Jacques Dutronc, back on stage

Return to the old hits

Paris 

14/01/2010 - 

Seventeen years after his last live appearance, Jacques Dutronc is back on stage, his trademark nonchalance still very much in evidence. Although he performs no new material, the old hits – some of them very old indeed! – are as good as ever. 

Touring without an album to promote is somewhat unusual. Even Charles Trenet, in his final concerts at the Salle Pleyel in 1999, was promoting a new album, although he didn’t sing anything from it. Henri Salvador, Charles Aznavour and even Juliette Gréco were debuting new songs past the age of eighty. And yet Jacques Dutronc, a sprightly seventy years of age, has returned to the stage seventeen years after his last tour with nothing new to perform.

That makes his new show something to savour and yet frustrating at the same time – invigorating but curiously incomplete. On Wednesday 13 January, for his second concert at Paris’s Zénith theatre, the surprises were on the sidelines rather than in the main event: a dwarf dancer dressed entirely in red; a guest appearance from Vincent Lindon for Tous les goûts sont dans ma nature; a fairly mediocre rapper on Fais pas ci fais pas ça… From his last album, he performed

only the title track, Madame l’Existence. Its bitterly political lyrics ("I’d like to buy myself a democracy (…) You’ve got the wrong place/There’s no Republic here”) seem all the more striking now, than on the album’s release in 2003.

The rest was essentially just a run-through of Dutronc’s old hits, with no notable omissions:  Et moi et moi et moi opened the proceedings, with the rest of the set featuring Les Playboys, Il est cinq heures Paris s’éveille, Les Cactus, Gentleman cambrioleur, On nous cache tout on nous dit rien, L’Opportuniste, L’Hymne à l’amour (moi l’nœud), La Fille du Père Noël… Not much was changed, although William Leymergie took Catherine Langeais’s role in Et moi et moi et moi.

There were few surprises in the arrangements either, although there was a clear emphasis on rock, with Dutronc exhorting French rock icons Fred Chapellier on guitar and bass player Jannick to really go for it. Even the horrible sound quality of the violin on J’aime les filles or the garish synthetic piano couldn’t ruin the charm and genius of these songs, some of them more than forty years old.

Dutronc’s voice is in as good a shape as ever. It’s true that he has always composed within his fairly limited baritone range, which hasn’t altered much with age. The result is that the songs sound much the same as they always did! Even his stage act is pretty much as expected and as it always was, if anything even more so. The singer somewhat overplays his famous nonchalance and ends up coming across as more affable than cynical, more amiable than sarcastic. Ultimately, you’re rather left with the impression that all you’ve done is check out whether Dutronc still has one of the greatest repertoires of French chanson.  As indeed he has!

Tour : 21 January: Albi; 23 January: Pau; 28 January: Lanester; 29 January: Nantes (sold out); 30 January: Brest; 3 February: Strasbourg, 9 February: Saint-Etienne, 10 February: Grenoble.

Bertrand  Dicale

Translation : Hugo  Wilcken