RFI Musique: Is Recollection intended to sound like one big jukebox, fusing your own personal recollections with elements of our collective memory?
Laurent Voulzy: Well, Rockollection, certainly was! And I think that's why that song resonated so deeply with so many people. In any case, that's the way it worked for me. Rockollection was basically me telling bits of my life story that people could easily identify with… and, of course, I got to sing all those classic pop songs tucked away in our collective memory.

Alain (Souchon) and I basically got a bit carried away when we were writing the new version of Rockollection. Originally, there was no album, or even a recording session, planned around the anniversary. It was just that I realised it had been thirty years since Rockollection, a song I can honestly say changed my life. I thought to myself, "OK, we should mark the occasion by going to play it in a club and maybe we can get a DJ to get everyone up on the dancefloor afterwards." It was as simple as that. But when I mentioned it to Alain, he said maybe we should think about writing a new version of the song, adding in a new verse. Anyway, we didn't actually get round to writing this new verse straightaway because we got on to writing another song together called Jelly Bean. It's about how my life was before the whole fame thing happened for me with Rockollection… On Jelly Bean I recount how when I was a kid I wasn't interested in much apart from writing songs and dreaming about hearing them played on the radio. Jelly Bean runs through all these snapshots from my childhood when I was living alone with my Mum in Nogent-sur-Marne.

In the new version of Rockollection you perform extracts from a lot of '80s hits by Blondie, The Police, Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Tom Petty etc. How did you decide what 80s classics you were going to include in the song?
The original Rockollection was all about music from the sixties. So what we did this time round was keep a lot of the original lines like  "On a tous dans le cœur une petite fille oubliée" and I added in the '80s songs at the end, respecting the chronology of the music. I chose extracts of songs that I felt represented the spirit of the time as well as the tempo of my song and I used extracts I felt followed on OK from the previous line...

On Jelly Bean, the first single release from the album, you sing about dreaming of finding your own musical style…
Jelly Bean - the title was inspired by those flashy coloured kids' sweets and the rhyming slang "know what I mean jellybean?" - is basically a song about me growing up. And, yes, I did spend a lot of time dreaming about how one day I'd develop my own personal musical style and become a role model in my own right… And that's exactly how it is when you're fifteen and searching for an identity. You go through a phase of striking poses in front of the mirror. On the one hand, you're trying your hardest to be like your idols, but at the same time you're trying desperately hard to break away from that and follow your own path, to become a role model one day yourself.  

When Rockollection - with versions recorded in French, English and Spanish - came out in 1977 it became an overnight hit, selling four million copies across Europe. At the time you actually made very little money from the song, but plenty of people attempted to sue you for infringement of copyright …
To set the record straight here, what happened was my record company didn't ask permission for me to use extracts of the hits I sang on Rockollection and no mention was made of the songs I'd 'borrowed' from on the cover… Obviously, the French companies representing the artists I'd 'borrowed' from weren't at all happy about the situation. But copyright issues weren't exactly my domain. They were an administrative issue that should have been dealt with by my record label or the music publishers.

Going back to the childhood dreams you evoke on Jelly Bean, was your dream to become famous for the sake of being famous or were you more interested in  becoming a guitar hero?
I did dream about becoming famous one day, but that dream was inextricably linked to my passion for the guitar. Those two dreams can exist independently of one another, of course. There are plenty of people out there who have a real passion for an instrument they play alone at home, but they never dream of making a living from it. And there are other people who want to become stars and that's all they want to do, nothing else counts. My dream was to earn a living from my music, but at the same time, it's true, I wanted to hear my songs played on the radio. I wanted to be loved. I wanted other people to understand the sentiments I poured into my songs. And yes, there was definitely an element of my fantasy that involved me going round signing autographs, too. It was all mixed up together. If it hadn't been like that I don't think I'd have become a singer!

I actually learnt to play guitar when I was at boarding school. Quite a few of the guys who supervised homework classes and stuff were guitarists. They all played very different styles of music. Some were into classical music, others were into jazz and others went round playing The Shadows. I loved it all! I was bulimic when it came to music, soaking up everything I could. I found it all amazing - everything from Brassens songs and the guitar transcription of Bach's Prelude number 3 to Samba da una nota so (a bossa nova by Antonio Carlos Jobim) and The Beatles' I Want to Hold Your Hand. It all sounded brilliant to me! 

With time, you sort of gravitate towards your own style which is ultimately based on your physique and your voice as much as your musical talent. We all have to stick within our limits. It just so happened that my voice, my tastes, my passion for music history, melodies and certain harmonies - and, of course, my discovery of rock'n'roll - all pointed me in one direction and that was pop music. Pop has ended up becoming the definitive Voulzy sound!