From Lilas to Belleville, Eddy Mitchell’s Parisian youth in comics
© Production
Long before the leader of the Black Socks set them up to become the champion of French rock, his name was Claude, a kid with dreams full of empty pockets, in Paris who ended up in the wasteland. Today, with the help of Ralph Meyer, a boy from his neighborhood but from a different generation, they have translated into powerful images his memories from the time before his life changed. Eddy Mitchell I didn’t accidentally bring the cartoonist Undertaker: “I wanted to work with Ralph. I made him read this autobiographical novel, wrote more than twenty years ago. He liked it. We are from the same area in Paris, Porte des Lilas, it helps!“
Ralph Meyer goes further: “As a kid I used to watch The Last Session (a sort of film club, aired on FR3, hosted by Eddy Mitchell – Ed). Eddy first took me to the American West. Today, if I do Undertaker, it’s a little bit thanks to him!” The duo engages in a funny story: that of young Claude Moine who will hesitate for four days to do something serious. We don’t write more, because the story reads like a thriller. But in 96 hours, an intimate geography takes shape: that of a very young man on the verge of a turning point in his life. A kid whose grown-up version remembers: “I grew up in an average family… Well, more than average, because the end of the month started on the fifteenth, so we cut. But we managed“.
A big brother who delights girls while he only dreams about it, a sister who sings anything and everything and a father who sometimes makes him a bowl of bread filled with red wine, Eddy Mitchell is still touched by it today: “I was spoiled in my youth. My father had an ordinary job, at night, in RATP services. It wasn’t very fancy, he knew that, but he had a passion for reading and cinema. The passion he passed on to me. He almost forced me to read. He was right and I am very grateful“.
Add to the equation a mother who devours newspapers, a sister who is as irritating as she is charming, and here is Eddy Mitchell in the making, very well surrounded: “They all brought me something… I owe it to my brother, who loved horror movies, for discovering Hammer’s productions long before the required age. I remember The Revenge of Frankenstein thanks bro!” This love and this missing Paris is what emerges from this very beautiful journey into the prehistory of the singer Water-based mint paint.
The sequel is a jukebox broadcasting Bill Haley, odd jobs, and then a meeting: “What happened after that? I met a guy called a drummer, I called myself a singer, and he introduced me to two guys who were sure they could play the guitar.“. 5 Rocks was born, they would become Black Socks.
**** Eddy Mitchell and Raph Meyer/Dargaud
