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Nonchalance is a prized French characteristic, the Gallic version of cool. Françoise Hardy epitomised it. The singer, who has died aged 80, had a breathy, unembellished vocal style that gave her melancholy lyrics a tantalising air of lightness. She was feted as the ittiest of Paris it girls in the 1960s, wearing haute couture with the easy mien of one for whom a gold Paco Rabanne minidress was no different to a V-neck pullover.
Her nonchalant image was not a pose, but nor paradoxically — a frequent word in her best-selling memoir — was it a true reflection of her character. Hardy suffered from anxiety and under-confidence throughout her life, despite six decades of success as one of France’s most loved singers. She was not carefree about her music. A songwriter as well as singer, she expressed disdain for the arrangements and musicianship of the breezy pop hits with which she made her name in the early 1960s.
Hardy’s feelings of inauthenticity, of living a “life by proxy, more virtual than real,” in her words, were formed in childhood. She was born in Nazi-occupied Paris in 1944 to an unmarried single mother from a working-class background. Her wealthy father was married to another woman. He played a sporadic, unloving role in her life. Hardy’s mother preferred Françoise over her sister Michèle, who developed schizophrenia in later life. The two girls partly lived with their resentful grandmother, who denigrated Françoise’s looks and abilities.
A shy, bookish child, Hardy took up music after being given a guitar at 16 for passing her baccalaureate. Inspired to write songs by Barbara, the great chanson singer, she joined a television talent academy run by Mireille Hartuch, another star of French song. She released her first record in 1962, which included “Tous les garçons et les filles”, a jaunty number with downcast lyrics about a loveless solitary wandering among courting teenage couples. After Hardy performed the song on television, the record sold over 2mn copies across Europe.
It made her a star of the “yé-yé” scene, a European adoption of Anglo-American pop music (the “yé” stood for “yeah”). Its leading figures were young women, often moulded by male producers, but Hardy’s songwriting abilities gave her more autonomy. Her sound developed from Frenchified doo wop and rockabilly into orchestral pop and rock, often recorded in London where studio standards were higher. The startlingly aggressive guitar tone on 1964’s “Je n’attends plus personne” was provided by a certain Jimmy Page, making pioneering use of a fuzztone pedal.
A four-year relationship with photographer Jean-Marie Périer introduced Hardy to the 1960s beau monde. Taken up by fashion designers such as Rabanne, she came to symbolise a certain type of French style: existentialist Left Bank Paris, the antithesis of Brigitte Bardot’s brash Mediterranean sensualism. Unlike Johnny Hallyday, she crossed over to English-speaking audiences. Bob Dylan wrote a Left Bank-set poem for her, while Mick Jagger described her as his “ideal woman”.
“Truly, never would I have imagined that the world of song would open its doors to me so easily, still less that these would instantly close again as a gilded cage,” she recalled. She could not discern the beauty that others saw in her features, nor share their enjoyment in her music. For her, “Je n’attends plus personne” was “a bad cover of an Italian song”. However, she took pride in 1971’s La question, a sophisticated work pitched between chanson and bossa nova made with the Brazilian musician Tuca. She shrugged off its failure in the charts as unimportant.
After the 1960s, her albums moved freely across genres, from country-rock and piano ballads to alt-rock. Love was a persistent theme, a source of sadness as well as joy. She was a serious lyricist, in the tradition of the best French popular music. Her 2008 memoir The Despair of Monkeys and Other Trifles was a publishing sensation. She also wrote a novel and several astrology books, a subject in which she trained as a specialist. Her interest lay not in divination but charting a person’s place in the cosmos.
Her son Thomas was born in 1973, fathered by fellow singer Jacques Dutronc who she married in 1981 (both survive her). She and the playboy Dutronc were temperamental opposites; they separated in 1988, although never divorced. Diagnosed with lymphoma in 2004, she released her last album Personne d’autre in 2018. Acceptance of death was one of its themes. What appeared to be nonchalance was really stoicism, an ethos for how to live.