Sebastien Dehesdin
My first encounter with music was through my parents’ stereo whilst we were on holidays in Brittany. They kept listening to the same two or three albums: the best of the Doors, William Sheller and Daniel Balavoine. The Doors were freaking me out (especially ‘Strange Days’) and to this day, I still don’t believe they are a suitable listen for a 10-year-old. William Sheller was a bit quirkier but so melancholic at times, even if I didn’t really get what he was talking about. And then, there was Daniel Balavoine, and that song, ‘Le Chanteur’.
It was upbeat, funky, glorious, talking about screaming woman getting naked, and I felt so lucky that my parents let me listen to such naughty lyrics.
I misunderstood the first verse for years (“I want to succeed in life, be loved. Be handsome, earn money. And mostly be intelligent. But for all that, I would need to work full-time.”), thinking he wanted to work at “Printemps” (the big department store) because full-time in French is ‘plein temps’. It made sense to me as I assumed working at Printemps was the pinnacle of professional achievement, but he was just saying he wanted a full-time job (implying: instead of shitty part-time jobs like all singers have).
The end of the song is epic, switching to a minor key with Balavoine screaming in his characteristic falsetto voice. Later, his live Au Palais des Sports album was one of the first CDs I bought, and I still love how he goes crazy at the end of that song, just looping through the line “I want to die unhappy”. He died in 1986, in a helicopter accident in Mali whilst working on his charity on the Paris-Dakar. He was 33 and I was three.
