A song “which disgusts me”because of his “scout side, sectarian”, of which “the music is filthy”, which moreover is “from the right, nothing is going”. But what is the target of the singer Juliette Armanet, questioned a few days ago by the Belgian media Tipik, which belongs to the Belgian Radio-television of the French Community (RTBF)? To the question of a young animator, without much interest let’s admit it, on the three songs which could make him leave an evening, she answers ” Thrice Connemara Lakes ». Arousing a very Augustian controversy on social networks.
Triple punishment, therefore, for the song co-written by its interpreter Michel Sardou and the writer and lyricist Pierre Delanoë (1918-2006) and composed by Jacques Revaux. Huge success of Sardou in 1981, Connemara Lakes has become a unifying classic at wedding parties and the end of alcoholic evenings in large schools in particular, as recalled in The world Lorraine de Foucher in a chronicle.
Sardou has repeatedly told the genesis of this song. Having heard on a Revaux synthesizer a sound close to a bagpipe, he thinks of Scotland, and invites Delanoë to reflect with him on a text in this sense. Neither of them knew the country, Delanoë – Sardou sometimes mentions Revaux – went in search of documentation, found a tourist brochure about… Ireland and the lakes of Connemara, in County Galway.
The two authors then never set foot in Ireland, nor in Scotland, but therefore goes for the North Atlantic island and Connemara. With the evocation of landscapes (its moors, its “earth scorched in the wind”his “dark clouds”), her heroine Maureen, who “dived naked into a lake”and her lover Sean Kelly, the names of cities – Limerick, Tipperary, Barry-Connelly, Galway – drawn from the brochure, the evocation of the conflict between the two Irelands – “Over there, in Connemara/We all know the price of war”. Lasting 6 minutes, with arrangements of strings, winds and choirs of the London Symphonic Orchestra by Roger Loubet, a martial rhythm, the vocal breadth of Sardou.
A song by Sardou not really right
A music “filthy” for Juliette Armanet, author-composer and interpreter of lonely love, of Flame Or The Last Day of Disco. The term is strong. We can judge her grandiloquent, emphatic, undoubtedly far from the pop register of the singer. And when she adds, to justify her disgust, that the title is all at once ” Scout “ And “sectarian”difficult to understand what in the text, whose theme is an Irish wedding, can correspond to these qualifiers.
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