Scotsman Obituaries: Françoise Hardy, French singer-songwriter whose melancholic ballads influenced a generation​

Hardy, who has died of laryngeal cancer aged 80, unwittingly helped to invent, not just popularise this new style when she was asked in a radio interview what the English words “yeah yeah” meant in her song La Fille Avec Toi. The transliteration “yé-yé” was adopted as the name of a new youth music movement, with Hardy and her peers France Gall and Sylvie Vartan in the vanguard.

However, Hardy’s music was brooding rather than bubblegum. Her debut hit Tous Les Garçons et Les Filles (All the Boys and Girls) remains her signature song, typical of her less-is-more breathy style. Though her vocals were light, her words were weighted with isolation and melancholy. She was dismissive of the song, describing the recording as “three hours with the four worst musicians in Paris”, but she had found her lane, singing of the turbulence of love. “What a person sings is an expression of what they are,” she said in a 2018 interview. “Luckily for me, the most beautiful songs are not happy songs. The songs we remember are the sad, romantic songs.”

She recorded more than 30 albums across six decades, trailblazing as a young female singer/songwriter at a time most pop stars were handed their hits by industry writers – though one of her most enduring songs, Comment Te Dire Adieu, is a French language version of the Vera Lynn hit It Hurts to Say Goodbye with lyrics by Serge Gainsbourg, which was later covered by Bronski Beat/Communards frontman Jimmy Somerville. (Hardy also confessed a liking for fellow Scots the Jesus & Mary Chain)

Her looks were as natural and her style as effortless and understated as her singing. Her insouciant “it” girl appeal was sealed on the cover of Paris Match in January 1963. She was introduced to the fashion world by her photographer boyfriend Jean-Marie Périer and became muse to fashion designers Yves Saint Laurent, André Courrèges and Paco Rabanne, causing a style sensation in his gold plated mini-dress. Fashion label Comme des Garçons is named after one of her lyrics.

The camera loved her but she put the brakes on a film career following roles in John Frankenheimer’s Grand Prix, Jean-Luc Godard’s Masculine Feminine and Roger Vadim’s Chateau en Suede.

Mick Jagger described her as his ideal woman, David Bowie attempted to woo her backstage in dressing gown and slippers and Bob Dylan wrote her letters and poetry, once refusing to return to the stage of the Paris Olympia until she visited his dressing room, where he played her two new songs, Just Like a Woman and I Want You. She didn’t get the message. Instead, singer/songwriter Jacques Dutronc was the love of her life. They met in 1967, married in 1981, separated in 1988 and never divorced. Their son Thomas is also a musician. He broke news of his mother’s passing by posting a desolate “maman est partie” (“mum has gone”).

Born Françoise Madeleine Hardy in occupied Paris – during an air raid – she was brought up in the 9th arrondissement by her mother Madeleine and sought company from Radio Luxembourg, becoming enamoured not only by the early rock’n’roll of Elvis Presley, Cliff Richard and the Everly Brothers but also by French singer Barbara.

Absent father Etienne insisted Hardy and her sister Michèle receive a Catholic education. When she passed her baccalauréat early aged 16, he gifted her a guitar. Hardy started songwriting while studying German at the Sorbonne and subsequently scored a place at Le Petit Conservatoire de la Chanson, a school for radio performers where her potential was nurtured.

She auditioned and won a contract with Disques Vogue, who were hoping for a female version of rock’n’roll superstar Johnny Hallyday. Instead, she carved her own path when her debut EP, featuring the self-penned Tous Les Garçons et Les Filles, was an instant hit, topping the French charts and spawning English, Italian and German language versions for the rest of the European market. In 1963, she represented Monaco at the Eurovision Song Contest, finishing in fifth place.

Hardy appeared on Ready Steady Go! and Top of the Pops with her biggest English language hit All Over the World (Dans Le Monde Entier) and used her London trips to record in what she felt were superior studios, working with producer Tony Hatch and session players including a pre-Led Zeppelin John Paul Jones and Jimmy Page. Plans to record with a similarly shy young singer/songwriter called Nick Drake did not come to fruition.

Never comfortable with her celebrity, Hardy retreated from the spotlight in the late Sixties but kept recording, amassing a varied catalogue of folk rock, jazz, orchestral pop, even alternative rock, including her favourite of her albums, the bossa nova-flavoured La Question, with Brazilian singer/songwriter Tuca.

Her music was discovered and lionised by subsequent generations. She recorded with Parisian duo Air and with Blur on a French language version of their 1995 single To The End. In later years she became a writer of fiction and non-fiction, including several works on astrology. Her 2008 memoir The Despair of Monkeys and Other Trifles was a bestseller.

She was first diagnosed with lymphatic cancer in 2004; eventually it robbed her of her voice. She released her final album, the acclaimed Personne d’Autre, in 2018 and in 2023 she featured in Rolling Stone’s list of the 200 greatest singers, the only French singer to make the cut.

Obituaries

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