Wikipedia:Sandbox

Brigitte Fontaine, born in 1939 in Morlaix, Finistère, in

the Brittany region of France, is a singer of avant-garde

music. During the course of her career she employed numerous unusual

musical styles, melding rock and roll, folk, jazz,

spoken word poetry and world rhythms. She

collaborated with such celebrated musicians as Stereolab, [[Michel Colombier]], Jean-Claude Vannier, Areski Belkacem, [[Gotan

Project]], Sonic Youth, Antoine Duhamel, Archie Shepp and

The Art Ensemble of Chicago.

Artistic Overview

Daughter of teachers, Brigitte Fontaine developed her taste for writing and comedy very early. She spent her childhood in small communes of French Britain, then in Morlaix. At 17 years old, she moved to Paris in order to become an actress.

===From Theater to Music, and Back (1963-1968) In 1963, she turned to singing and appeared in several Parisian theaters, interpreting her own texts. As soon as 1964, she played the first part of Barbara and George Brassens’s show in Bobino. Even so, she did not give up comedy. With Jacques Higelin and Rufus, in the Vieille-Grille theater, then with the Theatre of the Champs-Elysées, she created the part “Maman j’ai peur” ("Mom I am afraid"), which met with a critical and popular success so important that it stayed in Paris for more than two seasons and made a European tour.

In 1965 and then in 1968, she made two albums, one pop and one jazz, as well as two 45s with Jacques Higelin. In 1969, she began what would be a long collaboration with Kabyle musician Areski Belkacem. With Belkacem and in the company of Higelin, she conceived for Le Lucernaire Theatre "Niok," an innovative spectacle of theatre and song. Soon after, Fontaine wrote a series of texts in free verse and prose which comprised the show Comme à la radio in Vieux-Colombiers’s Theater before becoming a record. Recorded with The Art Ensemble of Chicago, this album marks a clean break with traditional French songs, building the first bridges to world music.

On the Edges of the Charts

Brigitte Fontaine then became an incontrovertible figure in the French underground. In a half-dozen albums, the majority of which published by the independent label Saravah, Fontaine explored different poetic worlds without worrying about the charts. She renounced the use of rhyme, and using talk-over sometimes, she recorded, with very little means and often on two tracks, songs which addressed topics with humour or gravity, according to the mood, as various as death (“Dommage que tu sois mort”), life (“L’été, l’été”), alienation ("Comme à la radio), madness (“Ragilia”), love (“Je t’aimerai”), or social injustice (“C’est normal”), the inequality of the sexes (“Patriarcat”) and racism (“Y' a du lard”). However, she also knew how to make light of herself.

Because they sail between pop, folk, electro and world music, the albums "L’incendie" and "Vous et nous" by Areski and Fontaine figure among the most unclassifiable records of the French scene. Almost thirty years later, the international audience of these LPs (sinced re-edited for CD, and now available for download on the Internet) is comparable to the cult record Histoire de Melody Nelson by Serge Gainsbourg and Jean-Claude Vannier, notably thanks to the enthusiastic remarks that members of the band Sonic Youth have made in the Anglo-Saxon press.

Exile? (1980-1990)

The 1980s were for Brigitte Fontaine and her husband Areski Belkacem a period of silence, musically speaking. Far from the recording studio, she devoted herself to writing and the theatre. Always active, she appeared onstage in Quebec, she performed her play "Acte 2" in a grand tour of the French-speaking world, interpreted "Les Bonnes" of Jean Genet in Paris, and published a novel ("Paso doble") as well as a collection of short stories ("Nouvelles de l’exil"). In 1984, she recorded a single ("Les Filles d’aujourd’hui").

After having given a series of concerts in Tokyo and other large Japanese cities, she had to wait about five years for a French company to distribute her new album " French corazon " (written and composed in 1984 but released in 1988 to Japan). Having been broadcast notably on French television, the video for the single "Le Nougat", directed by comics artist Olivia Tele Clavel, prepared the public for the big return of the singer to the French stage which commenced with a concert in 1993 at the Bataclan.

Pink Period

In the 1990s, Brigitte Fontaine moved closer to the musical worlds of Björk and Massive Attack by testing new, more electric musical forms and, especially, more electronic than before. Her lyrics mark a return to a more classical, versified form. The release of her album Genre humain, in 1995, met with great success (moreso on the part of the critics than the general public) with its surprising titles like Conne (produced by Étienne Daho, lyric titles like La Femme à barbe (produced by the Valentins), or poetic ones like Il se mêle à tout ça (produced by Yann Cortella and Areski Belkcem).

In 1997, while she published a new novel ("La Limonade bleue"), she recorded "Les Palaces" and its subtitle "Ah que la vie est belle!". The album, very well-received by the press, is enriched by the collaboration of Areski Belkacem, Jacques Higelin and Alain Bashung.

Her records "Kékéland" (2001) and "Rue Saint-Louis en l'île" (2004), both of which went gold, benefited from prestigious collaborations with artists such as Noir désir, Sonic Youth, Archie Shepp, - M-, Gotan Project, Zebda, etc. In 2005, after having given a series of concerts with her usual band (but also with La Campagnie des musiques à ouïr), she published a new novel, La Bête curieuse, whose erotic ambiance foretold somewhat the tonality of her sixth album, "Libido" (2006). This new album renewed her concerts with a lively energy and gave them a very "baroque 'n' roll" ambiance, in which Teresa of Avila, Sufis, Hollywood films, and Melody Nelson are invoked.

In October of 2006, Fontaine appeared at the Barbican Theater in London along with Jarvis Cocker, Badly Drawn Boy and other English artists, for the first public interpretation of the mythic "Histoire de Melody Nelson". In January 2007, she appeared onstage with graphic novelist Blutch at the Angoulême International Comics Festival. On March 29, 2007, she invested in the Olympia music hall, supported by her friends Jacno, Arthur H, Christophe, Anaïs, Jacques Higelin, Maya Barsony and Jean-Claude Vannier. In April, she played at the Printemps de Bourges music festival and participated in her Quebecois admirer Pierre Lapointe's concert for a duo of "La symphonie pastorale". After having given a series of intimate concerts all through September on a barge anchored under the Pont des Arts on the Seine river in Paris, Fontaine toured throughout France. Between two concerts, she went into the studio with Olivia Ruiz to record a new single, "Partir ou rester", for which she wrote the lyrics. In February 2008, she published a new novel, "Travellings", published by Flammarion, while Benoît Mouchart devoted a monograph to her ("Brigitte Fontaine, intérieur/extérieur"), published by Panama.