“I like singers who don’t insist, who sing without effect”

MY LIFE IN MUSIC – While all of his vinyl albums are reissued, the singer looks back on the music that built him, open to all winds, from Léo Ferré’s revolt to Jimmy Cliff’s reggae.

The complete Bernard Lavilliers albums have just been reissued on vinyl. At home, in Saint-Étienne, the turntable is waiting to be put back into service and the singer of Barbarians goes around her memories, a little in a daze under the effect of a painkiller. “I will try to reconnect to my memory”, he said. Mission accomplished.

A song that comes to you from your parents.
Nothing very original Dead leaves, by Jacques Prévert and Joseph Kosma, which my parents both sang extremely well, in duet, with a third. They loved to sing, all the time, often in the kitchen. They were very much in love, they remained together for seventy years. My father listened to a lot of jazz albums, Duke Ellington, Django Reinhardt… He received them through the International Record Guild, which offered LPs by subscription. He also listened to Latin jazz and Brazilian music, of which I kept the imprint. My mother listened to classical music, Bach, Ravel, Debussy, The Rite of Spring, of Stravinsky, and Russian composers like Alexander Borodin. We both got along on romantic music, while with my father we shared a taste for music that fucks up the mess, offbeat, atypical jazz, like that of Thelonious Monk. There was always music in my house, the radio was on all the time. There was only one station at the time, then Europe 1 arrived, which gave us some air.