Tant le ciel était sombre

Il a plu ce week-end: première fois depuis des mois que je voisde l'eau tomber du ciel. Ca fait bizarre. Déja en Guinée, quand on voit de l'eau tomber d'un robinet, on est en extase, alors si en plus l'eau tombe du ciel maintenant, je saiis pas ou on va...
Enfin bref, je n'aispas beaucoup apprécié le commentaire de Mathieu sur ma vitesse d'ingurgitation d'un pizza, n'empêche que c'était très drole. Vachement innatendu en tout cas. J'ai rigolé pour tout te dire...

Euh... PArdon rémi d'encombrer ton forum de messages, ininteresssants en plus: c'est juste que je voulais réagir à ton message Intro, mais ça a crée un nouveau message, à mon insu... Pardon

Comment vas tu nathan ?
Moi je dis si on analyse trop ce qui est drole ou pas , on est cuit mais bon.

Alors tu l'a bien ecouté "a l'origine" ? qu'en pense tu petite andouille ?

A ce propos , benjamin ( et je lui ai demandé personnelement héhé ) vient d'etre fait chevalier des arts et des lettres ( c'est une distinction tres rare en france ) il a le diplome et tout....
il a cepandnat refuser la cérémonie officiel because l'ump c'est pas vraiment sa tasse de thé.
Moi je dis felicitation quand meme.

désolé nathan, mais je cherchais une image qui parlerai à remi et aussi aux futurs utilisateurs de ce forums et comme je pense que tu es assez bien connu des services ben j'ai pris cet exemple

sinon felicitation à benjamin diamond pour le titre de chevalier mais ils auraient pu faire une tir groupé lors de la ceremonie avec air cassius et cie ..

je trouve que cette blague est lourde car elle dur trop longtemps ...

felicitation Mr Biolay

Mais je rigole Matthieu. Pour une fois que tes blagues sont plus droles que celles de Rémi...

Bah, oui, rémi, j'ai bin écouté à l'origine, et franchement, y'a des chansons qui me font rêver. La deux (mon amour m'a baisé), Dans mon dos, et surtout, surtout "TANT LE CIEL ETAIT SOMBRE". Une des meilleures chansons que je connaisse. Vraiment au top de sa forme, et il mérite amplemant sa reconnaissance sous forme de diplome. J'espère qu'ils lui donneront aussi de quoi financer son prochain album, pour pas qu'il ait d'ennuis avec sa maison de disques...

C'est cool les forums: tu peux ecrire a deux personnes ou plus en un seul mail...

et puis "cours " aussi quand meme.
C'est le meilleur titre qu'il est fait.

J'ai uen question qui n'a rien a voir :
comment fait on un haiku ?

pour nathan.
C'est trop long , et un peu dur a lire pour moi mais c'est pas inintéressant.
Publié dans le new york times pour la sortie officiel de "a l'origine".


Benjamin Biolay sat, shoulders hunched, in a smoky, cluttered recording studio on the outskirts of Paris. He had just returned from a month's vacation with his wife, Chiara Mastroianni (daughter of the cinematic titans Catherine Deneuve and Marcello Mastroianni), at Deneuve's country house in Normandy. He should have appeared refreshed, but instead he looked as if he had spent the month in this windowless room, chain-smoking cigarettes and contemplating the cruelty of life. The French, after all, can seem mean and aloof when they're really just feeling shy, and Biolay is no exception. He knows that he can come off as con, meaning ''jerk'' or ''jerklike'' -- the French conveniently use the word as a noun and an adjective -- when he doesn't intend to.

But Biolay makes the look work. With his wavy brown hair, soulful brown eyes and sensual pout, he strikes many who meet him as painfully handsome. In this way, he couldn't be less like the man he has been compared with a lot lately: Serge Gainsbourg, the big-eared, baggy-eyed, perpetually hungover hero of French pop. As the 78-year-old chanteuse and former Gainsbourg collaborator Juliette Gréco put it: ''Benjamin is beautiful. Serge was not.''

Nonetheless, Gainsbourg did manage to revolutionize the French music scene in the 1960's, taking chanson -- the song style of Edith Piaf -- and turning it into something innovative and daring. Thirty years later, Biolay has done much the same thing, with four albums in as many years -- ''Rose Kennedy,'' ''Négatif,'' ''Home'' and, out next week, ''À L'Origine'' -- that rethink French song through just about every other musical genre. Like Gainsbourg before him, Biolay styles himself as more than just a singer -- he's also a songwriter, producer and composer. The similarities don't end there. Both men had musician fathers who trained them in classical music. Both married actresses with whom they then recorded albums. And both wrote songs for others before figuring out they could sing them just as well themselves.

