“To start writing, I have to move. Bernard Lavilliers is no exception to the image of an adventurous artist that has stuck to his skin for more than forty years. His new album, Under a huge sun, released on Friday, is steeped in Argentina, a country he kept “cool” to relish the pleasure of discovering it in due time. Two years ago, he lived in Buenos Aires for three months, drew inspiration and inspiration there, then returned to France with the idea of returning to visit the rest of the country. A project thwarted by the pandemic and confinements, subjects also mentioned in the disc. At 75, Bernard Lavilliers has lost none of his capacity for indignation. He sings about global warming, corruption, politics and “amnesiac assholes” dreaming of “a military dictatorship”, with an ironic distance making the point all the more biting. 20 minutes the encounter.
The story of this new album began in Buenos Aires …
No one knows me there and I don’t know anyone, it’s a good thing to start writing. I walked around the city for a week. It was the best way to soak up the sounds, the smells, the different languages of this cosmopolitan city. Tired or not, I went to see things, concerts, theater every night … Tango Black is inspired by a kind of very powerful sound from a concert I attended. It took place in a hangar where a collective regularly performs. It is a city that suffered a lot under the dictatorship. You have to have a lot of respect for her, you should not allow yourself hasty judgments. It is out of the ban, as New York was at one time, in deficit. I have talked a lot with Porteños [en français, les Portègnes, les habitants de Buenos Aires] : journalists, historians, poets. I felt a kind of weariness in them. This is why I say that the Porteños are elegant and cultured, but tired. It is the city in the world where there are the most psychoanalysts.
You sing: “Of all my lives, the last is the only one that makes me want to walk alone in Buenos Aires”. What is this last life?
It is rather the fourth. Considering the age that I have… Unless I take myself for Jeff Bezos who wants to be immortal, but immortality, that does not tempt me masses. I have had a busy life, I try to keep making plans. I do not retrace my steps, the proof, I keep myself corners to discover and especially human beings to meet. Buenos Aires inspired me news. Let us say rather that they are poetic diaries. I want to keep track as I go on in my travels, there are phone numbers, reminders, two rhymes … Since I said I had a bunch of news from three cubic meters, the editors call my agent, but I refuse their proposals… A day will come, when I will no longer go on stage. If I can’t sing my songs anymore, I won’t write songs anymore.
Will you then express yourself through your travel stories?
Yes, because I won’t be able to stop. Retirement, well… I’ve been doing rabbit for fifteen years (laughs).
In “Toi et moi”, which takes up a melody by Seu Jorge, you write about 2020 and the pandemic: “An impossible year that this year” …
This is to sing the real of the moment and move on. I had been playing Seu Jorge’s music on guitar for a while, wondering what we could write about it. For him, Tive Razão, “You were right” is a love song. The pandemic arrives… I started from there, from the interference of this virus in a couple who are not used to seeing each other 24 hours a day and lacking air.
Was it your case?
Me, it was okay. With my wife, we went to the countryside. She’s a graphic designer, so she had a job. Me, after two weeks, I realized that it was going to last, so I started, on my farm, to sing on my cell phone for people who were bored. After a while, it’s a little pointless, because there is no one there. You know, in concert there is the energy of the audience. If you’re sick, it heals you. Me, I know that, when I limp, on stage, I no longer limp, and I kick back when I go out. That’s why I say that if I can no longer be comfortable on stage, I will not write any more songs.
You also resume Who killed Davey Moore?, the adaptation of Who Killed Davey Moore? by Bob Dylan, by Graeme Allwright. You sing it with Izia Higelin, Gaëtan Roussel, Eric Cantona and Hervé. Do you feel some form of familiarity with them?
Izia, I have known her for a very long time, I was a friend of her father’s. Gaëtan Roussel, I see him regularly. Cantona, I didn’t know him, but we wanted to meet, it was mutual. Everything I know about him pleases me. He is cash and lucid.
And Hervé?
I did not know him. I was told: “There is a young guy who has a physique” … Indeed, he looks like an athlete. I saw him on stage lately, just in one song, I said to myself “ah yeah okay”. It is dance around the machine : he dances around the machine, as if he had a physical connection with his keyboard and his rhythm machines. He could have done boxing, he has the right stretch and physically, he holds.
For I got from her, written and sung with the Herrerias brothers of the Terrenoire duo, it was your common Saint-Etienne roots that created the link?
I met them at a mutual friend’s house. We drank bottles of wine and thought we could work together. We talked a lot about our city. For me, Saint-Etienne has always been there. Why do you think I titled one of my records The Stéphanois ? It was provocative, it was at a time when the city was not doing well, the football team was climbing but companies were closing, including the one where I worked. Raphaël and Théo Herrerias’ grandparents were background miners. We are not nostalgic, but there was a whole layer of memories. I wouldn’t have imagined writing about Saint-Etienne on this album. It’s thanks to the Terrenoire duo. I’m talking about my first guitar offered by my mother, I never thought to put that in a song. This piece is a three-way dialogue. We succeeded.
On Beautiful days, you say “The President is lying”. Is it better while singing it?
I sing that he lies, brazenly demented. I find the term brazenly suited him. This song is not a pamphlet. The text does not apply only to the president, but to a whole bunch of technocrats who one has the impression that they all come out of the same box, impeccable, with the rhetoric of the winner saying “This is the new one.” world “. Except that killing the old world is no big deal (laughs). I say “beautiful days”, with these violins that we wanted to be close to the sublime arrangements of Tony Benett or Franck Sinatra, because it’s a bit like “Close your eyes, vote for me…” There is always in France a kind of strange state before the elections. Even the most reluctant and intelligent will take a horse. At one point there is a bit of a hypnotic. They want to forget. In Beautiful days, there is irony, but I didn’t mean to chuckle, I don’t like that very much.
“I come across more and more hatred, fear, death, (…) it becomes habit”, you sing. Are you afraid of this presidential year?
Hatred, fear, death, it’s mostly on the Net. It quickly turns to insult, injury. It seems that there is no longer any possibility of dialogue, of nuance. It’s black or white. They think in circles and repeat the same thing all the time. Algorithms will only hook them up with guys who think alike. This is where you become a monolithic society. Blocks. Hatred, why? because everyone is afraid at the end of the day. The speech of “Mr. Eric” is based on fear.
In the 1980s, to François Mitterrand who asked you what you were doing …
I replied “I sing about lost causes to tropical music” …
You would make the same answer today to Emmanuel Macron?
He wouldn’t ask me the question. Mitterrand, the artists, that interested him. So, indeed, when I had crossed paths with him, he had asked me “What are you doing now?” I was coming back from Nicaragua. I told him I was singing lost causes to tropical music. He replied that it would make a very good title [Bernard Lavilliers a intitulé son album sorti en 2010 Causes perdues et musiques tropicales]. This is a real anecdote. There was a basic culture in Mitterrand, he was quite close to literature, artists in any case. I don’t think the other would ask me those kinds of questions. It is too “fashion”, Emmanuel Macron. I don’t think he’s a big fan of what I do. He must think I’m too old, I guess.