It’s hard to say just how many records Michel Sardou has sold. Around a hundred million, including singles and CDs, maybe ten or twenty million more, it doesn’t matter much. He’s way up there, bathed in his unfailing popularity. His fans have never doubted him and record labels have never had to look for a new concept to relaunch his career. Perhaps that explains the impression of sheer and utter self-belief that each of his new albums exudes. Naturally, Être une femme 2010 is no exception to the rule: Sardou is totally Sardou, unerringly Sardou, impeccably Sardou.

The big one is clearly the song that lends its name to the album, an update of his Être une femme, released in 1980 (A woman of the 80s / But a woman down to the tips of her breasts). Against a fairly charmless electro rhythm, he paints a half-admiring, half-compassionate portrait of today’s women: "Since the eighties, women have been full-time men". Obviously, hard-line feminists will find a lot to say about his lyrics, starting with the introduction, where he imagines that he’s living "the strange drama of being a woman". Towards the end of the song, he evokes his "autumn loves", which mainly consist in "Letting a man do what he wants / And then falling asleep at his side", which could come across as rather cursory, even for autumn-time. 

At the time, the feminist outcry easily drowned out the sigh heaved by bankers’ unions, who were unimpressed by the highly nihilist couplet in the same song that went: "I want to blow up a bank / To crucify the cashier / To take all the gold I need / And vanish in smoke"… At the time, associations were fighting to make rape a criminal offence, although bank hold-ups did still cause a few deaths every year.

Unshakeably then, from Ricains (the first of his songs to be censored on the radio) to Je suis pour, and from France to Bac G, he has got more editorial ink flowing than any other French singer. If you’re looking for something to rage about, you won’t have much trouble finding it in some of the other songs on this album, where he sings about the downside of women’s freedom (Elle vit toute seule – "she lives alone") or makes a list of human stupidities (Lequel sommes-nous – which one are we). Yet it is glaringly obvious that Sardou doesn’t want to make enemies anymore, no longer enjoys the fight, and has no desire to see his effigy burned. He’s more likely to be found wearily crestfallen or grimacing in alarm at the times than to be heard screaming with anger.  

When his last album, Hors format, was released nearly four years ago, he said to us: "Only 10% of you goes into a song. The other 90% is acting - you tell a story like you act a character". Yet the characters he plays correspond well to what he is now – an artist with little left to prove, continuing his career in song and on stage simply for the pleasure, with no more anguish and no more rage.

Interestingly, the weakest song on the album is Nuit blanche à Rio, a lifeless portrait of hedonism and carnival-time eroticism that completely lacks the inspiration, originality and frankness that come across in the rest of the album. More human and intimate, the other songs on Être une femme 2010 reveal a Michel Sardou who has been slowly chipping away at his armour and transforming the deep timbre of his voice to put even more of his heart into his songs.