Music critics can't help forging supernatural links between the two, claiming that Biolay is channeling Gainsbourg and ''comes on like Serge Gainsbourg reincarnated.'' But for his part, Biolay has had enough of all the Gainsbourg talk. ''It gets tiring,'' he said, strumming a guitar and looking appropriately fatigued during a break from producing his sister Coralie Clément's second album. (A song from her first, ''Salle des Pas Perdus'' [''Room of Missteps''] was part of the soundtrack for the Jack Nicholson-Diane Keaton romantic comedy, ''Something's Gotta Give.'') ''One day a journalist asked me which French singer I really admired,'' Biolay continued. ''I felt pressure to come up with a name, so I said Gainsbourg. Ever since, I've been 'the next Serge Gainsbourg.' But I don't really even think I sound like him. And he was a very sad man. He was immature, very childlike in many ways. Complained a lot. And he didn't have any success until his 40's.''

In fact, the 32-year-old Biolay would just as soon not be compared with any French singers at all. ''As a kid,'' he said, ''I really didn't like most of them. The ones I did respect, like Gainsbourg, sounded more American to me than French. You could tell they didn't listen to much French music.'' As Biolay sees it, he's not really making French music. He doesn't even like French music.


France loves its auteurs (both Biolay and Gainsbourg can lay claim to the title), but not even the French can be counted on to love French pop music. Over the last two decades, the French music scene has drawn heavily on whatever it could bring in from outside: the African rhythms of Senegal's Youssou N' Dour and Mali's Salif Keita, the D.J. remixes that blended world beat with house and Euro-pop. The band Air collaborated with the 60's sweetheart Francoise Hardy and played with the synthesizer sounds of 70's rockers like Jean-Michel Jarre but then overlaid them with Pink Floyd-inspired psychedelia and ambient lounge. And Phoenix and Tahiti 80 began making effervescent, American-inflected pop that garnered cult followings in the United States.



Only recently have a handful of young singer-songwriters (Biolay among them, though he prefers not to be lumped in with the pack) started looking back to chanson itself. The songs tend toward the melodic, celebrating everyday moments and humiliations with a light sense of irony: stealing your girlfriend's handbag (''I have it. I succeeded. I proceed with the autopsy of this loyal animal, which follows her around like a little dog'') or the charms of small flaws (''Ta dyslexie est si sexy'' [''Your dyslexia is so sexy''], croons one singer). In its world-weary ennui, the music is distinct from Gainsbourg's brashly sexual double-entendres and Hardy's little-girl-lost melodies, but it is indisputably chanson.

Of the new generation, Biolay and his former partner, the Israeli-born Keren Ann, who just released a new album, ''Nolita,'' have had the most critical success in the United States. Ann could easily pass for the auburn-haired reincarnation of Hardy (with whom, incidentally, Biolay sings a duet on the coming ''À L'Origine''). Ann sings in French and English and regularly appears at Joe's Pub in New York City. Biolay produced and helped write all the songs on her well-received first album, ''La Biographie De Luka Philipsen.'' Its best-known song, ''Jardin d'Hiver'' (''Winter Garden''), a hit in France, was originally written for the jazz crooner Henri Salvador, who was a star in the 1930's. ''I've always admired Henri for writing very pretty and jazzy songs, so we sent it to him, hoping he would sing it,'' Biolay told me. ''He took so long to get back to us, we just decided to have Keren sing it. Then Henri called and said, 'J'adore!' So both of them ended up singing it on their albums.''


Salvador's ''Chambre Avec Vue'' (''Room With a View'') sold more than one million copies in Europe and includes four songs written and composed by Biolay and Ann. The album's success got them noticed, and in 2001 Biolay's debut solo album, ''Rose Kennedy,'' a musical homage to the Kennedy saga, earned rave reviews. Biolay followed it in 2003 with the darker but equally poetic ''Négatif'' (Beck is said to have had tracks from the album on his iPod) and then the dreamy ''Home,'' on which he sings with Mastroianni. Recouped by a generation attuned to the retro groove of lounge, chanson is sexy again, at once deliciously French but not too French. Carla Bruni, the model and an ex-girlfriend of Mick Jagger, released her first album of French pop, ''Quelqu'un M'a Dit'' (''Someone Told Me''), late last year (it sold one million copies in France). The latest album from Joel Virgel, who is from Guadeloupe, included a version of Gainsbourg's ''Chanson de Slogan,'' with Virgel singing the female part in one of the pop icon's more playful duets.

