Le Turbulent Baladin Digipack

Description

There was, during the 1940s, the rise of Charles Trenet, there will be, in the 1960s, the wave of "yéyés." Between the two, during the 1950s, the phenomenal Gilbert Bécaud asserts himself. Phenomenal, impetuous, prolific, exuberant, excessive. all these adjectives apply to him.
With more than 350 recorded songs, with 33 performances at the Olympia averaging 3 weeks, with several musicals and film scores, with a cantata and an opera, Gilbert Bécaud becomes, in less than 10 years - from the first Olympia in 1954 to the worldwide success of Et maintenant in 1962 - an artist of international stature whose tours take him to all countries and whose songs are adapted into all languages.
1954. For the first time, with Gilbert Bécaud, lyrics and music are directly connected to youth - a segment of the population previously ignored - to the point that radio shows and magazines targeting this emerging teenage audience borrow their titles from his songs (Salut les copains, Âge tendre et tête de bois). To this generation emerging from the Second World War, one must address, despite their young age, as an adult.
The feminist emancipation is underway, consumer society imposes its dictates, the rural world is still synonymous with prosperity and shared goods (Le jour où la pluie viendra, Galilée), still spared by the uncontrolled expansion of urban life. No question of bringing these new concerns to the stage and on record by singing "like the old days." Bécaud surrounds himself with musicians from jazz - a small formation (guitar, drums, double bass) similar to that used by Elvis Presley in That's all right mama in 1954 or Bill Haley in Rock around the clock in 1955.
But there is more, Bécaud abuses his voice to the point that an Eugène Ionesco writes that "he sings like a monkey that got its tail caught in the door of its cage" or that his voice comes "from very low, from the belly or the large intestine." He also abuses his piano which he uses as a percussive instrument or certain songs that he accompanies, on stage, with clusters as effective as they are disturbing. On the other side of the Atlantic, a similar treatment is inflicted on the piano by Jerry Lee Lewis in '56. Thus, Gilbert Bécaud, this smiling and friendly young man on record covers releases a transgressive and contagious energy in public that will trigger the scandals of his beginnings and that will be claimed by the rockers of the following decade.
1962. Not at all destabilized by the Yéyé wave, Gilbert Bécaud triumphs on all sides: with his song Et maintenant and with the creation of his Opéra d'Aran which allows him to join the closed circle of composers of lyrical works. One would have liked Bécaud, rich from the lessons of this first major work, to approach this exceptional genre again. But the artist with unbridled enthusiasm, the harbinger of a brand new spring, the whimsical balloon seller reveals painful scars: death (L'Absent); love and friendship undermined (Mon ami m'a trahi); a deep feeling of loneliness to which he will oppose, a few years later, his bravado La Solitude ça n'existe pas; a trust in God (Je t'appartiens) that does not protect him from a difficulty in living (Les Croix) and dangerous impulses (Mes Mains) to the point that innocence, prison, and freedom are recurring themes.
A dispenser of communicative optimism but secretly anxious, drawing crowds but irreparably alone, in search of purity but succumbing to temptations, would Bécaud sway "between shadow and light," between Janus and Gilbert? Olympia Rouge, Olympia Bleu!