Last year, Emmanuel Macron decorated it with the Legion of Honor. This year, Christine Angot quotes her in her latest book (“I can see myself moving between the walls, humming the last songs of Sheila”), Eddy de Pretto takes up “Bang Bang” on stage. The review Schnock makes her cover with her and sees her sales fly away, The New Obs devotes four pages to him, France Inter welcomes him with open arms, Yann Barthès invites him into Daily and the Philharmonie de Paris puts it in the spotlight at the center of the exhibition Disco. This period which, in L’Obs Still, pushed the electro justice duo to confess – “We really like disco songs from Sheila” – And to take (almost) everyone by surprise. Unexpected literary subject, Éric Romand makes him a heroine in My father, my mother and sheilastory adapted to the scene last year.
Jean-Michel Jarre, a life combined with the future
A succession of appointments and a change of gaze which, smiling, make him say “I will die Bobo”, Even if dying is not on the program, she who works on a new tour on the occasion of her 80th anniversary that she will celebrate in August. While Sylvie Vartan fareweed and Françoise Hardy went, she remains the only one who, from the Holy Trinity Yé-Yu, still travels the roads to meet an audience which, between tenderness and fetishism, shows him an attachment whose sincerity and longevity make it an object of sociological curiosity. For sixty-three years, Sheila has been the luminous incarnation of this France and this Belgium that is said to be deep or, worse, from below, but also the target of the sarcasms of the intelligentsia which gave it to heart, practicing a class of class that only the singers of varieties of yesteryear were inspired, often leaving them silent and mistreated.
“The right to be there”
“Class contempt, I knew, tells the one that sold 85 million records. When I set up an acoustic show and wanted to offer it to the houses of culture, I was thrown away: Sheila, it is not culture. In the 1960s and 70s, in certain circles, if we loved Sheila, we did not say it. “ She forgets to mention every time, in the intelligence shows -that of Philippe Bouvard, that of Michel Polac -, it was fashionable to lower his repertoire to a chapter of Beauf culture, at the same time stigmatizing those who listened to her and who, to her songs, found nothing to complain about. Coming from a modest background (her parents were small traders who made the markets), Sheila is a character with whom the silencer and the invisible.
She also sang it, in 1968, in “Little Daughter of Middle French”, the self -portrait of the girl representing laborious classes in front of the bourgeoisie. The song, which will be a tube just after the May barricades, makes fun of “Precious little girls of big families” And praise the efforts of those who blend into the mass. “Me, who is nothing that a little girl of average French people. When I work, yes, I feel good, and fortune will come with my hands”, She sings with a candor who says a little more than we want to hear. When we remind him of the importance of this song, far from being anecdotal in the establishment of her celebrity, Sheila does not hesitate to remember her condition. “I come from an environment that normally, I have no right to be there, she underlines. I had no entering the showbiz, I come from an environment that does not even know what we are talking about, who knows no lawyer. I come from an environment where I learned to count the pieces and to earn my money. In the 60s, I am the one that symbolizes these average French people, I opened a breach. “
-“I worked like a dog”
Because she is only sixteen, her parents signed the contract which, in 1962, will make it a star and bound it to producer Claude Carrère, a sort of French colonel whose control – total for twenty years – ends up stifling the one that records channel discs, squat the TV sets and lives with the frustration of not being able to make a stage. “Without a praising, she comments, I think I am the one that made the most tubes in her career, but at one point, I wanted it to stop because I had changed and I wanted to get out of a system. ” This system is that of an industry that exploits artists and in fact the proletarians of the tube. Sheila is very moving when she says, her throat tied, “I worked like a dog, but as a dog!”, Barely leaving what an employee life is truly life in show business. Because yes, Sheila was an employee in the Carrère company who, to calm her claims, in terms of financial advancement and artistic development, will find nothing better to do than to dismiss her.
Suzanne Vega: “In the United States, we are witnessing a breathtaking awareness”
“Claude Carrère started from nothing, and I started from nothing, she explains. He was the businessman who won behind, I was the flag that floated in front of everyone. He built an empire, I had a career. I followed everything I have been told, I only thought of doing my job well, being perfect. I was a good little soldier. I worked twenty years with Carrère, but the rest, the forty-three years following, it was not he who made them. But when I left Carrère, the rest was difficult because – I realized it – we do not leave Carrère. He was like a Mac. I was in the center of a system, but I took the risk: I planted everything. ” It was not until the disco period and the recording in New York of an album produced by Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards of the Chic group – an event in 1980 which allows it to go around the world – to see it emancipate and end up closing this chapter to open another. “Sheila was a very well -adjusted machine, but I resumed Sheila to zero”she breathes before evoking Yves Martin who, as early as 1982, offered him more personal texts, arrangements more in tune with his desire for change.
“I am the confidante”
A woman at the center of an economic universe where everything is thought of by men. “My job is a job managed by guys, we can say what we want, they are the ones who decide. I grew up in the midst of men, I know them. The liberation of women, I experienced it in my own way, by carrying shorts and showing my thighs on TV, everyone has fucked up with me, but I did it. That said, the most importantly in the liberation of women,” Sixty years later, he remains an artist, stronger than ever, who looks at the horizon – hence the title of his disc, In the future. “Retirement is a word banned from my vocabulary, I will never be retired, I will never touch a retirement, she said, only jokingly jokes. Rather than giving us the senior card, they better give us the major card, the one that would allow us to transmit. “ Sixty-three years further, there remains above all friendship with an audience, ally of the early hours and faithful among the most faithful. “With people, it’s a long story, and it belongs to me. Sixty-three years of life … I was there for weddings, for divorces, for burials … I am the confidant. Of all that, I plan to do something …” And without being asked what she can do with it, she adds: “I think I’m going to give conferences” …
10/12, Pab, Charleroi. 12/12, Wex, Marche-en-Famenne. On 14/12, Cirque Royal, Brussels.