At the same time, early stars of chanson like Gréco and Salvador have resurfaced, releasing their first albums of new material in years, with lyrics by the same young French songwriters who were influenced by them in the first place. There has also been a flurry of releases commemorating the genre's heavyweights: Edith Piaf, Jacques Brel and, as always, Gainsbourg. Last month, ''Great Jewish Music: Serge Gainsbourg'' was rereleased with the Gainsbourg songs covered by groups like the Japanese hip-hop-influenced pop duo Cibo Matto and the self-consciously indie New York band Elysian Fields. Maybe Biolay is right: neither he, nor anyone else, is really making just French music.



Over dinner at an outdoor table in the Fifth Arrondissement in Paris, as I tried to get Biolay to talk about chanson, he played with a pack of cigarettes with ''FUMER TUE'' (''SMOKING KILLS'') emblazoned in big black letters on the front, eyed an attractive brunette who meandered past our table and finally steered the conversation toward two of his obsessions: American history and politics. He has a closetful of books about the Kennedys. He had also just finished reading Bill Clinton's autobiography, ''My Life,'' which, he joked, was just as long in French. Lighting a cigarette (he says he wants to quit and is considering hypnosis), he talked about making ''Home.'' As Biolay tells it, he and Mastroianni conceived of the album on a drive to The Hague. Dissatisfied with the CD's they'd brought, they decided to produce a better road-trip soundtrack when they returned to Paris.

Mostly, ''Home'' is a sun-drenched album of folk-inflected, lo-fi duets, perfect for cruising through the Arizona desert. Only two songs are sung in English (''She's My Baby'' and ''A Home Is Not a Home''), but there are plenty of lyrics that need only partial translations, like ''Fume un peu de weed.'' To Biolay's annoyance, it didn't take long for critics to claim that he had found in Mastroianni his Jane Birkin. It was with Birkin, the whispery-voiced British actress who became his wife, that Gainsbourg released the scandalous (and scandalously successful) 1969 duet ''Je T'Aime Moi Non Plus.'' The song was an instant underground hit (the BBC banned it, and the Vatican denounced it). For those who knew French, the salacious lyrics made clear what Birkin's moaning did only too well on its own.

Biolay says he's not interested in scandalizing anyone, but he does have a way of turning the women in his life into musical sensations, much as Gainsbourg did for Birkin and Brigitte Bardot. Before Mastroianni worked with Biolay on ''Négatif'' (she joined him for a couple of tracks) and then on ''Home,'' her singing was relegated to the shower. Mastroianni is better known as an actress with supporting roles in offbeat films like Robert Altman's ''Prêt-à-Porter'' (in which she appeared with her father) or Delphine Gleize's ''Carnage,'' an ensemble piece about unrelated characters connected by the remains of a bull.



Then there's Biolay's younger sister, Coralie Clément, who also never expected to be a singer. Clément was hanging out with Biolay a few years ago when he asked her to sing a song he had written. ''I needed a girl to sing the lyrics just to see how it sounded, and she was there,'' Biolay said. ''So she sings, and she was good, but I didn't think much of it. When I sent the song to my distributor, they loved it, and they said that whatever I did, I should use the woman on the demo. So that's how it started. It happened by accident. It's not like I'm trying to turn every woman I care about into a singer.'' Of course, that's what Biolay would say. His style is to coolly avoid the big statement, to seem hounded when anyone tries to pin him down. The first time I saw him smile -- in the recording studio, after he made a gay joke -- I furiously scribbled ''Biolay Smiled!'' in my notepad. ''Oh, that was just a joke,'' Biolay's manager, Laurent Manganas, told me, probably worried that I was writing that Biolay is homophobic. (Which, incidentally, he's not.)

As we finished our meal, a short man wearing a straw hat and wielding a guitar approached the outdoor tables and broke into a spirited rendition of ''La Javanaise,'' a classic Gainsbourg love song. ''He's killing the song,'' Biolay told me as the old man sang off-key. Finally, as we got up to leave, Biolay gently put a few euros in the man's coat pocket. It seemed a strange choice, considering that he was butchering a French classic. ''If enough people give him money,'' Biolay explained as we left, ''then maybe he'll stop singing.''


