Between 1962 and 1966, Françoise Hardy released one French-language album
per year. Each, strictly speaking, was eponymously titled, and each was
collected
from a series of contemporary four-track, seven-inch, picture-sleeve EPs–pop
music’s main format in France, known as le super 45. In them, we see the
maturing of
one of the decade’s most singular talents–a pop singer with the heart of a
chanteuse, a singer-songwriter in an age before such a thing was known, and a
style icon
who valued privacy and modesty. Remastered from the original tapes, we present
the first five Françoise Hardy albums in their original French format, on
deluxe LP
and CD.
Following the French success of 1962’s Tous Les Garçons Et Les Filles and
1963’s Le Premier Bonheur Du Jour, 1964 was the year Hardy went truly
international.
Having competed in the Eurovision Song Contest and acted in a Roger Vadim film,
this was the year Dylan dedicated a poem to her on the sleeve of Another Side
and the year she ventured to Britain to record English language songs for the
first time.
Hardy’s first three French EPs of the year, from which just “Pourtant Tu
M’aimes” appears on Mon Amie La Rose, were largely recorded on home soil
with Parisbased
arranger Mickey Baker. After the third, Françoise changed tack, abandoned
French studios and arrangers, and headed to London’s Pye Studios. She
would
not record again in France until 1968, instead employing a series of British
producers and musicians that even included then-studio guitarist
Jimmy Page.
“It was very difficult for me to convince my record company to go to London
for the production because my artistic director was having lots of success with
very bad
arrangements,” she says dryly. “Since they were having success with bad
arrangements, they could continue like that.”
Hardy got her way and, working with arranger Charles Blackwell, a former
protégé of Joe Meek, set about creating a new interpretation of her glacial,
existentially
yearning music: part pop, part chanson, part soul music. On one hand, she was
marrying yearning melodies with lyrics examining feelings of otherness. On
the
other, she was interpreting the music coming from Britain and America—both
that of Phil Spector and country, too. Blackwell was the first arranger with
whom Hardy
was happy, and Mon Amie La Rose was the first album she thought of as more than
an afterthought. “She chose her own songs and was very in control,” says
Blackwell. “She was very much a perfectionist.”
As Hardy’s sound was changing, so was her life; the British were enchanted
by her Parisian style and sophistication and didn’t see her as the shy, sad
soul that
those at home painted her as. A new era was beginning, and Hardy’s music was
traveling further than ever.