E-Book, Englisch, 224 Seiten
Laurain French Rhapsody
1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-80533-348-7
Verlag: Pushkin Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
E-Book, Englisch, 224 Seiten
ISBN: 978-1-80533-348-7
Verlag: Pushkin Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
Antoine Laurain was born in Paris and is a journalist, antiques collector and award-winning author of ten novels, including The Red Notebook and The President's Hat. His books have been translated into 25 languages and sold more than 200,000 copies in English. He lives in Paris, France.
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An idea began to form in his mind. An idea that would help to dispel his feelings of fury and injustice. He would contact them. There was no reason why he should be the only one to know that they had actually succeeded in bagging a meeting to discuss songs of which he no longer had a recording. Still in pain, Alain got up and went over to his desk, almost knocking into his examination table, and, sitting down, turned on his computer.
They may not have had a career with the Holograms, but some of them were quite well known. Sébastien Vaugan was easy to track down – the French Billiards Academy, which served as his headquarters, was in the phone book, but Alain wanted if at all possible to avoid asking him anything at all. The plump, shy boy with the genius for playing bass had become an extreme right-wing thug. At fifty-three, muscular, with a shaved head and always dressed in black T-shirt and leather jacket, Vaugan, known simply by his surname, was a rabble-rouser and the head of an extremist group, called the WWP – White Western Party. He’d been all over the internet for years and had been convicted several times for inciting racial hatred, offences against the police and magistrates, and slandering journalists.
This ghost from the past had kept popping up in Alain’s life every few years, in the most diverse places. Their paths had last crossed six years ago in a restaurant. Before that it had been in a DIY shop, at a funfair in the Tuileries Gardens, and once by the baggage carousel at Orly. Each time, Vaugan seemed happy to see Alain; each time Alain had promised to have a drink with him, and each time he had failed to follow it up, without Vaugan ever seeming to hold it against him. Alain did not, however, feel that a further meeting, which this time would not be by chance, was really called for.
When the coloured Google logo appeared, Alain typed in ‘Stan Lepelle’. Their old drummer had dropped ‘Stanislas’ and now preferred ‘Stan’. He was enjoying increasing fame in the world of contemporary art. Twenty years ago he had attracted attention with an installation of thirty thousand pencil sharpeners and pencils in the Colonnes de Buren. He had stayed there a full week, day and night, sharpening all the pencils right to the end, until all that remained were shavings that his assistants gathered up and his dealer then sold, elegantly set in glass. Alain had taken his family to see the artist, but was told he could not be interrupted. He had bought one of the glass discs containing shavings, though, and it now adorned one of the bedrooms in his holiday home in Noirmoutier.
There were numerous results on the Net for Lepelle. Alain read through his Wikipedia entry which listed all his installations across the globe, giant structures – of a die, a key, a light bulb – in urban or rustic settings, but all creating an unusual effect. Next he clicked on Lepelle’s website and saw his official picture: frowning, with very short hair. Over the years he had seen that face several times in various magazines like Connaissance des arts or Art actuel. The website also listed the numerous prizes awarded to Lepelle’s work throughout the world. At the top of the page, the thumbnail marked ‘Contact’ displayed the email address of a prestigious gallery in Avenue Matignon. Alain wrote it in his notebook.
When he typed in ‘Frédéric Lejeune’ an impressive number of Frédéric Lejeunes appeared. None of them seemed to be the one he was looking for. In about 2001, Frédéric had sent him a brochure for a hotel he had just opened in Thailand. He had obviously gone through his old diaries and sent a copy of the brochure to all his old contacts. That was how Alain had learnt that the keyboard and synthesiser player from the Holograms had decided to make a new life for himself in Thailand. The last time he had thought of him was on hearing the news of the tsunami. Had Frédéric and his hotel been carried off in the tide of rubbish that the wave had swept into the towns? Out of curiosity he had checked several times on the Net. It seemed that the ‘little paradise of relaxation in the Land of Smiles’ was still standing. After putting in some key words along with his old friend’s name, like ‘Thailand’, ‘resort’ or ‘little paradise’, Alain succeeded in finding the ‘Bao Thai Resort’, still being described as the ‘little paradise of relaxation in the Land of Smiles’.