Benjamin Biolay was born on Jan. 20, 1973, in Villefranche-sur-Saone, a small manufacturing town near Lyon in east central France. His father, a clarinetist in the local orchestra, encouraged him and his two sisters to play instruments. ''My parents basically forced me to play the violin,'' Biolay said. ''Eventually I realized that I actually really liked it, and then that I was good at it.''

At 15, Biolay was accepted to the prestigious Lyon conservatory of music and moved into an apartment with other young musicians, learning to play the trombone and winning two of the school's top awards. But his classical phase didn't last long -- soon he was watching a lot of MTV and teaching himself to play the guitar. In 1994, Biolay and the band he had formed, Mateo Gallion, released a live album. Hardly anyone noticed. He then went off on his own, writing and recording his own songs, but nothing caught on. ''I was really unhappy in my early and mid-20's,'' he told me, ''but a lot of what I wrote was really happy. It's like I was trying to make myself feel better. Apart from drugs and sex, which I did all the time, there wasn't much more that interested me. I was the kind of guy who would have a girlfriend and then three girls on the side. I was pretty transparent, though. I wasn't pretending to be anything other than what I was.''

That, he maintains, is still the case. So I tried again to get him to talk about chanson. Did he really want to be on the record saying he doesn't like most French music? (I pictured irate, Gainsbourg-loving Frenchmen overturning Citroëns outside Biolay's apartment, demanding that he apologize or move to America.)

Biolay shrugged. ''Some are O.K., really, but I'd much rather listen to the Beatles than to Gainsbourg,'' he said. And as much as Biolay wants to cast off the great man's shadow, his refusal to be lumped in with other chansonniers isn't just a pose. ''Benjamin's music is more subtle, more layered and less French-sounding,'' said Christophe Conte, a writer for the French music magazine Les Inrockuptibles. ''Benjamin really doesn't belong in the same category, but he's lumped in there because a lot of what he writes for other people has a more classic chanson sound to it.''

Much of modern chanson is playful, ironic and downright perky.

Biolay's music is often dark and moody. On his second album, ''Négatif,'' which moves from acoustic ballads to country rock to pocket symphonies and electronica, Biolay sings about suicide, nightmares and furtive back-room sex: ''I love your bitter skin, your silky skin in an iron glove. I like going into the wall, to each his own, glory hole, glory hole . . . Nothing but a dog's life, in the back rooms and basements. Glory hole, glory hole.''

Obsessed as he is with America, Biolay couldn't resist a post-9/11 song on ''Home'': ''Are you still afraid of the dark? Who do you see in the mirror? Have you had your hour of glory? What will history make of you?'' Biolay's coming release, ''À L'Origine,'' is his first foray into a real rock sound, although it still features his trademark beautiful ballads and a children's choir on four tracks. ''Benjamin is a poet,'' Juliette Gréco told me. ''His writing, his music, it's very serious, very meaningful. It's beautiful, elegant and haunting.''

Kind of like the man himself? Gréco laughed. ''Yes, exactly.''


Biolay and Mastroianni live in a big, sunny Parisian apartment littered with children's toys, CD's and books about music, culture, art and politics. ''Ignore the mess,'' Biolay said, lighting a cigarette as we sat down at the big table in the spacious living room, while his 2-year-old daughter, Anna, stumbled around, banging an empty Evian bottle on anything that might make a funny sound. ''For the last month she's been running around with the sheep at Grandmother's'' -- Deneuve's -- ''country house, so this apartment isn't really containing her,'' Biolay said. ''She's like, 'Where are the sheep?'''

Biolay also has a stepson, Milo, an outgoing 8-year-old, from a previous relationship of Mastroianni's. Milo seemed excited when I was visiting, because once I left Biolay was going to take him bowling. I didn't realize that people bowled in Paris. ''Oh, yes, we love bowling,'' Biolay said. Was Mastroianni going, too? ''Oh, no, bowling is just for the boys,'' Biolay said, smiling at Milo. Mastroianni, who wore jeans and a T-shirt and hadn't said much since I came over, concurred. ''Yes, bowling is definitely for the boys,'' she said.

Mastroianni has mostly avoided the attention of the paparazzi, who tormented her parents when she was a child. The couple say they do as few interviews as possible, although they did pose for the cover of French Elle to promote ''Home.''

''When people want to interview us, it's rarely about our work,''

Biolay told me, rolling cigarettes for Mastroianni and himself. ''Journalists won't let Chiara be her own person -- they want to write about her in relation to her parents. And they always want to make us out to be this glamorous couple.''

