“I am very old,” said Françoise Hardy, who was then aged 69 and had just refused to shake my hand – she hurriedly explained that “germs are spread by hands” – and continued by saying, “and I am no longer strong. I get so tired.” Okay, I thought, here we go: diva time.
I had just been ushered into Hardy’s apartment in southwest Paris and, to be honest, I had no idea what to expect. It was April 2013 and Hardy’s latest album L’Amour Fou had just been released in the UK, her first in a good while. I was here to interview her for the Sunday Times, many of whose readers would surely recall Hardy from the mid-1960s, when she was a pop star and one of the world’s most photographed women.
But since then? Well, in French-speaking territories, Hardy, who died on June 11 aged 80, remained a superstar – admittedly, an aloof one: she hadn’t sung in public since 1967 – but, to the wider world, she existed as little more than an emblem of Parisian Left Bank chic. Researching her before our interview, I kept finding the same information repeated over and over: Mick Jagger called her “his ideal woman”, David Bowie stated, “I was, for a very long time, passionately in love with her. Every male in the world, and a number of females, also were.” Bob Dylan began a poem on the back of his 1964 album Another Side Of Bob Dylan “for Françoise Hardy/ at the Seine’s edge”. In more recent years, Malcolm McLaren, Blur and Iggy Pop have all invited Hardy to sing on their albums, the spell her 60s hits cast not having faded. The spell continued to work on L’Amour Fou, a striking album featuring 12 contemporary chansons. Hardy wrote the lyrics for 10 of them and one of the others was a Victor Hugo poem.
As I arrived with my assigned translator, I observed that the neighbourhood appeared wealthy – “very exclusive and bourgeoise”, she affirmed, then noted that Hardy spoke English but preferred to do interviews in French. I was somewhat surprised to find her opening her own door – not a maid or PA in sight. She was make-up free.
Her silvery grey hair was cut in a stylish bob and she was slim and casually chic. In life, as in music, Hardy was devoid of artifice. Once we got past the “no shaking hands” kerfuffle, I warmed to her: she had a bright smile, was alert, droll and intelligent. While no longer resembling the Hardy of my LP covers, she had a commanding presence – if she’d broken into song I surely would have fallen to my knees and declared my undying devotion.
“It’s very unusual for me to have no trouble at all with my producers or musicians,” explained Hardy when I announced my enthusiasm for L ‘Amour Fou,“but with this album, everything went smoothly, harmoniously – and that’s the reason!” When I noted how the album’s 2012 French release marked her half-century as a recording artist, she replied that EMI had emphasised this, but the anniversary meant nothing to her.
Hardy has always excelled at suggesting the murmuring of a wayward heart and L’ Amour Fou’s contemporary chansons found her little happier than when she first won attention with 1962′s Tous les Garçons et les Filles. Back then she sang, “all the guys and girls my age know how it feels to be happy, but I am lonely. When will I know how it feels to have someone?” She now sings with a world-weariness that comes with knowing how it feels “to have someone”.
“I’ve always had a very difficult, very tormented love life,” she replied when I asked what inspired L’ Amour Fou. She then laughed at herself – for someone so melancholy, Hardy laughed a lot. “Also,” she continued, “I like reading and especially melodrama and, at present, 19th-century English literature, especially Henry James. Okay, he’s American but he lived in England. I find myself through these books.”
I suggested that being muse to the greatest figures in 1960s British and American pop music must have made her feel very special indeed.
“All these major artists were in love with my image,” she replied. “They did not know my songs. My genre is so much different from what they like. So, you cannot say I was truly their muse. What I think happened was they probably saw me on TV, and they liked what they saw.”
As for Dylan, who invited her to his hotel room, she refused the tiny American’s overtures. “He was very thin and small and did not look healthy,” she recalled with a touch of contempt.
Admirably blunt, she said she disliked McLaren but recording with Iggy was fun (as their video shows).
Of her many admirers and collaborators, Hardy retained her deepest affection for Serge Gainsbourg, the late French singer-songwriter-producer who also recorded with Brigitte Bardot and Jane Birkin. “He was a genius and a warm, funny man. But he drank and drank, and I knew he was going to die. It was very sad. With his passing I felt the passing of my youth.
“Serge liked small voices. Mine and Jane’s [Birkin] are both small, but our ways of singing have nothing in common at all. I was told that he was disappointed I never asked him to do a whole album with me, but I would never have asked as when you did a whole album with him it became a Serge Gainsbourg album. It became his universe and I chose to make my own albums, even if they were not as interesting as they might have been if Serge had taken control.
“I remember once I went to his place to listen to his new songs – he often invited friends around to hear new songs – and he went and played one of my new songs, a very melancholy song, and he said, ‘this is something I cannot do.’ I was very flattered.”
Hardy mentioned that Carla Bruni – the supermodel/singer songwriter now married to former president Nicolas Sarkozy – was a neighbour and then began berating the socialists (then in power) for taxing the French elite. Obviously, she and Bruni had much in common.
Time, then, for me to say “adieu”. Francoise Hardy saw me to the door with a bright smile and the Buddhist clasping of palms. But no shaking of hands.