Jessica Walker on Barbara

Born in Paris in 1930, the French singer-songwriter Barbara (née Monique Andrée Serf) became such a superstar in her home country that crowds took to the streets in their tens of thousands to mourn her death in 1997, but her songs have never quite achieved the same international popularity as those of her compatriots Édith Piaf and Françoise Hardy

Mezzo-soprano and writer Jessica Walker is on a mission to change that with an innovative stage-show which brings Barbara's legacy to life for non-Francophone audiences; released last month on Resonus Classics, the companion-album La Solitude features Walker's own English translations of some of Barbara's best-loved songs, in new chamber arrangements by pianist Joseph Atkins. Jessica and I spoke in July about why Barbara's songs have hitherto struggled to connect with audiences outside France, the challenges involved in preparing English versions of the texts, and the traumatic events which shaped Barbara's life and music.

When and how did you fall under Barbara’s unique spell?

I got to know her through my love of Jacques Brel, whose songs have been in my repertoire for a long time – they’re famous worldwide, and exist in many translations. Barbara and Brel weren’t just contemporaries, but also colleagues and friends: in 1971 they even starred in a film called Franz together. She learned a lot from Brel, because she started her career singing songs by him and Georges Brassens: that’s absolutely her musical lineage, but her songs are more unusual by virtue of the fact that they’re expressing a woman’s thoughts. 

When I started exploring Barbara’s songs it made me sad to see they haven’t reached an international audience in the same way as Brel’s. Barbara was (and still is) an icon in France: when she died in 1997 250, 000 people took to the streets and sang her songs spontaneously (there’s footage of it on YouTube). 

So I got hooked a long time ago, but it was only as I got older that I got the confidence to sing them – somehow she feels like an older person’s singer. I’ve spent my whole career unearthing marginalised voices and bringing them into the public consciousness; I’ve never been England-specific, but Barbara was a difficult one to present to English audiences because we don’t have a great affinity with this kind of song.

Is that lack of affinity solely down to the language-barrier, or is there more to it than that?

Her songs are very attractive to listen to and she writes wonderful melodies, but they’re also very verbose, so unless you have a really good grasp of the French language then you’re going to miss a lot of nuances. I felt that a new audience would connect with them if they were sung in English, and that’s certainly the experience I’ve had in live performances: I’ve presented them as a stage show (also called La Solitude) at Jermyn St Theatre, and at festivals in Deal, Lichfield and Nevill Holt.

Beyond the language itself, Barbara is part of a very distinctively French tradition which doesn’t really have a parallel in England. But what we do have here is an incredibly strong folk tradition: we’ve always had wonderful folk singers, and I would say that Sandy Denny is the nearest we’ve got to someone like Barbara. Denny was writing really quite profound lyrics from a very young age – her most famous song ‘Who Knows Where the Time Goes’ was written when she was a teenager, and she was dead by the time she was 31. On a musical level she’s very different from Barbara, but she shares that ability to tap into very deep, complex emotions within a popular idiom.

Is it fair to say that the emotional complexity of Barbara’s songs was to some extent rooted in childhood trauma?

Absolutely. For a start, she spent the whole of World War Two hiding out in the various parts of the French countryside with her family, and they were nearly discovered several times. When she was ten, she and her aunt were travelling on a train which was bombed – they were stuck in the middle of nowhere for seventeen days and had to forage for food and water. 

As a young Jewish girl she had a really traumatic experience in the war, and that’s before you consider that it seems she was being sexually abused by her father when he came home on leave from fighting. She never talked about it until she was writing her memoir in 1997; she died before finishing the book, so nobody knew about the abuse until after her death. With hindsight, it’s obvious that 'L’aigle noir' (which sold a million copies on the day of release) is her confession song: the great black eagle which descends upon her represents her father, but that was never made explicit while she was alive.

As the war was coming to an end she knew she had to escape him, so when she was sixteen she ran away and reported the abuse at a police station; they didn’t believe a word she said and simply called her father to come and pick her up…

It wasn’t until she was twenty that she escaped to Belgium in the hope of starting a singing career; she chose Belgium because Jacques Brel was there, but she had no money or contacts and was absolutely destitute. One night she got so desperate she tried to sell herself; the only thing that stopped her was a stranger who saw her crying and bought her a meal in a café. The autobiography is called Il était un piano noir – it was published after her death in its unfinished state, but there’s currently no English translation.

Is sheet-music for her songs readily available?

There’s no definitive version of any of her songs. She didn’t read or write music, so she worked entirely by ear and no two recordings of her performing her songs are the same. You can buy vocal scores, but they’re dreadful and bear no resemblance to what you hear if you listen to her albums! So in a way the field is wide open in terms of how you interpret her songs today.

