Hardy shot to fame singing airy, carefree pop before she took control of her career, hung out with 60s rock aristocracy and became a sophisticated singer-songwriter of rare sensuality and melancholy
Françoise Hardy circa 1965. The singer and actor, who had suffered with lymphatic cancer for many years, has died aged 80.Françoise Hardy circa 1965. The singer and actor, who had suffered with lymphatic cancer for many years, has died aged 80.é-yé was France’s homegrown response to rock’n’roll: pretty young singers – almost all female – performing a lightweight Francophone adaptation of American music with lyrics about teenage concerns.
‘I was passionately in love with her,’ recalled David Bowie. ‘Every male in the world was, and a number of females’ Hardy transitioned with ease into the late-60s singer-songwriter era, covering Leonard Cohen’s Suzanne on 1968’s Comment te Dire Adieu , an album to which Gainsbourg also contributed two particularly fine songs: the surprisingly effervescent title track, and the gorgeous L’Anamour. But it was her 1971 album, again called Françoise Hardy but known by fans as La Question, that proved her masterpiece.
Her subsequent albums were rich and impressively diverse. She was as capable of essaying a Gallic take on country rock on the 1972 album Françoise Hardy, AKA Et si je m’en vais avant toi, as she was dealing in supremely cool jazzy funk on Gin Tonic or, perhaps most unexpectedly of all, grungy alt-rock .
She remained a defiantly uncategorisable figure until the end. Her final album before ill health forced her retirement from music, 2018’s Personne d’Autre, found her writing French lyrics to music by Finnish indie band Poets of the Fall and confronting mortality head-on. You could just about imagine her singing the melody of one of its tracks, Train Special, as a yé-yé song in a different era, but its lyrics dealt with impending death.
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