RFI Musique: In Bravo et merci, you interpret texts given to you by some of the stars of French chanson. How did the project come about?
Michel Fugain: It was in 2003. It all started with a depression, like good weather usually does, but it wasn’t an artist’s depression, it was more of an “accident of life” depression. I had lost my daughter and I was all broken up. I didn’t think I was capable of being so destroyed. I only wanted one thing, and that was to stop everything and sit down and die in some corner. But at the same time, I looked around and realised that for forty years I’d been moving alongside artists who still had things to say and who really knew how to turn a phrase. And I wanted to say thank you to them: thank you for having fed my imagination – and the imagination of people like me – with such wonderful songs. They have all done three or four immortal numbers. So I wrote a letter to them explaining that I wanted to pay tribute to them and asking if they would give me a text that I could set to music. 

Why did you choose these twelve artists in particular?
I wanted them to be writers, which cut things down. I wanted to pay tribute to the creators, those who write the songs. I know the pleasure that comes from doing a song, and the pain too: the doubts and bad feelings that come with it. And then the artists had to agree to join in the game of writing the lyrics without a tune. What I wanted was to create the music based on their text, otherwise I would have been doing Fugain, and that is not what interested me.

How did you go about composing the tunes and making the songs yours?
It takes time to make lyrics your own. You need to let them get inside you. The words seep into you little by little, always with the author’s image alongside. You let it happen and then one day it goes. I got a lot of pleasure from it. When you work with people who are so easy to identify, they are permanently there in your head and your ears. But if I’ve got a text by Lama, for example, I mustn’t do Lama, that would be stupid. And that’s where the difficulty lies.

Claude Nougaro gave you a song five weeks before he died. It must have been particularly moving to sing it. 
Yes, it was. That song was one of his last and it was set to music posthumously because I created it in Toulouse on 9 September 2005, on Claude’s birthday, which was celebrated in the place du Capitole. For a week, the whole town was inhabited by Nougaro. It was a very special thing to experience. I had spoken to him a few days before he died. I needed to repeat a word in his text and I wanted to know what the “poet would allow”. He told me, “Oh, if you need it for the rhythm you can do what you like.” Those are the last words I heard from him, or nearly. I said goodbye to him with emotion because I know that it was the last time and since then I’ve missed him. He was a genuine poet.

His song is a topical one because it is about the environment. Is it a cause you care about? 
Yes, it’s a cause I care about. What’s more, he told me that the song would suit me. What is so important is that he was the origin of the lyrics. The poet’s message has a big place in there.

Love is everywhere in Bravo et merci  too (Je parlerai de toi, Amours gris gris, La rue du Babouin, Ça dure un jour, etc.) Is it still one of your favourite subjects?
Yes, but they are love letters in disguise. For example, Charles Aznavour talks about very hard things in Je parlerai de toi: women who make love without love and children stolen and raped. And then, suddenly he says, “Je parlerai de toi – I will talk about you”. The idea was to let yourself have the right to say, “If you don’t mind, now I’m going to talk about love.”

It all gives out a great sense of optimism. Are you trying to struggle against the moroseness out there?
The authors all gave me bittersweet lyrics. And I tried to make it happier and make each song a bit more sunny. I didn’t want to take that bitter-sweetness on face value.

You are doing a tour soon. Are you looking forward to it?
It starts with Olympia, in October. Yes, I’m very much looking forward to getting back up on stage. I can’t get enough of doing tours. When you’re on tour, you are defending a cause or an idea. The songs from Bravo et merci all have a story to them and I’m really going to enjoy telling those stories. But I won’t only sing those twelve songs. After forty years in the trade, I’ve got 250 numbers to choose from.

Manon Nouvelle