Memory of long ago - a gentler age?
I heard this morning of the death, at age 80, of Françoise Hardy, who was never a great singer, certainly wasn't much of an actress, but had a breathless, fragile quality which caused me some (respectful) stirrings in my teens.
This is naive, but charming, I think. Seems like yesterday.
Thank you, Françoise.
Sad news indeed. Petroc Trelawny played a song of hers (possibly this one) as a tribute on Radio 3 this morning. I confess to having never listened to her, but I rather liked it, may have to find out more. Her Wikipedia biography describes something of a 'complex' character, shall we say? Indeed, a gentler age...
ReplyDeleteThis really was pre-history - in the days when (from the towers of a boys' grammar school in the Gritty North) girls were mysterious creatures from fairy tales and, now I think about it, throwaway popular songs might have half-diminished chords in them. In the subsequent world of the go-getting finance industry, raising families, paying mortgages, and also of Stravinsky, Fauré, Sibelius, Miles Davis and Bill Evans, Françoise and I rather lost touch, so I can blithely ignore her later right-wing political activism. The miracle of recorded sound means that - as we hear - Françoise is forever 19. And my Physics homework is late again.
DeleteBeg permission to disagree...given that I know next to nothing about musical notation, and last played a musical instrument in 1976...(bagpipes, and our instructor piped the Black Watch into the assault at El Alamein)...I think Francoise Hardy was a very good singer...shes mostly the reason I can still speak French today, and for the effect she had an me in my early teenage years....goodness, what a lovely lady...
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