The Despair of Monkeys and Other Trifles by Françoise HARDY

Author:Françoise HARDY
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781627310734
Publisher: Feral House
Published: 2018-02-01T05:00:00+00:00

At the same time, my working relationship with Gabriel Yared became more defined, though our relationship was a bit tense in the beginning. A native of Lebanon, where he grew up and pursued his education at a Jesuit school, he was—he is—a complex individual, and as one often goes with the other, a tortured man as well. He is passionate about music and is self-taught in this field. Before coming to live in France, he accompanied his sister, who sang some of my songs, on piano. I did not realize how much I had impressed him and did not know him well enough then to know that once he became involved in a project, he gave it his all. At the same time, he also belonged to that race of men who have an irritating tendency to become fixated on women who are already taken. They think they are in love but it is really the challenge posed by their inaccessibility that attracts them. This irritated me so much that one day I sounded off on how much I disliked beards and was surprised to see him the next day clean-shaven, which made him look incredibly juvenile.

Gabriel worked too much, recording during the day and writing his arrangements at night. During the long hours in the studio, he showed alarming signs of exhaustion, and when I saw him sitting on the ground covered in tiny beads of sweat, the thought that he might not have much longer to live took my breath away. He always hired the same musicians, who he constantly criticized for not knowing enough about music, and he relentlessly urged them to study counterpoint. The extraordinary slowness of the guitarist, the fanciful Denys Lable, a cousin of France Gall, was already legendary. His own record several years later had been a kind of grail quest as it took years to be completed. During lunch, when Gabriel was introducing me to his crew, Denys turned to me and asked: “And aside from this, what have you done?” which triggered widespread hilarity. But I did not need his question to know that I vaguely represented something in the eyes of a small number of people and nothing at all to the rest of the world. Moreover, this was the least of my worries.

Like Cinderella, I would leave the studio before the last stroke of midnight because I had to get up early every day for Thomas and to shop for food. One day, Denys Lable took me aside one-on-one and thoughtfully explained that gracing the musicians with my presence was the least I could do. With the painful impression that we were speaking at cross-purposes, I tried to explain to him in return that it was impossible for me to sleep too late—he would finish that night at four in the morning—and staying in shape for recording my voice was a priority. I could understand his point of view so clearly and he was so obviously incapable of seeing

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