Emmanuel Macron stands behind the coffin of Charles Aznavour. Photograph: Yoan Valat

'In France, poets never die': Macron pays tribute to Aznavour

‘Son of immigrants’ likened to Apollinaire and praised for his cultural contribution to France


Angelique Chrisafis in Paris
Friday 5 October 2018

France has given a full state farewell to Charles Aznavour, the singer-songwriter hailed as one of the greatest variety performers of the 20th century, as president Emmanuel Macron lauded the son of Armenian refugees as one of the most important “faces of France”.

Aznavour, who died this week, aged 94, was a lyricist who shaped and defined French popular culture for decades and became one of the best-known French singers in the world, often using catchy melodies to explore despair and challenge taboos, from prejudice against gay people to the problems of masculinity and depression.

In a career that lasted more than 70 years, he recorded more than 1,200 songs, sold in excess of 180m records and appeared in more than 60 films. He was still touring and performing on stage until his death and had often said he wanted to live to 100 or die on stage.

Emmanuel and Brigitte Macron follow the coffin of Charles Aznavour, alongside his family, in Paris, Photograph: EPA

At a pomp-filled state ceremony at Les Invalides military complex in Paris, where Napoleon is buried, Macron praised Aznavour’s lyrics, which he said appealed to “our secret fragility”. He said the singer’s words were “for millions of people a balm, a remedy, a comfort ... For so many decades, he has made our life sweeter, our tears less bitter.”

Likening Aznavour’s literary genius to the poet Guillaume Apollinaire, Macron said: “In France, poets never die.”

Crucially, the French president also hailed Aznavour as an example of how much children of immigrants and refugees can give to their adopted country.

 Parisians watch the national homage to Aznavour broadcast on a giant screen at the Esplanades des Invalides in the French capital. Photograph: Lucas Barioulet

Aznavour was born Shahnour Varinag Aznavourian in Paris on 22 May 1924 to an Armenian actor father and singer mother who had fled the massacres in their homeland as the Ottoman empire collapsed. He left school and became a child actor aged nine. Later, he survived the German occupation of Paris singing in cabarets, while his parents hid fellow Armenians, Jews, Russians and Communists in their apartment and his father joined the resistance.

“He knew that the real France was a France of welcome,” said Macron of Aznavour’s mixed heritage and embracing of French culture. “This son of immigrants, who had not studied, knew that in France … the French language was a sanctuary more sacred than any other.”

Former French presidents Nicolas Sarkozy (left) and François Hollande, with Sarkozy’s wife, Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, attend the homage. Photograph: Christophe Ena

Alongside Macron, the Armenian prime minister, Nikol Pashinyan, said Aznavour had given fresh momentum to Armenian pride: “He brought to life the aspirations of Armenians, and so was declared a national hero for his songs and services to Armenia.”

Fittingly for a man who was devoted to rhythm and had a genius for describing melancholy, one of the most poignant moments in the ceremony came when the silence of the vast military courtyard was broken by the steady sound of footsteps on cobbles as marchers carried his coffin draped in the French flag with a wreath in Armenian colours.

His coffin was lifted away at the end to the sound of his hit song, Emmenez-Moi (Take Me Along).

People watch the ceremony in Paris. Photograph: Lucas Barioulet

The ceremony recognised Aznavour’s grit, fiendish hard work and determination to keep knocking on doors that were so often, at the start of his career, slammed in his face. French critics had initially dismissed him as repulsively ugly, too short, with a terrible cavernous voice and dubious song titles. His stellar success in the face of adversity was part of his great appeal in France: a national loser who became a winner – someone who was able to pinpoint emotion and magnify it.

The French poet and artist Jean Cocteau once said: “Charles’s true success comes from the fact that he sings more from his heart that from his vocal chords.”

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From drag queens to dead marriages, Charles Aznavour was far from easy listening

ALEXIS PETRIDIS

MON  1 OCTOBER 2018

In the UK at least, Charles Aznavour, who has died aged 94, is largely embedded in the popular imagination as a light entertainment phenomenon. It’s the context in which he appeared on British TV in the late 60s and 70s: BBC specials called things like Love from A to Z, or spots on variety shows. His two big British hits, the syrupy The Old Fashioned Way and the impassioned She, seemed reactionary and wilfully old-fashioned: like Perry Como’s And I Love You So, or Peters and Lee’s Welcome Home, they were part of a wave of grandma-friendly MOR that crashed awkwardly around the glam and Philly soul records in the early 70s charts, a reminder that a lot of Britain’s record buyers were old enough to remember a halcyon world where rock’n’roll didn’t exist.

