The place was not cheap (70 euros), but I decided to take one anyway. Just like that, on a whim. Because it was him, because it was me. Because the concert would take place at the Salle Pleyel (in Paris) and not in one of those unsightly hangars where vociferous crowds pile up. That reassured me. After all, as far back as I can remember, I had never attended a show given by a French singer, a matter of snobbery, I guess. I’m a child of the Smiths, of Joy Division, of Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen, of Belle and Sebastian and Lloyd Cole, where on earth would I get lost among an audience coming to listen to an artist whose songs are played on Nostalgia radio?
Yes, but there it was, it was Alain Souchon. Not Francis Cabrel, not Julien Clerc, not Michel Sardou, but Alain Souchon. For me, he is a brother of melancholy, one of those beings who have the courage to exhibit their fragility to better console men and women for being what they are, lost souls in a world that overwhelms them everywhere. Above all, I like his delicacy of feelings, his modesty, his Fitzgeraldian side where we are all magnificent losers who are heading towards our doom, but without ever giving up on our dreams.
And then, there is his inveterate taste for childhood, this refusal to be an adult, a real one, with all that that can imply in terms of compromises and renunciations. Also, his very own way of being on the side of the weak, of the defeated, of the exiles, of all those human beings who go through life bumpily, looking for a reason to live, not finding one, but continuing to move forward because they have to, and because between nothingness and sorrow, it is always better to choose sorrow.
I had never bought one of his records or even really listened to one of his albums in full. Nevertheless, his songs have accompanied me since childhood and, more than once, when life had pushed me too hard, I had found refuge there. I had been fake; I was indeed one of those regretters of yesterday who find that everything we gain, we lose; I had often sat on one of the sidewalks nearby. And like him, I found that life was worthless, but that when I held my friend’s small breasts in my dazzled hands…
I took a seat at the back of the room. The assembly was no longer very young, which was a good thing, I am not young myself. The concert has started. Under subdued light, he appeared behind large white sails, leaning on a piano, surrounded by his two sons (Ours and Pierre Souchon). I don’t remember what song it was, one not too well known, but the voice was there, well maintained, soft and intense at the same time.
When the song was over, he emerged into the light. He greeted the crowd, said he found us beautiful, laughed as if he himself couldn’t believe that at his age (81), people still come to listen to him. It seemed like a prank of fate. Something too big to be true. And yet, he was there. His children, too. So do we.
Sometimes, between two songs, when he started to fidget, with big swings of his arms, facetious as possible, he looked a bit like Woody Allen when, in some of his films, he made faces behind Diane Keaton’s back. What’s surprising? After all, aren’t both joyful depressives, hilarious despairers, people for whom laughter is a spare tire designed to keep them afloat?
The songs followed one another. Hits, old forgotten ones, classics, timeless ones, some so well known that the public sang them for them. It was beautiful and moving at the same time, with a tenderness that spoke of the crowd’s attachment to this singer, not as a goodbye, but as the desire that he remain among us forever. It was not a funeral wake, but a tribute to life, to love, to all that cozy melancholy that makes everyone’s heart beat.
And the longer the concert lasted, the more Alain Souchon became agitated, stamped his feet, and enjoyed the anecdotes told by his children as if he were discovering them for the first time. It was light, playful, childish like a birthday party. We were family. Him, them, us. A sentimental crowd lacking ideals. When the lights came back on, our hearts sank a little. Just enough time to realize that if life is ephemeral, songs are eternal.
