Alain Bashung

Though present for the emergence of rock & roll in France during the 1960s, Alain Bashung waited another fifteen years before his own breakthrough arrived. Born in Paris in 1947 and raised in Alsace, he departed home at sixteen to join friends in a cover band that performed for several years. Only afterward did he launch solo sessions for Philips in 1966. A full decade elapsed before commercial traction developed, yet he secured a notable part in the 1972 French rock opera La Revolution Française, staged by Claude-Michel Schoenberg.

Beginning in 1976, Bashung teamed with lyricist Boris Bergman and songwriter Andy Scott. The partnership yielded immediate creative gains: after preliminary efforts on his long-postponed 1977 debut and the 1979 release Roulette Russe, the 1980 single “Gaby, Oh Gaby” exploded into a major hit. That success granted Bashung stardom and his first gold record; he followed it the same year with another gold single, “Vertigo de l’Amour,” taken from the album Pizza. In 1982 he realized a long-held ambition by recording alongside Serge Gainsbourg.

Through the mid-1980s Bashung maintained his position atop the French pop scene with releases such as “S.O.S. Amor” and “Touche Pas à Mon Pote.” A period of critical and public disfavor marked the late 1980s, yet he rebounded decisively with the 1991 album Osez Joséphine. This song cycle devoted to one of France’s most celebrated historical women became Bashung’s greatest commercial triumph, earning strong sales and three Victoires de la Musique awards. The thematically linked Chatterton appeared in 1994, and Fantaisie Militaire returned him to the summit of the French album charts in 1998.

In 2002 he issued both the landmark L’Imprudence and Cantique des Cantiques, a collaboration with his wife Chloé Mons. Bleu Pétrole, his twelfth studio album, arrived in 2008 and proved to be his final release of new material. Bashung died in 2009 at age sixty-nine after a struggle with lung cancer. His first posthumous project, L’Homme à Tête de Chou, surfaced in 2011. A track-by-track reinterpretation of Serge Gainsbourg’s album of the same name, it had originally been recorded as the score for a Jean-Claude Gallotta dance production.