It is often said that Tôt ou Tard – created and managed by Vincent Frèrebeau – is France's best record company, and it has been compared to the likes of Tamla Motown or Blue Note in terms of the consistency and high quality of its stable of artists. Obviously, with Thomas Fersen and the Têtes Raides, then Lhasa and Bumcello, followed by Vincent Delerm and Jeanne Cherhal, there haven't been too many years when Tôt ou Tard hasn't debuted new artists or boosted singers who had less happy residencies at other record companies, such as Dick Annegarn, Mathieu Boogaerts or JP Nataf.
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But just because some Tôt ou Tard artists are friendly with each other and have worked together (either guesting on the other's album or on stage), or because the label's standards are so consistently high, doesn't necessary make for one big family. So to celebrate their tenth anniversary, Tôt ou Tard decided to try something new: get all the label's artists together working on new songs or reprises. Perhaps it's not so surprising to hear Mathieu Boogaerts and Vincent Delerm singing about their reputations and journalists' endlessly repetitive questions on
Na na na, or Thomas Fersen and Jeanne Cherhal duetting on
Barmaid. But it's altogether more surprising to see the Fabulous Trobadors, the Têtes Raides and the Bombes 2 Bal get together to write and sing
Méfie-toi, which is half Toulouse-style forro dance music, half Parisian rock with biting lyrics. And the feverish dance sounds concocted by the Fabulous Trobadors and Bumcello on
Le Coco anti-coke make it one of the great dance tracks of the season.
The Tôt ou Tard artists have not simply reprised a few songs in a halfway-house compromise style; they have gone out of their way to create new forms, new ambiences and colours to make these duets really something special and in no way contrived. L’Echelle de Richter by Lhasa and Vincent Delerm – an elegiac celebration of love – and the highly cultivated (and almost a quarter century old) Dithyrambos by Dick Annegarn, with its return to Ancient Greece in the company of JP Nataf and Franck Monnet, are both stunning examples of songs that have been brought back to life and given a whole new energy. The reprise of Luna, which the Têtes Raides imbued with a sense of bitterness on their album Les Oiseaux a dozen years ago, becomes sweeter and more sentimental in the hands of JP Nataf, Jeanne Cherhal and Bastien Lallemant, who transform the rage of the original ("One girl is dumb/One day is long/A leap into your grave") into a desolating wound.
It was in fact the recording of
Luna that kicked off the project, with Dominique Ledudal as sound engineer at the Garage studios, Paris. Already the producer of many Tôt ou Tard records, Ledudal forged the unique sound of this collaborative album, paying special attention to subtle mood changes, nuances of interpretation, and finding a balance between the dreamy post-pop ambience of someone like JP Nataf and the rich pointillism of Thomas Fersen. The two CDs each have their own particular sound: the
Plutôt tôt CD features beat-driven, dance and industrial tracks, while
Plutôt tard comprises the slower, more melancholy songs. It's a division that recalls the concept albums of the 1970s, such as Rod Stewart's
Atlantic Crossing, with its slow side and its fast side.
If the Tôt ou Tard double CD is the portrait of a family, it's very much an extended one, taking in the Jamaican Stanley Beckford with his classic Big Bamboo revamped in collaboration with Bumcello, and also the actress Agnès Jaoui, whose album of Cuban songs finds an echo with Fioricanto (a Lhasa song), which she sings on this album with JP Nataf. The arranger and multi-instrumentalist Joseph Racaille plays ukulele on Escobar by Fersen and Nataf, while Jacques Higelin (who released the album Paradis païen on Tôt ou Tard) sings his Rousse au chocolat with his young admirer Jeanne Cherhal. This double album is more than just a collection of excellent tracks performed by excellent artists, it is also a veritable manifesto of pure pleasure and artistic intelligence.