Biolay so dislikes being in the limelight that he doesn't even like playing live -- or at least not that much. ''He's very shy, and for a long time he didn't feel comfortable in front of a lot of people,'' Mastroianni told me. ''But now he's starting to like it. It's growing on him.''

Celebrity is also growing on him. While Biolay insists that he looks at his feet when cute girls in the subway recognize him and stare, I don't believe it. During our time together, Biolay -- in typical French male fashion -- tried to make eye contact with almost every attractive woman who walked past us on the street. ''It's really funny,'' he said as he walked me from his apartment to a cabstand. ''The moment I start to get famous, I get married. So the moment I could have sex with any girl I want, I can't.''

I gave him a poor-you look. ''Yes, I know, I have it rough,'' he said. ''But Chiara really is all I want. I'm terribly in love.''

As in love as Gainsbourg was with Birkin? Biolay smiled, said nothing and kept walking


si tu veut mon avis , le ny times parle mieux de sa musique que tt la presse française réuni.

Bon nathan , j'ai rien dit pour la presse française : voici un article sur benjamin qui est a limite de la décence tellement il dresse un bilan elogieux, on apprend entre autre que son roman s'appelera "peine perdue" , qu'il aura un premier role dans un film sur un serial killer et que keren ann chantait avant a .....disneyland. quoi qui a ricanné ?

http://www.lexpress.fr/mag/arts/dossier/chanson/dossier.asp?ida=433223

Depuis quelques semaines, Benjamin Biolay anime une rubrique intitulé "Benjamin Biolay, chronique d'un swingman" où il parle de ... basket !

Basketnews, hebdomadaire 2Euro 50.

Benjamin Biolay écrit dans Basketnews? Eh bah! Pas que ce soit un mauvais magazine, mais si il faut écrire sur le basket, il aurait mieux fait de choisir 5majeur, référence en matière. Quoique, ils font beaucoup de faues d'orthographe...
Je sais pas. ou bien sinon, MVP Basket... Bref, j'aurais pas choisi BasketNews à sa place.

c'est mieux que le figaro ou la redoute

Oui, mais c'est basketnews, quoi...
Non, j edéconne, c'est pas pire (comme diraient nos amis les suisses)

ils peuvent parler ces connards, ils approuvent la constitution ...

ça nous fait une belle jambe, merci la Suisse

Belle jambe, belle jambe, euh, ils ont rien à dire sur notre putain de contistitution, que nous réprouvons, par ailleurs, vu qu'ils ne se sentent pas européens. Ils n'ont pas à se prononcer sur nos affaires intérieures. On se fout de leur avis tout autant que les americains, si ils venaient à le dire, et tout autant que le Mexique, le Vénezuela, la Tchétchénie, ou le Vanuatu pour ce que j'en ai à foutre!

Bel exemple de parfait mépris, mais juste

Bel ami, belle famille, Bela Lugosi

J'ai écris un truc avec Bela Lugosi dedans

Hmmm. Ca c'est de l'inspiration de première classe. Enfin je sais pas si c'est lui qui t'as inspiré le roman, mais qu'il te l'ai inspiré où non, qu'il y touche de près où de loin, ça risque d'être bien, et un peu bizarrement angoissant comme truc. Je veux le lire.
Et toi, Rémi, tu écrivais un roman aussi, il me semble. où cela en-est-il?
Je suppose que t'as pas eu le temps dernièrement avec le bac, mais tu me montreras ça...

c'est pas vraiment un roman, plutot format chanson, mais je sais pas si c'est angoissant disons que je prend de l'élan sur le toit, et j'attrape Bela Lugosi, ou plutot lui m'attrape par les mains, je m'accroche à sa cape et on fait le tour de la ville par le ciel, avec les nuages,

mais à la fin en fait je suis mort, j'ai jms volé ac Lugosi je me suis juste ramassé en sautant du toi, mais c'est juste une idée, faut creuser

Ouais, bien. Si tu veux, on écrt ça ensemble. J'ai des envies de projets artistiques en commun en ce moment.

ben celle là je me la reserve dsl, j'ai envi de faire un truc perso là dessus, mais autrement pas de pb

Ouai des projets artistiques bonne idéee.....
J'ai eu l'idée de monter un cirque.


Bien sur j'ai immédiatement pensé a vous comme clowns.

et tu ferai quoi toi ? le caniche ?