Françoise Hardy Was the Essence of Cool
Remembering the celebrated French pop star who died this week at age 80
Back in the ’60s, coolness across the Atlantic wasn’t limited to Swinging London.
At the start of the decade, a French radio show, Salut les copains, started to play a newer type of pop music. It didn’t yet have the name it would become known by, but it was a hipper, more liberated (at least in feeling) form of pop appealing to the youth of post-war France and later, western Europe.
The biggest name and face to come out of that pop subgenre, Françoise Hardy, passed away Tuesday at the age of 80 after battling cancer for 20 years.
The news arrived simply and sadly, on her son Thomas Dutronc’s Instagram. Underneath a 50-year-old photo of a younger Hardy holding him as an infant with a loving expression, Dutronc, now a musician himself, wrote: “Maman est partie,” which translates to “Mom has left” in English.
The news drew a response from fans regular and famous. “The death of an icon is always a tricky bastard to wrestle with,” Shirley Manson wrote on Garbage’s Instagram. “For some reason, the death of Françoise Hardy has hit hard. It is almost as though she has taken much of the beauty that was left in the world with her. Much of the gentleness at the very least.”
Hardy was born in Nazi-occupied Paris. Her father was soon out of the picture, eventually winding up as a closeted man who met a violent end in 1981. Her mother did what she could as a single mom, but was emotionally distant.
The difficult childhood fueled Hardy’s shyness and self-doubt. But those years also fueled her love of music — first, chanson music of the day, then bolstered by exposure to American and English artists through Radio Luxembourg.
A focused student, she finished secondary school two years early. When her father asked what she wanted for a graduation present, her reply was a guitar. He was reluctant, but her mother pushed him to buy it, which he did.
Various studies, at university and at a performers conservatory followed, as did failed auditions for record labels. One of those ultimately became a success, as some folks at Disques Vogue liked her potential and worked with her to improve some things.
It didn’t take long. She signed a deal with the label in late 1961. The following February, she appeared on the TV show Petit Conservatoire, performing the song “La fille avec toi.” The host later asked what the songs “yeah yeah yeah” meant in French, which later led to the term being created for the music as a whole — yé-yé.
Hardy was the biggest name to come out of the yé-yé scene, even as she began to color outside the lines and come up with her own designs quickly.
She was an outlier from the start. Yé-yé was a genre where the singers, primarily girls and young women, were often made to rely on outside writers.
The tradeoff was a chance at success paid for with a loss of artistic control. On the worst end of the deal was France Gall, three years Hardy’s junior. She eventually became angry and mortified when she was told what the lecherous Serge Gainsbourg’s lyrics to her single “Les Sucettes” (lines like “When the barley sugar/Flavoured with aniseed/Flows down Annie’s throat/She is in paradise”) were really about.
Hardy avoided that issue. She wrote all of the lyrics on ten of the 12 songs on her debut album, Tous les garçons et les filles, and co-wrote the music for 11.
The title track became her first hit, staking out her terrain early. She was not the peppy singer of happy songs. She was going to traffic in melancholia.
The track itself owes a bit to American girl group pop as well as, dare I say it, a French take on country songs like “The End of the World.” It’s kept intentionally spare, with Hardy never belting, having her voice ingratiating itself like a warm call through the fog.
“Tous les garçons et les filles” quickly catapulted Hardy into stardom.
“It was also the heyday of Salut les copains, and the press played an extremely important role, it could promote beginners,” Hardy told Telerama in 2012. “I remember being on the front page of Paris Match very quickly, without being very well known or doing anything special for that. This would no longer be possible nowadays.”
It kicked off a run of hit singles throughout the ’60s — the subtly twangy guitar underscoring the heartbreak of “C’est à l’amour auquel je pense,” the sprightly declaration of love in “Pourtant tu m’aimes,” the girl group-inspired “Je veux qu’il revienne,” the smoothly orchestrated breakup song “Voilà” and the hit Vera Lynn ballad “It Hurts to Say Goodbye” reworked into the classic Gallic pop of “Comment te dire adieu.”