Charles Aznavour

The latter was his solitary UK No 1, reigning incongruously over a Top 40 that contained Slade, Sweet and This Town Ain’t Big Enough for Both of Us by Sparks. He cut a very unlikely figure indeed on Top of the Pops, a diminutive, middle-aged man (“so worn by experience he’s got bags under his head”, as Clive James memorably put it), belting it out amid the glitter and lights.

His path would sometimes cross with anglophone pop music in the subsequent years. Bob Dylan was a fan, covering Aznavour’s Les Bons Moments as The Times We’ve Known live and naming a 1963 Aznavour show at Carnegie Hall one of the greatest performances he’d ever seen. A reporter from the Guardian was more baffled by said performance, replete with Aznavour’s trademark dramatic gestures, describing the “painful process” of the singer-songwriter “thrusting his anxious and sad, five-foot-and-a-bit, eight-stone frame in front of an audience … and trying to hypnotise them with chanted, throbbing complaints of love.”

Charles Aznavour

Elton John, Sting, Carole King and Bryan Ferry all appeared on Aznavour’s 2008 album Duos; Elvis Costello recorded She for the soundtrack of Notting Hill. But these crossover moments didn’t happen often: a man whose showbiz career had begun before the second world war and flourished as a result of the post-war patronage of Edith Piaf, he belonged to different world entirely.

But, counter to the popular imagination, it was not the world of light entertainment. Among the pantheon of great chansonniers, Aznavour was a born rule-breaker. “Before Aznavour, despair was unpopular,” joked director Jean Cocteau, who cast him in 1960’s Le Testament d’Orphée, and certainly, the songs he wrote about everyday life were filled with downcast tenor of their lyrical content.

He could write about post-coital bliss – so racily that the song in question, Apres L’Amour, was banned – but he really excelled at the dark stuff: grief and remorse, relationships in crisis. You can see why Tu T’laisses Aller was controversial – the title translates as You’ve Let Yourself Go, the lyric offers a pretty unsparing depiction of a husband’s bitterness over his wife’s appearance, but it’s an uncomfortably truthful song about a marriage that’s curdled from stasis to acrimony. 1963’s Bon Anniversaire, a song about a ruined birthday, is more uncomfortable still in its drawing of icy silences and dangerously swinging moods.

Aznavour wrote about rape, depression and, in 1972’s Comme Ils Disent, he conjured up a sympathetic portrait of a drag queen in an era when French music discretely avoided the topic of homosexuality. 1987’s Je Bois, meanwhile, was a spectacularly bleak portrayal of a inveterate boozer in middle age, suffering an existential crisis and trouble with his prostate. “It’s a kind of sickness I have, talking about things you’re not supposed to talk about. I started with homosexuality and I wanted to break every taboo,” he said in an interview three years ago. Whatever label you wanted to put on it, the one thing you could never have called his music was easy listening.

THE GUARDIAN

Charles Aznavour

Interview

Charles Aznavour: 'I wanted to break every taboo'

Critics said he was too ugly, too short and had a terrible voice. Fifty-one albums later, Charles Aznavour is a living legend. The 91-year-old French crooner talks Edith Piaf, Kim Kardashian and plastic surgery

Angelique Chrisafis

Monday 1 October 2018

Charles Aznavour, one of the greatest singer-songwriters France has ever known, sits in a velvet armchair a few days before his 91st birthday, discussing the whiff of ladies’ armpits.

A song on his new album, in which he declares, “I love the smell of your underarms,” worried his Swedish wife of 50 years, but Aznavour knows his audience. If he’s the most successful French crooner in the world – a lyricist who defined the country’s popular culture for decades – it’s precisely because his songs have always been risky.

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When Aznavour began writing in the 1940s, sex was something that happened with the light off. It was OK for women singers to howl over their broken hearts, but men didn’t sing about their own emotional despair – and later their dodgy prostates. Aznavour shone a spotlight on masculinity and libido, singing about depression, sex, prejudice and rape. His hits ranged from the 1970s story of a gay transvestite in What Makes a Man, to the once-banned ballad of muggy, post-coital exhaustion, Après l’Amour, and the controversial You’ve Let Yourself Go – the plea of a man whose wife has grown dowdy and fat (“I gaze at you in sheer despair and see your mother standing there”).He is unrepentant. “It’s a kind of sickness I have, talking about things you’re not supposed to talk about. I started with homosexuality and I wanted to break every taboo.” The armpit line comes in a new ballad about a blind lover’s sense of smell. “When I wrote a song about the deaf [Quiet Love], I learned sign-language to perform it on stage. On this album, I wanted to describe what it was like for someone non-sighted.” He pauses. “I still don’t know how I’m going to perform it …” In his shows, he takes on various personas with dramatic gestures that resemble a mime act. He’s an actor who sings rather than a Frank Sinatra-style singer who acts.

