| One of France's best-loved singer-songwriters, Françoise Hardy, has died at the age of 80.
I discovered her at 16 via budget record labels and have listened to her right up to the present day. Such a wonderful voice.
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Hardy burst on to the music scene in 1962 and became a cultural icon who inspired the likes of Mick Jagger and Bob Dylan. Known for her melancholy ballads, she symbolised France's Yé-yé (yeah yeah) pop movement, so-called because of its nod to English music.
Her most famous songs included All the Girls and Boys (Tous les garçons et les filles), It Hurts to Say Goodbye (Comment te dire adieu) and My Friend the Rose (Mon amie la rose).
Her biggest UK hit was All Over The World, an English-language version of her song Dans le monde entier, which reached number 16 in the charts in June 1965. |
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She appeared in the 60s film ‘What’s new pussycat’
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“I was passionately in love with her,” David Bowie said. “Every male in the world, and a number of females were, too.” Mick Jagger declared her to be his “ideal woman” while his fellow Rolling Stone Brian Jones tried to get Hardy to join a threesome with his then girlfriend An-ita Pallenberg.
Before having met her, Bob Dylan was smitten enough to write her a poem which began: “For Françoise Hardy/ At the Seine’s edge,/ a giant shadow/ of Notre Dame/ seeks t’ grab my foot.” It was printed on the sleeve of his 1964 album Another Side of Bob Dylan, and two years later Hardy went to see him in concert at the Olympia in Paris. When Dylan was told that she was in the audience, he refused to go back on stage for the second half of the show unless she visited his dressing room.
He then invited her back to his suite at the George V hotel and played her I Want You from his new album, Blonde On Blonde. She was listening so intently to the song, “which sounded totally different to anything I had heard before”, that she claimed not to realise he was attempting to seduce her. “And that was it … I never saw him again.”
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