No one was really expecting anything to outshine the 90th anniversary of the birth of French music legend Georges Brassens, coupled with the 30th anniversary of his death. Yet we’ve had to wait until almost the end of 2011 – 18 December to be precise – to remember that it’s ten years since Gilbert Bécaud passed away.

LISTEN ... Gilbert Bécaud LE COFFRET ESSENTIEL

It looked like the date was going to go by completely unmarked, until the release of Bécaud, Le coffret essentiel, a collection of 267 tracks on twelve CDs: original albums, rare singles, thirty-eight songs recorded during thirteen performances in Olympia, and thirty-two titles previously unreleased on CD. This musical treasure trove not only contains all the big hits (Nathalie, Et maintenant, L’Indifférence, Les Marchés de Provence, Un dimanche à Orly), it gives listeners a chance to discover or remind themselves just how multi-talented the great Bécaud was.

He was a revolutionary figure of the 1950s that went on to incarnate one of the most conventional televised faces of music, but it’s worth remembering that he gave French chanson some of its most powerful classics, copied by the mega stars, like Je t’appartiens which Elvis Presley and Julio Iglesias transformed into Let It Be Me, and Et maintenant sung by Frank Sinatra and Judy Garland under the title What Now My Love.

Strong emotions

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Bécaud is a melodist-interpreter in the same way as Arthur Cravan might call himself a “boxer-poet”. For the Frenchman, composing meant conveying an emotion bursting with tension, desire and life itself. Whether he sang about a peasant waiting for the rain to come, a jilted lover, a shy young man, or a pleasure-seeker out for a night of debauchery, the emotion he put into his work was always potent, fragrant and fervent. His performance involved big gestures, anger and bawling, and his music is a sensual, sensitive beast.

Gilbert Bécaud hit the music scene like a huge roll of thunder in 1953. With Les Croix, Quand tu danses, Donne-moi, Mé qué mé qué, Il faut bâtir ta maison, he sang of feelings that the adults of the time had trouble understanding. He spoke of friendship, wild love, sensuality and hope, and his songs were strongly rooted in reality. Listening to his lyrics, you can see the girl dancing, the friends walking together down the road, and the lovers running into each others’ arms. He served up a palpable world at a time when the French music industry was more concerned with the perfect love of fairytales.

Mr 100,000 volts

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His performances involved jumping, stamping, running about on stage and banging wildly on the piano, and he sang with an energy that had never been seen in France at the time. This was before rock and roll and Jacques Brel. It is this work that still captivates for its exuberance and force.

That same energy forged his reputation, earning him the nickname “Mr 100,000 volts” when hundreds of fans broke their seats in Olympia in 1954. Jean Cocteau, the great poet and film maker who loved popular music, wrote: “Bécaud has the courage to be excessive.” But the playwright Ionesco slammed him in an article, denouncing “the banal, silly lyrics and music, made worse by his voice that comes from neither his head, his throat, nor his chest, but from his belly, or his large intestine.”

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The singer liked to wrong-foot both fans and critics. Accused of impiety, he wrote a cantata for Christmas, L’Enfant à l’étoile. When told he was vulgar, he dared to fuse opera and folk in L’Opéra d’Aran. When some said he was right wing, he conjured up a kind of East-West love story in Nathalie. Accused of communism, he sang Général de Gaulle in Tu le regretteras. He sang forty times at Olympia (still a record), tried his luck in the United States, experimented with all kinds of instrumentation, and even acted on the big screen.

He made no efforts to hide his pride, and recorded a song entitled Bécaud in which he sang all about himself. With the passage of time, the strong mark he made has started to fade, and yet the hundreds of powerful songs he wrote are still there to be listened to and admired for the punch they pack.
 
Gilbert Bécaud Le coffret essentiel 12 CDs (EMI) 2011

Translation by: Anne-Marie Harper