And her own interpretations changed with age. She could still sing when she wrote 'L'aigle noir' in 1970, but recordings from ten or fifteen years later sound completely different because her voice has become more of a rasp. There were various factors involved in her vocal decline – she smoked, she had a lot of respiratory illnesses, and for years she relied on steroid injections into the throat to get through concerts. 

Did Barbara receive any classical training when she was young?

She played the piano well, although there was an obstacle: a childhood injury meant that her little finger on one hand didn’t work at all, so she created versions that were friendly for four fingers. She had classical singing lessons in Paris in her late teens but realised pretty quickly that it wasn’t for her, which meant that she then had to spend time unravelling all that. 

I really relate to her there, because I was an opera singer for a long time and if you’re going to explore other genres of music you have to learn how to let go in the right way: larynx position, vowel colours, phrasing, it all makes a difference. We classically trained singers can sometimes be a little bit too refined, and the danger is that we lose a degree of spontaneity in the way we communicate.  

Because Barbara’s songs are often streams of consciousness, you have to work with the voice and mind that you have, because if it doesn’t sound immediate and unforced then it falls flat. I’ve never tried to emulate Barbara’s sound because I don’t have the same vocal equipment, although I’ve also tried to avoid sounding too classical. There’s a lot of craft involved, but it has to be invisible.

On the subject of ‘invisible craft’, how much of a challenge was it to make her lyrics work in English?

The difficulty with some of the translations was the French love of wordplay: it’s really integrated into their language structure, but very tricky to replicate. There were a handful of songs which I really wanted to include even though they just didn’t work in English, so I left those in the original French: ‘Attendons que ma joie revienne’, ‘Sid'amour à mort’, and ‘Amours incestueuses’. (Marc Almond from Soft Cell released an English version of the last one in 1993, but it’s pretty bad!). I did make an English version of ‘Plus rien’ that I was very happy with, but we hit a roadblock with that one because the song was never published so we couldn’t find anyone who was in a position to grant permission for the translation to be recorded!

What’s the story behind the new arrangements on the album?

My long-term collaborator Joseph Atkins did the work on those, and we’d been performing the songs together for a while by that point. For economic reasons we’d usually used voice and piano for our stage shows, but I thought it would be wonderful to involve a string quartet for the recording, and I gave Joe a completely free hand about which songs would work best for that. He did a fantastic job. We both initially thought that 'L’aigle noir' would be the one with the big guns, but in the end we felt it needed to be unfussy.

It was Joe’s idea to add a soprano saxophone into ‘Sid’amour à mort’ because it’s written later and has a very different musical sensibility, much more like a pop song. That song’s got a very interesting genesis – Barbara wrote it because so many of her friends were dying of AIDS (‘SIDA’ is French word for AIDs), so the lyrics are about people dying of love. She went on a tour of French prisons singing the song to try and encourage the inmates to have safe sex, and all of the proceeds from the album sales went to AIDS research. She was a real activist and took it very seriously, even handing round buckets full of condoms at the end of her concerts!

Did Barbara herself identify as queer?

It depends who you believe. She loved men and had many affairs with them – affairs rather than relationships, because she couldn’t stick with anyone and said that she liked to leave a man when she still liked him a little bit. She lived in absolute horror of waking up with the same man every day and having to have breakfast with him…

There have been suggestions that she may also sometimes have slept with women – certainly her PA said in an interview that Barbara would phone her at 3AM and ask her to come over and sleep next to her. But she was a very anxious woman who also struggled with depression: she took an overdose in 1974 which she said was accidental, but a lot of people thought it wasn’t. I think she sometimes just had this overwhelming need to be close to another person; their sex or gender was almost irrelevant. 

Looping back to her activism, the song 'Göttingen' became a powerful hymn to reconciliation in the decades after World War Two: did Barbara conceive the song in those terms, or did it take on a life of its own?

The extent of its impact took her by surprise, and I think she'd have been very taken aback to know that the German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder quoted it in a major speech a few years after her death – as a student Schröder had been there in the audience the first time she sang it in 'Göttingen' and was completely moved. Barbara always said she wouldn’t tour Germany because as a Jewish woman she couldn’t forget what had happened in the War, but at some point she changed her mind because she toured there in 1964. By all accounts she was very guarded and worried, but she got such an incredible welcome that she wrote and premiered this song during her visit – I think she realised that despite her preconceptions the Germans were just people and it was time to move on from the War. 'Göttingen' was her gift to them in a way, and it’s a fantastic song. 

What sort of relationship did she have with the press?

She had to do lots of interviews because she was so famous, but it was a part of fame that she hated because she was very shy. There’s some interesting footage where she gets palpably annoyed – she doesn’t want to talk about herself, and she obviously isn’t at ease. Fame came at a huge emotional cost to her. She wanted to connect with people through her music: ‘Ma plus belle histoire d’amour’ is a love song she wrote to her audience, who were her greatest love. Unfortunately that one isn’t on the album, although two verses of it are in the staged show – I couldn’t find a good enough way to translate the rest!