RFI/Musique: Did you have a hand in choosing the songs on the ten albums in your retrospective?
Georges Moustaki: Well, almost all my songs are on there somewhere, so I have to admit it wasn't so much a case of choosing which songs to leave out but rather which versions to use. The thing is, I made dozens of recordings of songs such as Les Eaux de mars and Le Temps de vivre. There aren't a lot of live recordings because they're just doubles of the studio versions really. In the course of my career I've tended to concentrate more on studio work for technical reasons – and that's also because, in my opinion, I think it's more enjoyable to listen to an entire concert rather than pull out parts of it. The basic aim of these albums was to put together something that sounded totally coherent and harmonious. I think it would have been extremely difficult to juggle two different atmospheres and technical set-ups…

One of the most surprising things about this retrospective is how so many of your songs mirror the era they were recorded in. In the 70s, for instance, you recorded some absolutely classic pop songs…
Personally, I don't think it was so much a case of picking up on a vibe at the time but collaborating with different musicians. When I started working with Catherine Lara, for example, she steered me towards music which was closer to her generation, so that's what made my songs sound in touch with what was happening at the time. If I'd listened to Catherine I'd have ended up sticking binary drums everywhere!
I didn't stick to what was happening in France, either. I made quite a few of my records in the UK actually – I never tried to fit in with any particular music trends though, I always did my own thing. But at the same time I couldn't just there and block my ears to what was going on around me.

At times your collaborations with different groups and musicians altered your music in a radical way. I'm thinking of your work with the band Flairk in 1982, for instance…
Yes, Flairk were this instrumental band from Holland who were real virtuosos on their chosen instruments and who wrote the most extraordinary material. What happened was I came across an album by them when I was on tour in Holland and was just blown away by it, so then I asked if someone could arrange for me to meet them. The great thing about Flairk was they didn't understand a word of my songs in French – the idea was for them to bring their music to my songs without changing a thing about it. That was the first time in my career that I really broke away from my Latin roots, my whole Mediterranean image.
It was a brilliant experience, even though there came a point when the collaboration just couldn't go any further because we were absolutely incompatible with one another. We were on completely different wavelengths when it came to behaving on tour for instance. I was shocked by the group's working methods which I thought were far too strict and disciplined – and they were absolutely appalled at my sloppy approach to concerts, by the fact that I never decided the running order of my songs before I went on stage and I used to switch tempos all the time...

At the other end of the spectrum you also recorded a song with traditional musette accordion - Heureusement qu'il y a de l'herbe (Thank Goodness for Grass) in 1981…
You know, up until then I'd never witnessed a real musette accordion maestro play – and imagine, we ended up with Marcel Azzola, Richard Galliano and Joë Rossi performing together! You don't get better than that! As for the lyrics of the song, they were inspired by a conversation I had with (the late great French comic) Coluche. Back in those days I was experimenting with growing grass on my terrace and one day Coluche turned round and asked whether I could write down what you had to do, how much fertiliser and water you needed to use etc.
The song ended up causing me a whole lot of trouble. I remember the programmers at RTL turning round to me and saying, "Wonderful! You've finally got round to doing a nice old-fashioned number!" They played it on the radio every morning – until one listener called in to complain that the station was promoting the use of cannabis! And that, I might add, is not necessarily the correct way to interpret of the song!

But then you're no stranger to controversial lyrics and censorship, are you?
That's true. One of my songs, Sacco et Vanzetti was banned in South Korea, but the only problem was when I went out to perform in concert there I wasn't aware of that. So I obviously included it in my performance – and my producer ended up having to pay a hefty fine! Then there was my song Joseph, which was censored in Spain and Italy because I'd taken certain 'liberties' with the Bible. But I have to say that I had a huge amount of songs banned under Franco in Spain.

You can't have been too surprised about that, though, given that in songs like Flamenco (1975) you asked "Who would sing flamenco in Spain if it wasn't for Franco?"
Well, I was already so censored by that point that I thought "Well, if I'm going to be banned from the airwaves I might as well go the whole hog!"

 

Another of your most famous songs, Le Métèque (recorded in 1969) took a long while to take off on the airwaves…
Actually, when Le Métèque was originally released no-one heard it at all! The song was originally recorded by Pia Colombo and it was a complete flop, so I can hardly say I was surprised. Later I found out that there'd been a problem with me using the word "Jew" in the chorus – no-one could make out whether the word was used in a positive sense or not! I remember when I went out to perform in Israel later in the day I was asked why I never acknowledged my Jewishness. And I said, "Hang on a minute, I do sing about having 'a wog's face and looking like the wandering Jew'!" But I was told that "wandering Jew" wasn't the same thing as saying "Jew". I can't say I've ever felt any particular affinity with my Jewish identity, but if there's one thing I do strongly identify with it's the image of the wandering Jew.

But you do come from a Jewish family, don't you?
All I can say is, yes, I do come from a Jewish family, but I don't particularly respect or reject anything Jewish. I've never particularly identified with Jewishness, in fact, because in the culture I grew up with there was as much Greek Orthodoxy as there was Islam and Judaism. I grew up in an ecumenical country and, as Greeks we used to celebrate Greek Easter and Orthodox Christmas…
In Egypt being a non-believer meant that you weren't a Jew – and that was the case with my father. When I wrote the book Fils du brouillard with Siegfried Meir I did proclaim myself a Jew because what we were doing with that book was trying to draw a parallel between the experiences of a Jew born in Alexandria growing up without sectarianism and danger and the fate of a Jew from eastern Europe. But I can honestly say that I'd never come across the word 'bar mitzvah' before becoming a singer and going off on tour of the U.S.

One of the most distinctive things about your voice is that you've always had this totally indefinable accent singing in French. Where does it come from?
Well, if it were an Egyptian accent I'd roll my "r's" – which I have to say I've never done in French, whereas I do do it in Spanish and Italian. Maybe my accent stems from the fact that I attended French schools from a very early age. I see myself as a citizen of the French language. French is the language I really expressed myself in from the word go. When I came to France I already spoke perfect French, apart from the more bookish words and modern slang, of course. But I already had this accent which made me stand out as 'foreign' – people often thought I was Belgian, in fact!

Georges Moustaki/ Tout Moustaki ou presque… (10 CD set, Polydor /Universal)