“It was crazy”: Alain Souchon looks back on his crazy meeting with Laurent Voulzy
Alain Souchon and Laurent Voulzy is a story that lasts. A meeting almost by chance which will give birth to what will become one of the greatest duos of French song. A magical moment which Alain Souchon still remembers, and which he had told on the microphone ofEuropean 1 in November 2020.
“A simple meeting can change a whole life” as the quote says, or as Alain Souchon might say. Since 1970, he forms a shock duo with Laurent Voulzy. The two men chained the titles and the various collaborations. A meeting that acted like a real electric shock for the interpreter of Sentimental crowd. Guest at the microphone of the show Iconson Europe 1, presented by Michel Denisot in November 2020 on the occasion of the release of the reissue of his latest album Me fifty-fifty. Faced with the journalist, he returned to his fine career. A career that had started badly because the song was not the first love of Alain Souchon : “I didn’t know what I was going to do with my life to earn a living. I did not believe at all that I could be a singer”, confides the one who has chained the odd jobs. Bartender in a pub in London, then house painter, Alain Souchon only has good memories of this more precarious period: “It was quite nice, we were very free, we worked on the black market. Then, for a year, I was apprenticed to a house painter in Megève”.
“It fascinated us to be so dependent on each other”
Shortly after, he meets Françoise, the one who will become his wife. But Alain Souchon finds that he is not up to it and decides to change completely: “I had paint under my fingernails and I thought if I wanted to stay with this girl, I couldn’t stay like this, like a raggedy guy”. He launches into the song to try to seduce her, his career is launched.
Knowing nothing about it, the singer’s first album requires some arrangements. Bob Socquet, the artistic director organizes the meeting that will change his life, with Laurent Voulzy : “He has to arrange your songs. We did J’ai 10 ans, which was a success. After that it was gone. Everything we did, it worked. I say this without pretension because we ourselves were astonished by it. We were doing our songs Je suis bogus, There’s rumba in the air… It all worked, it was crazy. It fascinated us to be so dependent on each other. That it changes our lives to this point, it’s extraordinary”. A beautiful friendship that still lasts today.
