- French author, composer and performer Jean-Louis Murat died on Thursday at the age of 71.
- If, during his career, which began in the 1980s, he released about twenty studio albums, his work remains little known to the general public.
- 20 Minutes offers you a look back at his most striking songs and what makes Jean-Louis Murat a leg.
Sad observation: for the general public, Jean-Louis Murat is above all a provocateur. As rare as a good customer on TV, the artist, who died on Thursday at the age of 71, amused or irritated with his final sentences delivered with a gruff air that a smile in the corner sometimes defused. "He's cash, journalists come to get him on certain subjects because he's a sniper, but we miss the very essence of what he is: an incredible author and musician," Nolwenn Leroy told us two years ago. She spoke knowingly, Jean-Louis Murat had signed for her Sur mes lips, a little-known title and in the image of its author's repertoire: to be rediscovered.
If we have to talk about Jean-Louis Murat's best-known song, the one that met with the greatest success and which has the best chance of passing to posterity, we must recognize - cruel irony - that it is not one of his songs but Regrets, his duet with Mylène Farmer released in 1991. The singer came to pick him up because she liked her third album, Cheyenne Autumn, released in 1989. She wrote the lyrics and Laurent Boutonnat the music of this ballad thought as a dialogue of lovers mourning the death of one of them.
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Mylène Farmer is then the queen of the Top 50 with her hit Désenchantée... Regrets managed to reach third place and remained sixteen weeks on the chart. Jean-Louis Murat, who will never spare the stars of the French song, will forever remain extremely grateful to Farmer, who opened it to his audience and helped launch it under the media spotlight.
He put this gain in notoriety to good use at the end of 1991 by releasing Le Manteau de pluie which will become his first successful album - Sentiment nouveau will even manage to reach the Top 50. Listeners of the record discover a darkened artist, who does not necessarily seek pop efficiency (except perhaps on Cours dire aux hommes weaks) and allows himself experiments, as when he opens, with sounds of transhumance, Col de la Croix-Morand. This last piece refers to the place of the same name, culminating at 1,400 m in the heart of the Massif Central...
An unofficial ambassador of Auvergne
Jean-Louis Murat never ceased to be the unofficial ambassador of his native region, which he never left. This - and the laziness of journalists, will earn him to be called "Auvergne singer" at each interview or album review. The artist, who has never sought to correct his "open o" typical of the local accent, is inseparable from Auvergne. Born Jean-Louis Bergheaud, he chose his pseudonym in allusion to Joachim Murat, King of Naples under Napoleon I, but also to the Puydomoise commune of his youngest years, Murat-le-Quaire.
In his work, he sprinkles references to his region: Au Mont sans souci, one of his best songs, tells his childhood memories near La Bourboule, Babel, released in 2014, is an album conceived in collaboration with the Clermont folk rock group The Delano Orchestra. Works on the N89, published in 2017, owes its title to the construction sites and the national road 89 which crosses from east to west the department of Puy-de-Dôme...
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This last record marked the spirits - at least those who lent an attentive ear - by its experimental side completely assumed. "French melody is a bit like sugar addiction. I absolutely wanted to get out of it and start from scratch. (...) I wasn't sure it would make a record," he told AFP at the time. This is one of Jean-Louis Murat's other trademarks: turning one's back blithely on formatting.
Thus, in 2001, he did not hesitate to deliver the concept album Madame Deshoulières consisting of singing, with Isabelle Huppert, texts by the poet Antoinette Des Houlières on baroque arrangements. Two years earlier, Nude dans la crevasse happily exceeded ten minutes on Mustango. This album will undoubtedly remain as his most successful. Or, at least, the one that best condenses the different facets of his work. There is in the Auvergne, the taste of the rant (Les gonzesses et les pédés), but also the celebration of its Anglo-Saxon influences through the blues tone of the ensemble. Notice to those who appreciated Murat la grande gueule: listen now to the voice of Jean-Louis.
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- Auvergne
- Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes