura dans nos yeux

Tout le ciel bleu

It's the evening of Sunday, October 28, 1962. Millions of French people are in front of their televisions, curious to know the outcome of the referendum that had brought them to the polls that day to decide on the election by universal suffrage of the President of the Republic. While waiting to go over the first projections from the polling stations, the state broadcaster airs some entertainment programs, mostly musical ones. Suddenly, on thousands of small screens, a romantically decadent waltz titled "Tous les Garçons et les Filles" rings out in unison. Singing it is a very young Parisian girl with a melancholic air, her fringe framing a face with soft features, a long coat sheltering her from the autumn chill as she is rocked on a carousel just a few hundred meters from the Élysée. The same image will appear a few weeks later on the cover of her debut record, her face sheltered by a dark umbrella while her dress and the background glow in ochre tones. Her name is Françoise Hardy.

Born on January 17, 1944 in the ninth arrondissement of a Paris then under bombardment, a Capricorn (an important detail for her, since she would come to consider herself first and foremost an astrologer), Françoise Hardy - the surname is her mother's - did not have an easy, nor a particularly happy, childhood. Weighing on her was the near-constant absence of her father, a factor that sharpened a character that, in her adolescent years, grew introverted and shy. When in "Tous les Garçons et les Filles" she watches the boys and girls her age walking off together in pairs, well aware of what happiness feels like, while she walks alone "like a soul in torment, because nobody loves me," she is doing nothing more than recounting the very feeling she was experiencing at the time.

Certainly, the very young Françoise - just eighteen at the time - had already learned to fend for herself, and this made her not merely a performer or a cover-girl with innocent beauty, but first and foremost - unlike many of her contemporaries - an author. Hardy sings songs she wrote herself, certainly aided by a small team put at her disposal by the label Disques Vogue, starting with Jacques Wolfsohn, the label's artistic director and also the producer of this album.

How did the young Parisian make it all the way to the threshold of her recording debut? To understand that, we need to rewind the tape once more. It all begins, once again, within the walls of her home, the day Hardy discovers the frequencies of Radio Luxembourg and falls in love with the new English and American music. At sixteen, having earned her diploma, she is asked what she'd like as a gift: she asks for and receives an acoustic guitar, which she wouldn't start strumming until a year later, in between university courses. It's during this period that she begins answering audition notices for aspiring young singers, until she is selected for the Petit Conservatoire de la Chanson, which had its own radio and television program. Now confident in her abilities, in 1961 Françoise takes the final step: she writes directly to Disques Vogue, which at the time was looking for a female counterpart to an up-and-coming Johnny Hallyday, and despite the still unpolished nature of her talent, she manages to land a one-year contract.

Between late 1961 and the early months of 1962, Françoise Hardy is fully committed, body and soul, to writing and polishing a repertoire of original songs meant to make up her first 45. The label is prestigious, but the actual time available for her debut is modest to say the least, so much so that the record is cut live in a matter of hours at the Villetaneuse studios, near Paris, on April 25 of that year. Twelve songs come out of it, ten of them self-penned, for a total of almost half an hour of music: the tracks rarely run longer than three minutes. Presumably no one expects the runaway sales success the album will go on to achieve, given that it's the work of what looks like just another debutant among many, but her television appearance on election night - not her first time on the small screen, but by far the most important - sparks a honeymoon between Hardy and her fellow countrymen destined to last for decades. What's more, within a few years Françoise would become one of the icons of Frenchness: a musician and singer, but also an actress, the emblematic face of the new yé-yé movement, and later a muse to Bob Dylan and Mick Jagger, as well as an icon for fashion houses such as Yves Saint Laurent and Paco Rabanne.

Released as the artist's self-titled album, but actually known by the name of the first track on the tracklist (a practice found, for instance, in the discography of Georges Brassens), "Tous les garçons et les filles" immediately becomes a huge sales success at home: unsurprisingly, it would be followed by a dizzying stream of LPs and 45s released throughout the 1960s, up until her split from the label to pursue new ventures. As mentioned, "Tous les garçons et les filles" is an autobiographical song, yet one perfectly suited to represent a generation searching for its own place in a rapidly changing world. The track would be translated into Italian the following year under the title "Quelli della mia età" (also sung by the Parisian herself), achieving considerable success on this side of the Alps too, where an entire LP of songs sung by her in our language would soon follow.

The other iconic hit on the album is one of the two non-original tracks included in the debut. The song's author is Jacques Dutronc, whom she would marry some years later, and the first to record it back in 1962 - also for Disques Vogue - had been José Salcy et ses Jam's. Of "Le temps de l'amour," though, and its timeless romanticism ("Car le temps de l'amour/ c'est long et c'est court/ ça dure toujours/ on s'en souvient"), everyone remembers Françoise Hardy's version: it's her rendition, at once innocent and sensual, of a bossa nova in which her voice duets with the double bass and touches of guitar in a mysterious, almost exotic vein reminiscent of Serge Gainsbourg, a testament to the innovations sweeping through French music in those years, rich with young artists breaking away from chanson in search of new paths. More than tracks like "Ça a raté" and "Oh oh chéri," so light-spirited they seem to have just walked off the stage of a Montmartre cabaret, what's truly striking is "Il est tout pour moi," a self-penned song in which it becomes strikingly clear just how effortlessly and skillfully the young songwriter had absorbed the latest yé-yé influences arriving from America and the United Kingdom.

More complex is the case of "On se plaît," the track that opens side two of the vinyl, in which the tradition of chanson - with its attention to metre - meets an entirely new freshness, paving the way for the 1960s. Similar echoes can also be heard in "Ton meilleur ami," perhaps hampered by its bare-bones recording session, while the clean waltz of "J'ai jeté mon coeur" and the breezy energy of primal rock'n'roll in "Il est parti un jour" (a story told in under two minutes) come across more successfully.

Before the slowed-down rockabilly, almost concealed within its acoustic shell, of "C'est à l'amour auquel je pense" brings down the curtain, it falls to the breezy twist of "Je suis d'accord" to sum up young Françoise's intentions in a few clear words: "Je suis d'accord pour le cinéma/ pour le rock, le twist ou le cha-cha".

With “Tous les garçons et les filles,” Hardy ushers in a new era for French music and beyond. Talented, emancipated, modern in her blending of tradition and new genres, and in some sense revolutionary too – without ever needing to overdo it – in embodying, with utter naturalness, a style that was refined yet free of affectation, the newly-turned-eighteen Françoise launches a dazzling career, one able to transcend the styles and trends that would come to dominate the music scene, and indeed one that remains a touchstone to this day. To borrow the words that, a few years later, Serge Gainsbourg would write for her: comment te dire adieu?

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06/11/2022