French singer-songwriter and reluctant fashion muse
A cultural icon in France, Françoise Hardy, who has died aged 80, emerged as one of the yé-yé girls who dominated the French charts in the early 1960s: confident young women, many of them still in their teens, who sung breezy, US-influenced pop. Hardy was one of the most successful: her debut single, "Tous les garçons et les filles", sold two million records in 18 months (more, it was noted, than Édith Piaf had in 18 years).
But, shy and introspective, she was a different kind of yé-yé girl, said Alexis Petridis in The Guardian. Her songs were "invariably" melancholic; rather than relying on older male writers, she wrote most of them herself; and she insisted on controlling her own recording sessions to create a less manufactured sound. A pre-Led Zeppelin Jimmy Page played on one of her early records.
Elegant, nonchalant and understated, Hardy came to epitomise effortless French cool. Paco Rabanne and Yves Saint Laurent dressed her; the fashion label Comme des Garçons was named after a line in her debut single; and during her brief acting career, Roger Vadim and Jean-Luc Godard directed her. A generation of adolescent boys were obsessed by her or, as the critic Sean O'Hagan put it, "with the idea of her", said The Telegraph; as were members of the rock aristocracy.
David Bowie admitted in the 1990s that he had been "passionately in love with her"; Mick Jagger declared her his "ideal woman". Before meeting her, Bob Dylan wrote a poem about her for the back cover of "Another Side of Bob Dylan", and in 1966, after a concert in Paris, he invited her back to his hotel where he played some of the songs he had just recorded for "Blonde on Blonde" – including "I Want You". Hardy later said she'd not realised he was trying to seduce her, and that she'd not have been interested anyway.
Never comfortable in the spotlight, she described her work for fashion houses as a "chore", and grew increasingly irritated by the way people took more interest in her looks than in her music. She stopped performing live in 1967, owing to stage fright, and gave up her film career then too, saying that she couldn't act, and that her priority was songwriting. To get away from the press and fans, she spent a lot of her time at her second home in Corsica. In 1968, she escaped there to avoid the student unrest in Paris.
Hardy put her anxious temperament down to her star sign, Capricorn, and to the fact that she had been born, in 1944, during an air raid in Nazi-occupied Paris. Her father was married to another woman and largely absent; she and her sister were brought up by their mother in the ninth arrondissement, but spent weekends with her "narrow-minded" grandmother, who told her that she was "unattractive and a very bad person". At her convent school, she faced the stigma of being illegitimate. She took refuge in the rock'n'roll that was starting to be played on the radio; and when her father offered her a reward for passing her baccalaureate, aged 16, she asked for a guitar. She knew just three chords, but found she could write any number of songs with them. She signed a recording contract at 17, and the next year she topped the charts in France.
In the 1970s, she worked with the Brazilian musician Tuca and almost made an album with Nick Drake. She loved his music, but when they met to discuss the idea, the painfully shy folk singer sat in a corner without saying a word, and the project was dropped. In the 1980s, she took a break to raise her son (with her husband, the musician Jacques Dutronc); but she was soon back recording her own albums and collaborating with the likes of Blur (on their 1994 song "To the End") and Iggy Pop. Diagnosed with cancer in 2004, she released her last album in 2018. "What a person sings is an expression of what they are," she told The Observer at the time. "Luckily for me, the most beautiful songs are not happy songs. The songs we remember are the sad, romantic songs."