Aznavour is still composing and performing, he’s written around 1,200 songs and sold more than 100m records in his 70-year career. France worships him as the last living legend of a golden era. Like many popular singers who came to represent the very essence of France – such as Georges Moustaki and, to a certain extent, Edith Piaf herself – Aznavour is shaped by his foreign roots. Born Shahnour Varenagh Aznavourian in Paris to an actor-father and singer-mother who had fled the Armenian genocide, he left school and became a child actor at the age of nine. He survived the German occupation of Paris singing in cabarets, while his parents hid fellow Armenians, Jews, Russians and Communists in their apartment and his father joined the resistance.

Piaf pestered him to have a nose job. Afterwards he presented himself for inspection. 'I preferred you before,' she said

But Aznavour’s path to success was long and torturous. French critics dismissed him as repulsively ugly, too short, with a terrible voice and dubious song titles. It wasn’t until the end of the 50s, a decade after Piaf had taken him on as her songwriter, flatmate and all-round bag-carrier that he finally began to make it. In 1960, he played the shy and haunted piano-player in François Truffaut’s classic New Wave film, Shoot the Piano Player (he went on to act in over 60 films). But his global singing fame was cemented in the 70s with a triumphant crossover into the US and UK – something he puts down to the excellent translation of his lyrics into English. (The bittersweet British No 1, She, is hardly known in France). Britain was seduced by this scrawny Frenchman crooning about painful crushes in a 10-ton accent. “I often say: ‘France is for lyrics, England is for music’,” he muses.

Nowadays, Aznavour is a “dinosaur” – his word – who trades on agelessness. His 51st studio album is out in the UK now and he is working on his 52nd. He loves being sampled by adoring French rappers. He relishes the irony that at 30 he was considered ugly, but past 90 he is now seen as dashing. What it’s like being 91? “I wouldn’t have a clue,” he says, wide-eyed. “I don’t feel 91. I’ve always thought a person must never lose the gaze of a child.” At 5-foot-3, he holds his tiny frame perpetually taut (keeping his shoulders straight is one his secrets of eternal youth). But he’s brutally honest about performing on stage. “I hide nothing from the audience,” he says. He tells them he has an Auto-cue because his memory is fading, and says his mouth ulcers make it hard to sing. He relies on hearing aids. But he loathes what he calls the show-business “cult of youth”.

“More and more men are changing themselves, having surgery, and you can see it on TV, because their dyed-black hair turns blue under the lights,” he says. “I had a problem with my nose, I got it done. I made some white hair that was falling out grow back. But I left my wrinkles where they are. And I look younger than the others because I have never retouched nature’s work.”In fact, it was Edith Piaf cabaret superstar and queen of chanson française, who forced Aznavour to have a nose job 50 years ago. She pestered him for months to fix what she deemed his too-large hooter. He eventually went under the knife, and presented himself for inspection. “I preferred you before,” she said.

There’s a song about Piaf on the new album. It is the first time he has written about her, though they lived together – platonically – for eight years. “We were like cousins. We had this extraordinary complicity. I never had a love affair with her – that’s what saved us.” Why did Piaf, the star, latch on to him, an unknown nine years her junior? “I brought her my youth, my madness, she loved my whole jazzy side.”

 

I can’t say anything about [Kim Kardashian], because I would anger half the Armenians.

His other main role today is as one of the world’s most famous Armenians. He has finally taken dual Armenian citizenship, is Armenian ambassador to Switzerland and travelled with the French president François Hollande to mark the centenary of the Armenian genocide this year. But France still defines his identity. “I’ve always felt totally French. That really vexed the Armenians in Armenia, but now they’re used to it.” He politely declines to say what he thinks about his challenger as pop culture’s international symbol of the Armenian diaspora: Kim Kardashian. He’s never met her. Does he watch her reality show? “I can’t say anything about it, because I would anger half the Armenians.” He laughs nervously. “I suppose Armenians are quite prudish and don’t like too much nudity …”A few years ago, he caused shockwaves in France by saying he’d paid backhanders to figures on all sides of the political spectrum after being told he was facing a tax inspection, presumed to have been in the 1970s. A later tax investigation found no irregularity. Decades ago, he left France to live just over the border in Switzerland. “I was never a tax exile,” he is at pains to point out. “I didn’t have a penny when I left.”

The phrase Aznavour probably hates the most is “farewell tour”. He swears he has never uttered the words, and vows to keep performing until he dies.

“You’ve got to learn to leave the table when love is no longer being served,” he once crooned. But with audiences still dishing up a never-ending pot of it, he’s happy to stick around.

THE GUARDIAN