Françoise Hardy

Paris and Vogue

Françoise Madeleine Hardy was born on January 17, 1944 in the Marie-Louise clinic in Paris, during an air raid in the German occupation. She was raised with her sister Michèle by her mother, went to a Catholic school, studied briefly at Sciences Po and then German at the Sorbonne. NPR reports she was given her first guitar at 16 and began writing songs. In 1961 she took part in the television show Le Petit Conservatoire de la chanson, auditioned for Vogue in May and signed with Disques Vogue on November 14, 1961.

Her debut EP came in May 1962, and "Tous les garçons et les filles" became a hit after a television rebroadcast around the end of October, topping the French chart along with "J'suis d'accord" and "Le temps de l'amour". The debut album, released in November 1962 with the producer Jacques Wolfsohn, won the Grand Prix du Disque and the Trophée de la Télévision. In 1963 she sang "L'amour s'en va" for Monaco at Eurovision, finishing fifth, made her film debut in Château en Suède and had an Italian hit with "Quelli della mia età".

London, Paris and the 1970s

From 1964 she recorded in London at Pye Studios with the arranger Charles Blackwell, which gave Mon amie la rose (autumn 1964) its string-heavy sound; the English version of "Dans le monde entier", "All Over the World", reached the UK top 20 in 1965. She appeared in Grand Prix (1966) and as a cameo in Godard's Masculin féminin. The album Comment te dire adieu (1968), including a French adaptation of "It Hurts to Say Goodbye" with lyrics by Serge Gainsbourg, reached number two in France.

The Sonopresse years gave Soleil (1970) and La question (1971, with the Brazilian musician Tuca), which the Guardian included in its 1000 albums to hear before you die. Message personnel (1973, Warner) was produced by Michel Berger, who wrote its opening and title songs. She later ran her own label, Flarenasch, from 1980, made Décalages (1988) and was billed as retiring, then returned with Le danger (1996) on Virgin. Tant de belles choses (2004) won a Victoires de la Musique in 2005, and her last album was Personne d'autre (2018, Parlophone). She also wrote books on astrology and a memoir, Le désespoir des singes... et autres bagatelles (2008), which sold about 250,000 copies in France. She died on June 11, 2024, aged 80.

Reputation

Wikipedia counts 32 studio albums, 29 compilations and 116 singles, and more than 7.6 million records sold by November 2017. Pitchfork ranked her debut number 90 on its list of the 200 best albums of the 1960s in 2017, and she received the Grande médaille de la chanson française from the Académie française in 2006. NPR reports that Bob Dylan, who wrote a poem for her in the sleeve notes of Another Side of Bob Dylan, would not go onstage at his first Paris concert in 1966 until he knew she was in the audience.