RFI Musique: Les Sénégalaises is your second album, but you don't appear to have dropped your odd habit of denouncing friends and enemies in your songs. The young Patti Smith, Freddy Mercury, François Mitterrand and Michel Sardou all get their comeuppance on this album…
(Laughs) Yeah, well… Sardou… I think it's fairly obvious we don't vote the same way for a start! But there's something fascinating about Sardou and that is that he's the only singer I can think of who never seems to be enjoying himself. For God's sake, the guy never even smiles when he's on stage. I mean, how does he do it?
As for the "odd habit" you refer to let's just say I like to slip the names of real people, contemporary people, into my songs here and there… That's just part of my everyday way of expressing myself. I often go round saying things like "That guy's wearing Sardou's jumper" or "That woman's done her hair like Patti Smith". When I use people's names in a song it's not really a tribute; I see it more as a chance to use a name that sounds good in a song. I love slipping in names like Jean-Pierre Darras and Micheline Dax…

There are songs on your new album that are a bit more serious, like the song about your grandmother's funeral, for instance…
You know, funerals had always been a bit of a mystery to me. But the more you go to them, the more you get used to them. You can feel the vice tightening as you get older and you start going to more and more funerals. That's the way life is. Generally speaking, I get pretty worked up about the death of children or people close to me ; I'd actually been trying to write a song about my grandmother's funeral for over ten years. But I just couldn't do it – and then one day I realised the only way to do it was have a whole procession of imaginary people following the coffin. That way I managed to distance myself from the whole thing a bit. That made it easier to touch on the subject. I loved my grandmother, you know. She was my mother's mother, a wonderful woman. She had this completely brilliant sense of humour; she could be really witty and derisive about things. I think she's the person I'm most like in a lot of ways…

The first single release from your new album is La Cigarette, a song that will certainly go down well with smokers and tobacconists who have taken to the streets to complain about the recent rise in the price of cigarettes in France…
Well, I'll admit I wanted to get in a few apparently harmless remarks about the situation where you have a government putting up the price of cigarettes which they claim will encourage us to stop smoking, but the same government is still raking in huge profits from a product it keeps telling us is deadly. They can't have it both ways! If cigarettes are dangerous for people's health why go on letting them be sold in shops? It's all really hypocritical – and a huge rip-off, too! In my view, having labels printed on a product to warn the public of its dangers is just a way of warding off future trouble, like the lawsuits ex-smokers are bringing against tobacco companies in the States. It's all so hypocritical!

Somewhere down the line all your songs are a tribute to Gypsy jazz, particularly the track Michto la pompe… Following the success of your first album this style of music, which the mainstream public had pretty much ignored before, started to take off in a much bigger way. Do you feel you've had something to do with that ?
Whoa! I don't know… Let's say…Well, objectively speaking, I s'pose I have a bit. But no more so than someone like Bireli Lagrene. I feel a bit bad about making any claims like that though because I'm so shitty compared to those guys. I'm just the one who scored the big contract with a major label, that's all !
You know, every time I get a break in between concerts I head off to see these two completely brilliant guitarists at La Chope, the legendary bistro in the St Ouen fleamarket. Mondine and his son, Ninine must have been playing there for at least thirty years now! There are guys who are so crazy about Gypsy jazz that they'll come all the way from Japan to be at concerts or jam sessions. And there are starting to be more and more places like La Chope in Paris now. La Guinguette Pirate organises Gypsy jazz concerts every Tuesday night. But if you really want to catch swing culture at its best, you have to go to La Chope. It's a bit like Elvis fans making an annual pilgrimage to Memphis. Each to their own. Personally, I prefer to go to Lourdes !

Before you go to Lourdes, do you think you might make it out to Dakar to sing the title track from your album, Les Sénégalaises…
Well, I'll let you into a secret here. That song started off as a total failure. I wanted to write some sort of committed song about the situation in Africa. It bugged me that such a wonderful, smiling, generous people, a people with such a wealth of culture should time and again find themselves with such …. shitty presidents. I'd often sit down and think about that. It was a big mystery to me. But try as I might I couldn't manage to put my thoughts into a song. The way I see it, a president is like a reflection of his people, the essence of a country. That's the way I think it should be anyway. And in Africa it's just the reverse. People don't have the leaders they deserve. But the problem was I felt a bit uncomfortable about saying that. I didn't feel a bobo-style white guy like myself had the right to say, "Look you're wonderful, but your presidents are absolute bastards!" Anyway, I ended up doing the song as a sort of a fantasy about a secret agent who's got a thing about African woman and ends up saying a bit more than he should!

I just wanted to ask you before I go about François Béranger, who's just died…
François Béranger is a guy whose death didn't cause much more of a stir than he did at certain low points of his career. I thought about including a Béranger song on the new album but in the end I didn't because it felt too obvious. But at the moment I've got an idea simmering away in my head, a project to do an entire album of cover versions. Béranger was a brilliant songwriter. I loved the stuff he did on all fifteen of his albums. He was a guy who gave his all. He never held anything back… I wouldn't say he was a mentor, because I like to think I don't have any kind of god or mentor, but he's someone I had a lot of admiration and respect for. Right from the start of his career to the end he was straight. And he was right to speak out about the things that got on his nerves because that's exactly what a singer's role should be… No, I take that back, it's everyone's responsibility to speak out when they see things going wrong. Béranger was a man who never wavered from that principle – he always said what he had to say and that's something I really respect!

Sanseverino Les sénégalaises Saint Georges / Columbia