Musical tributes have come pouring in from all sides to mark the 20th anniversary of the death of Georges Brassens. But none has been more controversial or divisive than the compilation album Les oiseaux de passage. Produced on the Universal label, the album features covers of the legendary chanson star's classics recorded by leading names on the French rock scene such as Noir Désir, Miossec, Têtes Raides, Lofofora and Cornu. Sacrilege or brilliant innovation? RFI/Musique investigates.

One of the principal criticisms aimed at Les Oiseaux de passage has been that the orchestrations and arrangements on the album break with hallowed Brassens tradition. Brassens, as we all know, was a master of simple, acoustic guitar accompaniment and Noir Désir's screaming electric guitar version of Le Roi and Saez's melancholy machine programming have sent Brassens aficionados into a rage. But, if purists were to put their passions and prejudices to one side for a moment and listen to the compilation with open ears, they would have to admit that on the whole the album is worthy of interest.

True, Lofofora give the delicate Brassens classic, les Passantes, a rather insensitive rock treatment and Magyd (from the group Zebda) appears to completely miss the point of Supplique pour être enterré à la plage de Sète. And true, Cornu's bland cover of Les Copains d’abord is almost too predictable. But there's no denying that the Oiseaux de passage compilation contains its fair share of agreeable surprises. Tarmac (one half of best-selling rock foursome Louise Attaque) come up with a brilliant, and totally unexpected reworking of la Ballade des gens qui sont nés quelque part, Miossec's moody rock vocals excel on La non demande en mariage and modern 'chanson' star Juliette offers up a sublime cover of the Complainte des filles de joie. And le Parapluie gets a new lease of life thanks to talented multi-instrumentalist Yann Tiersen. OK, so Brassens's simple, acoustic guitar has been replaced by a barrage of violins, drums and vibrant horn sections, but that does not exactly make the Oiseaux de passage an act of high treason!

Taking Brassens to new ears

"We did actually sit down and ask ourselves whether we were right in trying to take Brassens work to a new audience," says Laurent Balandras, artistic director at Universal. "And in the end we decided that if we were going to attempt to do so, we should aim the collection at the generation of music fans who'd been born after his death. I remember thinking to myself at the time: 'Wow, has Brassens really been dead for 20 years now!?! That means that there's a whole generation of young people out there who never had the chance to know him in his lifetime! For all these 20-year-old kids today Brassens is like a long-lost ancestor, like Edith Piaf is to me! I suddenly woke up and realised that Gainsbourg's been dead for 10 years and Brassens's been dead for 20 – and there's an entire generation out there who grew up without either of them. After a series of meetings and get-togethers with Jacques Sanjuan and Santi*, we decided that the best thing to do was to turn to Brassens's legitimate heirs, his musical 'grandchildren' – that's to say singers and musicians working on the current scene who grew up listening to Brassens."

And it turned out that Brassens fans were not hard to find. In fact, many leading stars on the modern French music scene – such as cult rock band Noir Désir, Keren Ann, Tanger and Les Têtes raides to name but a few! – admitted that the moustachioed 'chanson' great had played an influential role in their musical upbringing. "There was only one exception really," says Balandras, "And that was Arthur H. He was the first person to turn round and say that Brassens had never been part of his personal culture. Arthur wasn't at all sure he wanted to be involved in the project to begin with, in fact. But our proposition gave him the chance to go away and really immerse himself in Brassens's work – and I think he's really happy he did that now ! There were a few other artists who turned down the proposition outright, of course. So the compilation only features people who grew up with Brassens and admired his work."

"People who accepted to work on the project said yes immediately," Balandras remembers, "The first group to get back to us was Tarmac who really jumped at the chance and Noir Désir didn't need any persuading either! People accepted our proposal totally spontaneously, in fact. We didn't need to take time to convince anyone – in fact, we ended up with too many people! Even when we'd finished recording the album, record labels were still ringing up saying they had groups who wanted to work on the project!"
At the end of the day Universal managed to assemble 17 groups and singers in the studio to record a total of 16 songs (Keren Ann and Tanger having opted to perform the Brassens classic Il n’y a pas d’amour heureux together). And the line-up included an impressive selection of headlining names. "Right from the word go," says Balandras, "we decided to aim the compilation at the younger end of the market, which, let's face it, is the sector who gets out there and buys records. So we really needed to have a number of best-selling artists on board, people like Tarmac (half of French rock outfit Louise Attaque), Noir Désir and Les Têtes Raides... I mean, let's not be hypocritical about this, we wanted to put out a compilation which was going to sell... The aim was to get a new generation of kids who were totally unfamiliar with Brassens's work interested in the idea of listening to it, so it was obvious we needed the leading bands on the current French scene involved."