Next he searched for ‘Bérengère Leroy’, and again several faces appeared and none of them corresponded to what Bérengère would look like today. Alain quickly gave up. Bérengère was not to be found. Her parents owned a relais in Burgundy but he had forgotten the name of it and had never been there; JBM was the only one who had. Anyway, Bérengère would almost certainly be married. When women married, they changed their names and disappeared from listings and directories. Alain had not even bothered to put JBM’s name into Google. JBM was so far removed from him now he would never reply.
An hour later, Alain had sent an email to the three contacts jotted down in his notebook: Lejeune in Thailand, Lepelle at his gallery and Pierre Mazart at his antique shop Au Temps Passé on the Left Bank. It was Pierre who had written ‘Such Stuff as Dreams Are Made On’. Pierre had always been passionate about the past and history of art, and perhaps he would have kept the cassette and could make him a copy. To thank him, Alain decided he would buy an ornament from his shop. Perhaps a mortar – he had broken the white marble one from his father’s day and patients liked seeing old-fashioned medical artefacts in the consulting room. It reassured them about the expertise of their doctor. The prospect of unburdening himself to someone else about the letter was comforting and he felt his backache receding a little.
Before switching off the computer, Alain typed in ‘new wave’. About a hundred and thirty-four million results came up. According to Wikipedia, new wave (or ‘nouvelle vague’ which took its name from the French cinematic movement of the 1950s) was used to describe ‘the new, mainly Anglo-American pop-rock groups and artists who followed on from the explosion of punk, incorporating electronic music, experimental music, disco and pop’. Also listed were all the sub-categories of new wave: synthpop, electronic music, New Romantics and cold wave.
That’s all rather clinical, thought Alain, for whom new wave and cold wave came together in a subtle fusion that had produced that cold but chic, industrial but luxurious sound. Earlier on, with the Beatles, the Stones or even Led Zeppelin it was easy to recognise the various instruments and there was hardly any difference between the recorded sound and the live sound. Mixing and working up sounds had evolved in less than ten years, led by pioneers like Kraftwerk before coming to full fruition with the Eurythmics. Poetry sung in English accompanied by sophisticated melodies invaded the French music scene in the early eighties. Alain’s view was that wave had been heralded several years earlier by one song. A cold, pure, magical song. A crystal of a song lasting three minutes forty-five seconds. Even though there were sometimes disagreements within the group, everyone agreed on that point: the song was genius. To Alain, it was more than genius, it was quite simply the ideal song. All the artistic attempts of Western poetry from Ronsard to Baudelaire were just drafts, just vague, clumsy pieces of research in comparison. Paul Éluard, André Breton and Apollinaire had, in their own modern times, come close to that ideal without quite succeeding. Finally, in the year of our Lord 1974, the singer and composer Daniel Bevilacqua, known as Christophe, aided by the young author Jean-Michel Jarre, succeeded in describing love and the paralysing impossibility of expressing it fully to the object of your affections. They had written ‘Les Mots Bleus’.
Alain had discovered it in that halcyon period between fifteen and twenty-one, the only time of life when you are truly capable of experiencing love. There is, for that brief period, an openness of mind and body which never returns again. Life will ensure that your brain and your time are taken over by other commitments: preparation for exams, worries about the future, then your career, courses, salary, money, paperwork, etc. The interlude arrives much too early in life, at an age when, apart from some overachievers, experts in flirting and sex, no one is ready.
Alain well remembered his adolescent self in his parents’ apartment, hanging out in the bedroom that would later become his son’s. He lay on the bed listening to the high-pitched, tragic voice of Christophe telling the remarkable story of the girl coming out of the mairie and of the boy who wanted to talk to her. The hypnotic music and the reverberation of the singer’s voice, as if he were declaiming couplets in a Romanesque church, took him to vertiginous highs that no drug could have given him. ‘Les Mots Bleus’ addressed itself to another part of his brain, touched his sensibility in an incredible way that brought...
