Cult heroes: Jacques Dutronc - the epitome of 60s pop chic

Jacques Dutronc might be a cool name to drop when discussing debonair Gallic musical greats, but there is a surprising dearth of material written about him outside the Francosphere. In his home country he is a household name and the subject of countless biographies; elsewhere he is better known as Monsieur Françoise Hardy. (They started dating in 1967 and married in 1981, and though still married they are now separated.)

The Parisian’s ascent to teen idol status wasn’t overnight. He burst through as a positively ancient 23-year-old as the era of the yé-yé drew to its conclusion, charting with the garage R&B of Et Moi Et Moi Et Moi in 1966. Hitherto, he’d been known as a fine session guitarist for other artists such as Eddy Mitchell, Micky Amline and Gene Vincent.

As a teenager, Dutronc, like so many others, was inspired by the burgeoning sound of rock’n’roll coming out of the US, and in 1959 he picked up the guitar for the first time, soon favouring it over his ukulele; he’d also learned to play violin and piano as a youngster. Following school he trained as a graphic designer but dropped out of college with the aim of becoming a full-time musician. Hanging around Le Calypso bar with Mitchell and pre-fame Johnny Hallyday, he formed the band that would later be called El Toro et les Cyclones with his bass-playing school pal Hadi Kalafate and singer Daniel Dray.

Disques Vogue quickly signed the young guitarist’s group and they released a couple of unspectacular EPs in 1962. More successful was an instrumental track Dutronc wrote for labelmates Les Fantômes (Méfie-Toi), which, with the addition of lyrics, became Le Temps de l’amour, a hit for another Vogue artist, Françoise Hardy, also in 1962. Just when it looked as if he might be on to a winning streak, Dutronc was called up for national service, and El Toro and Les Cyclones fizzled out.

Fresh from the army, Vogue offered him an artistic director role, overseeing musicians on their roster. This was when Dutronc began his songwriting partnership with Jacques Lanzmann, after they were brought together by the label. Born in 1927, Lanzmann had led an eventful life already; having escaped the Nazis during the second world war, he moved to Chile, where he wrote his first novel. La glace est rompue was published at the behest of Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir when he returned to France in 1954, and it became a bestseller. When Lanzmann met Dutronc in 1965, he was also the editor of the men’s magazine Lui.

The pair’s first song, Cheveux Longs, was a hit for the beatnik singer Benjamin, but something about his vocals on another of their compositions – Et Moi Et Moi Et Moi – didn’t quite cut it. Dutronc stepped into the recording booth and a star was born. On the Et Moi Et Moi Et Moi EP, he also released J’ai Mis un Tigre dans Ma Guitare (“I put a tiger in my guitar”), Mini Mini Mini, and the stomping, euphoric Les Gens Sont Fous, Les Temps Sont Flous (“The people are crazy, the times are blurry”), an immaculate introduction from pop’s immaculate new grand fromage.

Dutronc was impossibly handsome and suave, emoting in the boulevardier style to keep the mums on side, with just enough Dylanisms (shaggy fringe, chattery, circumlocutory rapping) to make him positively au courant. His genial vocal style over fainéant garage grooves twinned with Lanzmann’s smart, sardonic lyrics propelled him into the big league with his first solo release. Within months he’d had two more big hits, with Les Play Boys – based on Lanzmann’s experiences at Lui, it spent six weeks at No 1 and sold 600,000 copies – and the comical Les Cactus (“The whole world is a cactus / It’s impossible to sit down”).

The hits kept coming, and in 1968 he scored another No 1 with Il Est Cinq Heures, Paris s’Éveille (“It’s five o’clock, Paris is waking”), while the album contained Hippie Hippie Hourrah, a biting commentary on weekend hippies with an expansive psychedelic groove. Dutronc continued to have hits – such as L’Arsène in 1971 – but his output became more sporadic as he concentrated on his acting career, with his turn as the titular Sébastien in the French movie Antoine et Sébastien (1974) winning him praise. Dutronc has since been nominated for a number of César awards, and finally won one in 1992 for best actor, playing the title role in Maurice Pialat’s .

After a five-year break from recording, he released Guerre et Pets in 1980, written mostly with drinking buddy Serge Gainsbourg (the title translates as War and Farts; it was Dutronc’s eighth album and the first not to be called Jacques Dutronc). Lanzmann had started on writing sessions for the record, but soon backed out, put off by the new team dynamic. He would work with Dutronc again but not for a number of years. The album is a mixed bag with a couple of decent tracks, including opener L’Hymne à l’Amour (Moi l’Nœud), which was controversial because of its ironic use of racial pejoratives. There’s also one curio, an alacritous electronic rendering of Le Temp de l’Amour, an indication that Dutronc had musically come full circle.

Certainly there are few remarkable moments in the catalogue post-1980, but those early flourishes in the 60s still sound as impudent and fresh and full of joie de vivre as they surely did on their release half a century ago. In France, Dutronc is as synonymous with that decade as les Beatles and la mini-jupe, while in territories elsewhere his cigar-chomping visage is the true embodiment of French pop at its most chic.