Charles Aznavour interviewed in Paris by Alan Franks.
First published in
Review section of the Saturday Times on Saturday 31 January 2009.
It's not quite right to call Charles Aznavour the French Sinatra, but he's certainly the nearest thing that they have. Never mind his tiny stature, he's huge all over the world after selling 100 million albums and acting in 60 films in as many years. Mention the comparison and he shrugs it away with Gallic insouciance; Sinatra, he says, was a singer who acted; he is an actor who sings.
His new album finds him begging the comparison again, even if unintentionally, as the late American is one of his three posthumous singing partners, the other two being Dean Martin and Edith Piaf. The 84-year-old more than holds his own in this company, his voice ranging fluently from deep valleys of tendresse to peaks of shameless melodrama.
From his expression when he talks about adding his voice to the recordings, it must have been a strange and moving experience. Although he never met Martin, Sinatra and Piaf were good friends and big influences. He has a face that goes beetling and ruminative, then pulls itself together as if it has been caught malingering. “Strange? Yes, but not difficult,” he says. “Of course, it brought up strong memories. But [with Piaf] this was not the first time I had done this, but the third. And naturally, when she was alive, we sang many times together.”
On this side of the Channel Aznavour has been taken as the essence of Frenchness, much as was Maurice Chevalier before him. Musically, he remains best known for his two UK chart hits of the 1970s, She (reprised by Elvis Costello in the 1999 film Notting Hill) and The Old Fashioned Way. As an actor, his profile was never higher than in the 1960 film Shoot the Pianist (Tirez sur le Pianiste), directed by François Truffaut. He has had several successful tours here and, moving briskly away from stereotype, says that he loves the food. “I had a piano player from Leeds, and he took me about. You know, the proper food, not like in restaurants, but like the family eats at home.”
His musical Lautrec, about the artist's final years, came to the West End in London in 2000 but lasted only ten weeks. “Very bad reviews in London. But in Plymouth, fantastic. In London the press doesn't like the French. In England, yes. In Paris, it's on the contrary. We receive the foreigner better than we receive the French.”
This is ironic, since without that hospitality in his case he would not have become as French as he has. Though he was born in Paris, his birth name was Shahnour Varenagh Aznavourian. His parents were Armenian migrants fleeing Turkish oppression. Originally French was his second language. When he talks of the family struggles to raise him and his sister, who is now 86, his eyes come close to brimming, but then he thinks better of it. “They abandoned their dreams in order to raise us. They came to France not knowing the language, and with no money. I can still see my father with a, you know” - he lowers his arms as if to pick up something heavy - “a charrette, a little cart. He was a good singer, a baritone, and he got records of jazz, tango, everything. He even took us to the movies twice a week.”
You could say that this background has politicised Aznavour, but he rejects the word. “Not political, no. I hate politics. But social.” Yet on the evidence of what he says about (parts of) Turkey's denial of the so-called Armenian holocaust in 1915, in which more than a million are thought to have died, he is thoroughly engagé. “They don't want to recognise it,” he says. “But they will need to do so one day, not only for us, but for themselves.” Two years ago he was hailed as “a hero of the Armenian people” by President Sargsyan for his charitable work and was granted citizenship of the republic. In 2002 he starred in Ararat, a film about the genocide directed by the Armenian-Canadian Atom Egoyan.
Last year Aznavour found himself travelling to Brazil, where he is officially the best-known Frenchman, on the same aircraft as President Sarkozy and his singing wife Carla Bruni. Sarkozy was going to a trade conference; Aznavour was going to perform. “I don't know Bruni's music,” he says, “but I thought she was very nice with him [Sarkozy]. He needs that. She calms him.”
If the songs on Aznavour's Duos double album concern themselves with politics, it is of the emotional kind. Here is an international gallery of singers helping him to dissect the joys and despairs of romantic coalitions: the Greek veteran Nana Mouskouri joining in on To Die of Love; Liza Minnelli, another “very dear friend”, doing Quiet Love; Johnny Hallyday, France's old answer to Elvis Presley, on You've got to Learn. Then there's our very own Bryan Ferry, louche as ever on She, and Elton John belting it out on Hier Encore. “I said he could do it in English if he wanted,” Aznavour says, “but he insisted on doing it in French, and I thought he did it very well.”