Bernard Chabert – an Interview
*translated from French – Originally posted May 19, 2011
On July 8, 2009, I wrote about Bernard Chabert, a French musician of whom I knew little about, but whose music I thought deserved to be heard and shared. I praised his very British and Beatles influences, a rather rare sound for French artists at the time. I wondered who was this Bernard Chabert, and why didn’t anybody – even the biggest French 60s pop nuts – know who he was? I also wondered why he had stopped releasing records after 4 amazing EPs that included two of the finest French psych singles of the time: “Helga Selzer” and “Une plage bordée de cocotiers.” Internet searches always pointed me to a certain “Bernard Chabbert”, journalist and pilot. I mistakenly assumed these were two separate people.
Nearly 2 years passed, until Bernard Chabert himself left a comment on my blog post (you can read it by clicking on the above link.) After exchanging a few emails with him, I asked if he wouldn’t mind doing an interview, to which he agreed. Below are excerpts from our email exchanges.
Many thanks to Bernard Chab(b)ert for his generosity and kindness in sharing these amazing memories.
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“In 1968, I was training at an institute called OCORA – affiliated with the ORTF – a luxurious school/studio in Maison-Laffitte that trained radio/television journalists. There, I befriended a sound engineer called Patrice Blanc-Francard, who already enjoyed a bit of notoriety thanks to his unique style and rock and roll background. I left the institute to start my career in journalism. Patrice got canned by the ORTF after May 1968 and was recruited by EMI as head of their rock and roll catalogue. He remembered that we used to play together during our lunch breaks in the OCORA studios and that I knew how to write songs, and so invited me to come to EMI-Pathé Marconi for an audition. We recorded a few demos in a Pont-de-Sèvres studio. They were reviewed by a committee and soon enough I was offered a contract.
I was assigned an artistic director, Jacques Sclingand, who worked with his two young assistants, Claude-Michel Schonberg and Michel Berger, and his musical advisor, the wonderful Hubert Rostaing, incidentally one of France’s greatest clarinet players (his version of Rhapsody in Blue remains famous.)
We all got to work, and released my first single, Tramway 7B:
Tramway 7B entered the charts, so we quickly released a 2nd single: “Une plage bordée de cocotiers.” Semi-flop: the song was censored by the RTL, among others, because I sang about being bored sh***less (FR: “je m’emmerde”) on this beach, and in those days you couldn’t say these things. (I grew up in Madagascar and on Maurice Island, and I really *was* bored sh**less on these beaches. They were indeed beautiful, with white sand and palm trees, but deserted of any pretty girls or rock and roll…)
“L’ascension sociale de Francis F.” was about climbing social ladders, a phenomenon that hadn’t yet reached the then very politically correct world of French show business, in spite of May 68. Not even on a technical level: when I was in the studio listening to a track we’d just recorded, looking at the vu meters staying so far behind the red line, I’d protest. I wanted my songs to sound saturated and wanted the maximum possible amount of volume on that tape, not guitar plucking noises. In those days, sound engineers were knights of the ultra-clean take: as far as they were concerned, if a take sounded saturated, it was good for the dumps.
L’ascension sociale de Francis F.
So as you can imagine when I recorded “Helga Selzer”(inspired by two girl friends: one was a star model for Chanel and sober, the other a childhood friend who was completely crazy. She even did a few triple X movies later on) and announced that I wanted part of the song to be sung through a telephone line, the sound engineers almost threw a fit. We worked it out in the end, but that’s the only track that has the guitar sound I wanted. (I played with a Rickenbacker that I borrowed from a shop in Bastille, because I couldn’t afford one of my own.)
I wrote Dear Jean for Jean Seberg, whom I’d met through a mutual friend. She was a little weird and we spent some strange moments together.
Between 69 and 72, I was making a living from my music and enjoyed some great moments, including a few days recording a Jean-Christophe Averty TV show with Led Zeppelin. We spent hours playing with them just to pass the time. There was also my friendship with Isabelle de Funès, who at the time sang songs by her friend Véronique Sanson, with whom we ate croissants in the morning.
But I started getting bored with Parisian show-biz, too bourgeois and void of any interest as far as I was concerned. I was a rock and roll guy and loved to play live, but I didn’t have a band, just mates. EMI wants to make money, not rock and roll. Around that time Apollo was sending space ships to the moon, and I dreamed of being a part of it. I’ve always been a pilot – runs in the family – and always wanted to be a journalist – also runs in the family, so I took advantage of my notoriety at Europe 1 thanks to my chart-topping singles and managed to get an interview with the editor in chief. I was hired, and in early 1972 I left show business and headed to Houston to report on Apollo 14. A new life began…”
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