As terrific as those singles were, Hardy wasn’t a fan of her own work on them.“I was so young then and untutored,” she told the Guardian in 2018. “I did not know anything about this stuff. Absolutely nothing. Some of those early songs are just terrible.”
As self-critical as she was, one hopes she realized why those songs connected and the allure they contained.
Hardy definitely wanted control, which extended to the studio. Feeling that facilities in France weren’t up to what she needed, she started to decamp to London to record albums.
When outside material entered the picture, she wasn’t afraid to let people know that it didn’t suit what she was going for.
“From when she was 18, she knew she was different,” producer Erick Benzi, who worked with Hardy on her 21st century work, told Uncut in 2018. “She was capable of going in front of big artists like Charles Aznavour and saying, ‘Your song is crap, I don’t want to sing it.’ She never made compromises.”
Hardy’s looks drew attention as well, which annoyed her as an artist, but she played the game on her terms, being selective about the shoots she did and the designers she worked with. If she was going to be looked at as a fashion plate, she was going to look good.
With her enigmatic French girl next door aesthetic, she could look equally cool in an impeccably tailored dress or dressed more suitably casual. Her fringed, slightly-mussed auburn hair (those killer bangs!) and eyeliner perfect.
That led to some acting, not big parts, but ones she took because she found them interesting or, in the case of her most known acting gig, as a love interest in John Frankenheimer’s 1966 Grand Prix starring James Garner, the check was good.
In those years, plenty of rock musicians had crushes on Hardy, David Bowie and Mick Jagger among them. The most notable was Bob Dylan, who penned a poem to her in the liner notes to 1964’s Another Side of Bob Dylan. A couple of years later, she and French superstar Johnny Hallyday wound up in Dylan’s hotel suite after he played his first electric show in Paris.
Dylan, at one point, got Hardy alone in his room and put on his as-yet-unreleased in France album Blonde on Blonde. He cued up two songs — “I Want You” and “Just Like a Woman.”
Over 50 years later, she amusingly told the story, acknowledging that she eventually realized Dylan’s amorous intentions.
“I know,” she said to the Guardian in 2018. “But I was too busy listening intently to the songs, which sounded like something entirely different to anything I had heard before. Plus, I was so impressed and petrified to meet him. Maybe if he had sung the songs to me, I would have got it.”
Incidentally, it was a couple years prior to that interview that she fully grasped it. An American couple who owned a cafe where Dylan used to write lyrics found some old typed drafts that included a couple of letters intended for Hardy.
“I do think, from the poem he wrote, which I did not take too seriously at the time, and now these letters, that I had quite a place in his mind at that time and even in his heart. I think maybe I was very serious for him. And, it moves me very much,” Hardy said.
Her popularity, greatest in France, Belgium and Quebec, rarely crossed over. She had one U.K. hit in with the understated and lovely “All Over the World” in 1965.
She released four albums in English by 1971, mixing in translated versions of her material with covers, but between never touring here (understandable given that they weren’t always released domestically) and not quite finding the right sound to fit the U.S. Top 40 of the period, she remained a cult figure here.
In retrospect, it’s a shame that she never got the chance to work with people like Burt Bacharach and Hal David, whose pop sensibilities might well have meshed with Hardy’s.
By the end of the ’60s, Hardy was eager to move on musically, with yé-yé having spread through Western Europe and run its course as a commercial force.
She found a willing and capable collaborator in Tuca, a Brazilian singer and songwriter, who would compose nearly all of the music for 1971’s La Question.
Hardy sounded the same in some ways, as there was a melancholic mood, influenced by the fact that her relationship with then-boyfriend and future husband musician Jacques Dutronc was rocky at the time. But it was a whole other thing musically with Tuca at the wheel. Brazilian music like bossa nova filtered through. The arrangements applied baroque touches with restraint. Hardy’s breathy voice further contributed to the smoky, late night vibe. For someone who was stronger as a singles artist for most of her career to that point, it was a lovely statement that she could make a complete beautiful album.