Interestingly enough, the compilation also includes a number of lesser-known groups such as Weeeper Circus, Subway (an all-female outfit from Clermont Ferrand) and the singer Géraud (a former member of Les Barons du délire). No matter their standing on the contemporary rock scene, all the artists involved in the project were given total 'carte blanche' when it came to choosing their song, putting together the team they wanted to work with and writing new arrangements.

Noir Désir reveal a new facet

Each of the artists involved in the project took 100% control of their chosen song, reworking it within their own musical universe and putting their own personal spin on it. And it appears to be this, more than anything else, that has offended Brassens purists. Critics have dismissed the modern rock covers of Brassens classics as "totally incongruous" or "ridiculous". But surely the more ridiculous approach would have been to try and recreate Brassens's originals without changing anything. At least, Universal's reworkings avoid the pitfalls of plagiarism and pastiche.

"You know, I'm convinced that if listeners didn't already know it was Brassens and the songs had appeared on albums put out by the groups involved," says Balandras, "Music fans would believe the songs belonged to these contemporary groups. I must say, we got some real surprises when the covers started coming in. Can you imagine how we felt when we first heard Noir Désir's reworking? It was funny really, because in Noir Désir's case, it was not so much a case of not recognising Brassens, but not readily identifying Noir Désir!" And it has to be said, you have to listen to Noir Désir's wild electric reworking of Le Roi a few times before you recognise the voice of the band's lead singer Bertrand Cantat!

Another moving highlight of the Oiseaux de passage compilation comes 7 minutes, 52 seconds after the last official track. Leave your CD spinning and you'll hear Géraud's cover of Stances à un cambrioleur slotted between two of Brassens's letters (read by French actor Denis Lavant). These letters*, written to the French author and philosopher Roger Toussenot in February 1949, are an interesting thing to include on an album aimed at the younger end of the market.

"It was actually pretty difficult to fit the readings in without breaking the rhythm of the album as a whole," Balandras explains, "The idea of using them as a 'hidden' track (i.e. which plays once the rest of the album has finished) allowed us to prolong the album and add a different ambience at the end. We linked the two different letters (which, read end to end, take up over 7 minutes), by bringing in Géraud's cover of Stances à un cambrioleur. That makes the whole thing a lot lighter on the ear. The wonderful thing about the letters is they were written during a really tough period for Brassens, when he was trying to meet people involved in the music world and get them to use his songs. He'd just arrived in Paris, he was staying with Jeanne and he was absolutely skint. When he went out and mixed with 'showbiz' people he felt really embarrassed and out of place. That's the sort of thing he recounts in the letters and we thought that made a really fitting ending to the collection – you know, there was this guy who had to really struggle to get his songs heard and hear we are all these decades later with groups clamouring to be involved in our cover project."

Forgotten classics

In short, critics of Les Oiseaux de passage should maybe rethink their totally negative attitude towards this compilation. Far from sending Brassens spinning in his grave, perhaps the legendary 'chanson' star would actually appreciate the 21st-century reworkings of his classics. And while teenagers are busy discovering Brassens the first time round, Les Oiseaux de passage also gives older music fans the opportunity to re-discover many of the singer's forgotten works. In fact, this is what happened to Balandras himself during the making of the album. "I was never a particularly big fan of La ballade des gens qui sont nés quelque part but Gaétan (Roussel, lead singer with Louise Attaque and Tarmac) has managed to totally transform it. Thanks to his vocals, La ballade... gets this new, violent edge to it! And I really loved that because it's so disturbing, you're really not expecting it at all. Suddenly you realise the song's radical and intolerant and provocative, because that's the kind of energy Gaétan puts into it. In Tarmac's hands La ballade... becomes a hard-hitting militant song!"

Compilation: Les Oiseaux de passage Mercury/Universal 2001

*Jacques Sanjuan former artistic director and head of Universal Editions and Santi is head of Mercury
*published by Editions Textuel