BFMTV explores Renaud’s life, his friends, his family secrets, the real reasons for his spleen and the little-known stories of his greatest hits.
Renaud: the last secrets is an epic in the heart of the singer Renaud, the most popular in France, cheeky, free and impenetrable. A colorful, poetic, tender and dark path, sometimes close to despair. With moments of decay and unexpected resurrections.
Renaud is above all a story of friendship. He likes to surround himself with friends. That he embarked on a sailing adventure in the 80s, with his wife and daughter Lolita. Or in L’isle-sur-la-Sorgue, where he found refuge, he is always surrounded by friends.
“Friendship for Renaud is above love”, testifies the singer Gauvain Sers. “He often talks about it, in songs, and in life”. He is always surrounded by friends”
His friends are his crutch, they have saved his life several times. To survive, he shares his roof with two friends, who have become his super assistants.
“There are two friends with him who take care of everything,” says journalist Eric Jean Jean.
They live with him every other week and look after him 24 hours a day.
“Driver, protection, confidant, friend, cook if you have to cook,” lists Pierre Tarde, who carries out his postman activity the rest of the time. His two “guardian angels” also ensure that Renaud does not drink.
“He needs to be reassured”
“He needs to be reassured, Renaud, he is a man who has this despair rooted in him and I think the friends are there to reassure him”, underlines Erwan Lelouet, author of Renaud: Paradise lost.
“The band of friends is something that is not new, recalls the writer Johanna Copans, curator of the exhibition on Renaud at the Philharmonie. “It is a reflection of his education and how he lived.”
Renaud has always been a gang man. With him it’s visceral, almost in his genes. One of the first bands he joined was that of the café de la Gare, after having met the actor Patrick Dewaere by chance. There he meets Coluche, who will become his best friend, the godfather of his daughter.
“Nationality: Childhood”
“That’s how in 1977 he met the wife of the handsome guy from the Gérard Lanvin gang, Dominique. Renaud falls madly in love and she with him.”
A gang man, Renaud is also terribly attached to childhood.
“Childhood for Renaud is a country, it’s a homeland, it’s his identity passport. Nationality: childhood”, evokes Didier Varrod.
Before discovering secrets that will eat away at him later… Renaud was first born into a happy family… The epinal image of a childhood in La Doisneau in working-class Paris.
“The carelessness of youth, of childhood. Golden, not financially, my parents were not wealthy people, but we were rich with a lot of love from my parents. And then we were 6 brothers and sisters, so there was a good atmosphere at home all the time”, recalled Renaud in a television program.
Despite a blessed childhood, there is a first heartbreak at 12, with the discovery of a lie, or rather a silence.
Little Renaud learns that the eldest Christine is in fact his half-sister, the child’s mother having died during the war. It’s a blast: adults can lie.
Intimate crack
His mentor, the most important family figure for him, is his maternal grandfather Oscar. The shock is immense when he discovers at the end of adolescence that Oscar has spent a few months in prison on suspicion of collaboration.
But his secret, his most intimate crack is this relationship of guilt he has with his father.
“His father is an intellectual who tried to be a writer without much success. Renaud will discover that his father is jealous of him. It is for him a senseless break, evokes Eric Jean Jean.
If his father has a complex relationship with the notoriety of his son, his mother Solange is very proud, and knows all his songs by heart.
Songs that will each time mark an era and several generations. Since 2015, Winner Mistral is the favorite song of the French, ahead of Do not leave me by Jacques Brel and The black Eagle from Barbara. But she almost never existed.
In 1985 Renaud is in Los Angeles to record his new album. He misses his wife and daughter back in Paris. He writes a little song between takes.
‘Mistral winner’, the absolute reference
“When Dominique and Renaud call each other, Renaud shares this new song with her. The story goes that Dominique told her: ‘if you don’t record it, I’m leaving you'”, says Johanna Copans.
“What’s incredible is that this song which should have been scrapped or be a B side will become the title of the album, and the absolute reference for Renaud”.
Despite the successes, despite the friends, Renaud cultivates spleen.
“It’s not unfortunate, idiots. If he’s unhappy it’s because he’s a brilliant man who probably thinks too much”, notes his friend Frédo.
Renaud drowns his discomfort in alcohol, as he sings in Doctor Renaud, Mister Fox. He takes up residence at the Closerie des lilas.
“I went through a somewhat dark period of my life, victim of the evil of the century, depression, which I treated with drugs that I thought were effective but which were poisons: alcohol, anti-depressants, bullshit like that”, he delivered then. His wife Dominique after 25 years of mad love ends up leaving him.
For 10 years the paparazzi will track Renaud at the exit of bars, detoxification cures, watching for the slightest signs of decline.
Unhappiness
But why does Renaud, blessed by success, love and friendship, sink like this, oscillating between exalted returns and black holes?
Several events in the 1980s precipitated this malaise. First there is this concert in Moscow in 1985, where “all his ideals will collapse”.
“Renaud is invited by the young communists to go play in Russia. He is super happy, we are in his values. And then he believes in communism at that time”, says Eric Jean Jean.
But when he sings The deserterpart of the audience, the Russians, get up and leave the concert.
“From that moment on, something went wrong in his head”, remembers his guitarist Mourad Malki.
Renaud is furious, he lets his anger explode. He is convinced to be the target of a conspiracy.
“At that time, he got into a very, very big paranoia. He doesn’t want to eat because he thinks we want to poison him, he doesn’t want to touch people because he thinks we wants to put the AIDS virus on him. There, this paranoia will develop in Renaud which will drive him crazy”, evokes Eric Jean Jean.
In 1986, another hard blow for the singer, Coluche died in a motorcycle accident.
“The death of Balavoine, followed by that of Coluche and that of Desproges after destroyed me completely for 2 years and still today, he will tell shortly after These are people who were essential to my ability to accept the world as it is.
“A man who has this basic fragility should not experience what he has experienced”, analyzes Eric Jean Jean. “Success, fame, money, his father, his crumbling political ideals…”
