All she has to do is stand there. It doesn’t have to be in colour, there’s no melody for the first one and half minutes, all she has to do is stand there and speak sensuously in French and we are transfixed. It’s not even her sixties heyday, it’s 1973, her days as the toast of French cool, (the Yé-Yé girl) are long gone. It’s not just her beauty that seduces us, it’s her personality, embarrassed by her own importance and it makes us love her even more. She is simply a perfect combination of alluring, cool and that soft relaxing voice – she could ask anything of you and you would obey without question. She’s almost an experimental weapon, so calm and soft, hypnotising the enemy, gently caressing their souls, stroking their cheeks, leading them to a heaven from which they can never escape.

But it’s also the song, written by Hardy and Michel Berger (his real name is Michel Hamburger). He also produced early Veronique Sanson albums. Berger was a sixties Pop star turned producer and songwriter who married another French star, France Gall. (He tragically died of a heart attack after a tennis match at the age of 44). By 1973 Hardy had made around 20 albums and had peaked in the sixties, Berger is credited with relaunching Hardy’s career, producing the Message Personnel album.

Hardy has continued to make records – in 2000 Clair-Obscur (Twilight) featured I’ll Be Seeing You, a duet with Iggy Pop. In 1994 she sang a duet with Damon Albarn, To The End on Blur’s third album Parklife. In 1994 she sang on Revenge Of The Flowers from Malcolm McClaren’s album Paris. In 2004 she recorded a duet on Tant Des Belles Chose (So Many Beautiful Things) with relatively unknown Irish singer Perry Blake. Blake is popular in France and despite a low profile his first self-titled album was a success in England in 1998 – someone for me to write about in the future. If you are French you would probably expect me to mention that she has worked with Étienne Daho and that she is married to Jacques Dutronc. Hardy’s last album L’amour Fou (Mad Love) was released in 2012.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Françoise_Hardy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_Berger

Note: The second version here is in English.