Having just put the finishing touches to Double enfance, Julien Clerc can sit back, relax and savour his efforts. "I really got what I wanted this time round," the singer says, "The album more or less sounds as if I'd written all the songs on it myself. And that's something of an achievement when I've spent my entire career trying to get just the opposite effect! The way I always worked with Etienne (Roda-Gil) was I didn't interfere and try and put words in his mouth. So I'd got into the habit – and a pretty good habit, I must confess – of sitting back and waiting to see what the songwriters would come up with." The tables were very much turned on Double enfance, however, with Clerc adopting a far more hands-on approach and commissioning precise material from his songwriters. The subjects? Julien Clerc, his life, his inner world and his obsessions. "This time round," the singer laughs, "there was a very deliberate attempt to guide the songwriters' pens!"

Double enfance provides an interesting and at times extremely touching insight into what goes on in a chart-topping singer's head. In a song written by Carla Bruni, Clerc muses "What will people say about me / when I leave this world feet forward? / Maybe it'll be good! / Maybe it'll be bad! / But the worst thing would be if people said nothing/ As if nothing special had happened/ Two or three twists of the hand and bye-bye!" Double enfance also verges on the autobiographical at times, the title "double childhood" referring to the singer's chaotic life as the child of divorced parents, dividing his life between two homes. But Julien Clerc is also capable of lifting his vision from the personal to take in the greater picture and, as a goodwill ambassador for the United Nations High Commission for Refugees he expressly commissioned his long-term songwriting partner Etienne Roda-Gil to pen a song on this theme.

It seems as if Julien Clerc has finally changed his position from popular mainstream artist à la Johnny Hallyday, singing anything anyone puts in front of him, and taken a leaf out of Serge Reggiani's book (Reggiani famously refused to write any of his own material, but always recorded songs which touched on personal themes such as Sergio, L'Italien and Un enfant de mon âge). Clerc has always declared that he is incapable of writing his own songs, but one can't help wondering whether he could ever follow the lead of Adamo, Indochine's Nicola Sirkis or Mathias Malzieu (from the group Dionysos) and become a singer-turned-novelist? Clerc is amused by the suggestion, but insists that "In a way it would almost be easier - and more interesting - for me to write novels rather than songs. But I don't really see what interesting material I could come up with other than writing about myself. The problem with that is there are too many subjects I wouldn't want to bring up – and those subjects are precisely the ones people would want to know about! So, in fact, there's no way I could ever sit down and write about myself."

Discovering Erick Benzi in the studio

For Double enfance - the twentieth album he has made since his recording debut in 1968 -  Julien Clerc branched out in a new direction, working with producer Erick Benzi for the first time. The latter was recommended to him by close friend and fellow French music star Jean-Jacques Goldman. "Jean-Jacques just said 'You'll see, Erick's the nicest guy in the world!' And I have to say he was right – and that's worth something in a world where you don't exactly come across nice guys every day! Jean-Jacques also said there were two other great things about Erick. 'One, your demo tape always ends up better than you could ever have imagined.' 'And two, he's not a pain in the arse in the studio, because he doesn't actually need to work that hard at what he does. I got him interested in all my albums!' That's just like Jean-Jacques to say that and he was completely right on both counts. When I got into the studio with Erick I found myself working with a guy who's profoundly a musician and profoundly generous, a guy who serves music without ever letting his own ego get in the way. Erick's very subtle in his way of working, but at the same time he's aware of what works on a commercial level because he's made a lot of hits with a lot of different people. When he listened to the demos I made before going into the studio, he immediately said, 'Great, no need for formatting here, we can get in there and make real music!' 

Erick Benzi has certainly succeeded in setting Julien Clerc off to his best advantage, using simple but effective arrangements and bringing his vocals firmly to the fore. Benzi even managed to get the singer back in front of the piano on four songs (something Clerc has rarely done in recent years). On others, he pared instrumentation back to the essentials, but still managed to use a number of top musicians on the album. Double enfance includes contributions from Loïc Pontieux (on drums), Hervé Brault and Gildas Arzel (on guitar, mandolins and other string instruments) and Renaud Garcia-Fons (on double bass). Meanwhile, Benzi experimented with different sound textures, including layers of keyboards here, a burst of accordion there and a touch of reggae influences or a ripple of female laughter where necessary. But throughout the entire album vocals and melodies dominate, carrying the emotional charge of Double enfance and the cinematographic atmosphere of songs like Place Clichy with its typically Parisian panorama.

Discovering Julien Clerc on stage

Julien Clerc is set to hit the live circuit again in a few months' time, kicking off an extensive tour at the start of 2006. The tour, which should last several months, includes a dozen concerts at the prestigious Olympia music-hall in Paris. Appearing to be in a particularly relaxed frame of mind with only a few days to go before the release of the album, Julien Clerc admits he hasn't looked too closely at his live schedule yet. "That's one of those things I just don't ask questions about," he laughs, "Over the past thirty years, I've never once asked questions about sales, the number of dates in a tour, or enquired about box-office takings! I only make a few small stipulations, like saying that I'm not going to perform more than five concerts a week and that's that! As far as the rest's concerned, I make sure I've got the best possible team of people around me,  because I'm actually a pretty anxious kind of person and I'm very conscientious. It's just that there are certain things I don't concern myself with, so I end up finding out about them at the last minute! I think one thing I've always done is organise myself in such a way that I can get out on stage and be an artist – and that's something I've done pretty well over the years!" And who can say fairer than that?

Julien Clerc Double enfance (Virgin-EMI) 2005

Julien Clerc's tour kicks off in Saint-Germain-en-Laye (on 4 January 2006) and includes a stint at the Olympia, in Paris (24 January – 4 February 2006).