Eight months after the release of his first album, a reissue of which comes out this Friday, Silly Boy Blue is one of the artists selected for the 37th edition of the Victoires de la Musique, broadcast this Friday evening on France 2. The 25-year-old Nantaise, whose real name is Ana Benabdelkarim, will she be crowned Female Revelation of the Year? Interview with this unconditional fan of David Bowie, who sings her pop in English (thanks to her idols such as Joann Jett or Lady Gaga, but also to an “absolutely brilliant” 6th grade English teacher) to tame her emotions, which have become her favorite theme
What do the Victoires de la Musique represent?
It’s a bit silly, said like that, but it’s really a little girl’s dream, something super crazy. I imagine that without daring to say it for so long, that I already knew what I wanted as benefits! It’s stressful but not scary because I work a lot, nothing is done at random, everything with my hands and my heart. I will sing The Fight, in orchestral version: it’s a song that talks about rupture, like almost all my album, Breakup Songs. It’s one of my first songs but I still feel the same when I sing it, even five years later. It’s like a scream, it makes me feel strong. I’m going to need it as I will be tiny on this big TV set!
The general public will (re)discover your style, both melancholic and comforting…
In a breakup, there is sadness, anger, melancholy, but also renewal, change, courage, lots of beautiful things… My album is like a big cover with lots of little squares completely different emotions. I didn’t know if I was going to be able to like it, because I wrote it based on very complicated memories. It’s the time and the audience above all that allowed me to transform these rather hard moments into the most beautiful things of my life today. When, at festivalsyou sing the song you wrote at the bottom of your sofa at 3am, totally unhappy, and people start singing, dancing, the moment becomes joyful, you say to yourself wow…
Directed and written by Jeanne Lula Chauveau and co-written by Silly Boy Blue, the “Teenager” music video follows the artist in his old high school between nostalgia and teenage memories
>https://t.co/mwRZ5opkc9 pic.twitter.com/V92JwtWHRR— Columbia France (@columbia_fr) June 23, 2021
What was young Ana’s adolescence like?
Quite ordinary, high school [Jules-Verne à Nantes, où elle a été récemment tourner l’un de ses clips], girlfriends… But I had a part of me that I didn’t understand, I felt things very intensely and sometimes very violently, the impression of being in conflict with the whole world. It was the music that kept me going. Nantes was also a great place for that, I went to Trempolino, to Stereolux, I sang to songs from friends and girlfriends… I went three or four times a week to the
Stakhanov, a bar where you paid 5 euros to see lots of cool concerts. I understood at this time that music would take a huge place in my life, even if I didn’t dare tell myself that it would be my life.
After my baccalaureate, I continued with studies in advertising, a master’s degree in communication and then in journalism… I started to work but all the days off I took were for music! I left Paris in the evening to do a concert in Nantes or elsewhere and I came back at 6 am the next day… and then I allowed myself to go all out.
After your Nantes group Pégase, you went solo, under the pseudonym of Silly Boy Blue, the name of a song by David Bowie…
I discovered Bowie in kindergarten. I heard Changes, I had a giggle, and since he has accompanied me in my life, this artist fascinates me, I love him enormously for his music but also for what he represents: never to fit into boxes, to be who he wants whatever the circumstances… A nickname is also a way to give me courage to go on stage. If I didn’t put on this costume, I could never go there as Ana!
You also say that without female role models, you would never have dared to get started anyway, pseudonym or not…
It was seeing Izia, Fishbach, Clara Luciani, Catherine Ringer perform on my TV that I wanted to do all this. Without them, I would surely have believed everyone who tried to make me understand that I didn’t belong. When we pass behind you to recheck if everything is connected correctly, when we ask you why you only sing in English, if you wouldn’t like to be more feminine… you integrate it, it’s complicated to deconstruct it, even still today. So if on Friday evening, girls who have been told that they are “too this” or “not enough that” to sing look at me, I hope to make them want to say to themselves “well, I can do it too! »