La Question completely stiffed commercially, but it didn’t take long for its hauntingly gorgeous qualities to be seen in a different light. Over time, it became one of the albums most beloved by Hardy’s fans and it was the favorite of the woman herself.
The most intriguing musical “What if?” of her career came next — a collaboration with Nick Drake. The two met in London, but the two were both introverted and nervous, so nothing came of it.
1973’s Message Personnel is another sterling album in Hardy’s post “It Girl” phase, thanks to another strong collaborator — producer Michel Berger, who was coming off producing Veronique Sanson’s stellar Amoureuse the year before.
This was smart, adult pop that sounded utterly contemporary, full of rock and folk touches with plenty of cinematic string flourishes.
With chasing the charts less of a consideration and plenty of artistic goodwill in the bank, Hardy felt freer to pursue different musical avenues, exploring deeper into jazz on 1980’s Gin tonic and alternative rock with louder guitars (and branching into other styles from there) on 1996’s Le danger, which was better than one might have expected.
Hardy’s pursuits away from music changed. Her interest in astrology expanded, to giving readings and writing books on the topic. She also compiled essays, put together a songbook with commentary and wrote a memoir (The Despair of Monkeys and Other Trifles).
Life became more difficult for her in the last 20 years, starting with a diagnosis of lymphoma, something she’d have to deal with off and on until her death. She nearly died in 2016 after being put into a medically-induced coma and lost her voice, which she fought to get back.
She recorded off and on through this period. One of her quickest periods of lyric writing resulted in her final album, 2018’s Personne d’autre.
Unsurprisingly, the album touched on the themes you’d expect for a woman who’d beaten death once and knew she might not again. “Special Train” was one of the songs where she looked at her own mortality.
“But at my age, I can really only sing about that one very special train that will take me out of this world. But, of course, I am also hoping that it will send me to the stars and help me discover the mystery of the cosmos,” she told the Guardian.
She sang honestly of her fears, of life, of the love for her son and her ex (they broke up, but never divorced and remained friends). With age and all she’d been through, Hardy’s voice retained its elegance.
Sadly, an already moving album gained unwanted poignancy when the reality sank in that it would be her final relase.
Later in 2018, a new cancer hit, this time with a tumor in her ear. The treatments robbed her of her singing voice, this time for good, forcing her retirement. It became difficult for her to speak.
In her final years, Hardy survived as best she could, frustrated that the ability to depart on her own terms wasn’t legally an option in France.
“My physical suffering has already been so terrible that I am afraid that death will force me to go through even more physical suffering,” she told the Femme Actuelle in one of her final interviews in 2021.
My own personal pet peeve with the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame has nothing to do with the tired debate over genre inclusion, but rather how U.S.-centric it is. The music celebrated in its halls has a global reach, but that’s not exactly reflected in its membership. The influential psychedelia of Brazil’s Os Mutantes, the amazing pop longevity of England’s Cliff Richard and the pioneering legacy and durability of Hallyday (to name three) all belong.
So too does Françoise Hardy. A talented writer and a beguiling singer who got the most out of her voice, she earned her status as one of her country’s beloved performers, a musical and fashion inspiration.
For all her insecurity, she possessed a sharp instinct with her own skills, as she became the yé-yé girl with the heart of the chanson heroes of her youth and the soul of an artist.
“It has always been a big surprise to me that people, even very good musicians, were moved by my voice,” Hardy told the Guardian. “I know its limitations, I always have. But I have chosen carefully. What a person sings is an expression of what they are. Luckily for me, the most beautiful songs are not happy songs. The songs we remember are the sad, romantic songs.”
With Hardy hopefully solving the cosmic mysteries she wanted to, the rest of are left with plenty of Hardy, the essence of cool, worth remembering.
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