Véronique Sanson
Véronique Marie Line Sanson is a three-time Victoires de la Musique award-winning French singer-songwriter and record producer with an avid following in her native country.
Ten years after Barbara, Véronique Sanson became one of the first French female singer-songwriters to break into stardom with her debut album "Amoureuse" in 1972. She also became one of the most successful and most prominent members of the Seventies "Nouvelle chanson française", alongside Alain Souchon, Bernard Lavilliers, Jacques Higelin, Michel Polnareff, Catherine Lara, Yves Duteil, Maxime Le Forestier, Renaud, William Sheller, Michel Jonasz, Michel Berger, Hubert-Félix Thiéfaine, Louis Chédid, or Francis Cabrel. Unlike most previous French artists of the Sixties Yé-yé era, who mostly released EPs consisting of a collection of singles, B-sides and covers, Sanson and her counterparts of the "nouvelle chanson française" established the dominance of singer-songwriters on the Seventies French charts thanks to albums with full-length artistic statements.
One of her songs, "Amoureuse", was covered in English in 1973 by singer Kiki Dee, and became a major hit in the United Kingdom, and has been covered since by various other singers, from Polly Brown to Elaine Paige with Olivia Newton-John, Pete Townshend, Linda Martin and Amanda Abbs with Illusive. In 1974, Patti Dahlstrom recorded a second version with her own lyrics, entitled "Emotion", which was covered by Helen Reddy and Shirley Bassey. Many other covers of "Amoureuse" have been recorded in French, German, Spanish, Dutch or Japanese.
Sanson plays piano and guitar.
Childhood and family
Both her parents, René and Colette Sanson, were members of the Resistance during the German occupation of France. Before the war, was a French diplomat in The Hague. When the Germans invaded the Netherlands, he sent a coded message to warn the French government that Germany was planning to attack France from across the Belgian border. This very message was decoded by Colette, a communication worker at the French Ministry of War. It was not until a few months later that they met in person, in a resistance cell. Both became prominent within the Resistance. In 1944, after the bombing of a German train, Colette was arrested and sentenced to death by the occupation force but managed to escape.After the liberation of Paris, René Sanson was appointed Minister of Labour in Charles de Gaulle's provisional government. The couple married in 1945. As a lawyer and an economist, René Sanson remained involved in politics as Member of Parliament and Deputy of the 13th district of Paris until 1967. In 1970, he was in charge of the French delegation at the Osaka World Expo; Véronique first visited Japan on this occasion.
Véronique grew up in a very privileged Parisian home. She attended the Cours Hattemer, a private school. Her parents considered music the finest art there was, and emphasized the musical apprenticeship of their daughters. Her mother introduced her to the guitar, while her father, who was a great fan of jazz, taught her the piano at the age of four. At the age of 13, she already composed her own songs, influenced by The Beatles, Ray Charles and by Dionne Warwick's peculiar vibrato. In 1965, she was struck by amnesia after a severe bout of meningitis that left her with few and fragmented childhood memories.
Discovery and early recordings: the late 1960s
In 1967, her career began in a trio, the Roche-Martin, with François Bernheim and her sister Violaine Sanson. The three teenagers only managed to sell a few hundred records, but this experience allowed her to meet with Michel Berger, with whom she began a romantic relationship as well as a prolific artistic career. He introduced her to his record company, and encouraged her to pursue a solo career. Sanson later mentioned that period as her most productive. In an interview, she recalled that she forced herself to write a song per day to keep up with Berger, who commissioned her to write songs for Isabelle de Funès, niece of French actor, Louis de Funès. She wrote "Mon voisin", "Une odeur de neige" and "Jusqu'à la tombée du jour" that would later be featured in Sanson's 1992 album Sans Regrets. In 1969, she released her first solo single, comprising "Le Feu Du Ciel" and "Le Printemps est là", which met with very little success.The Breakthrough: the early 1970s
After the commercial failure of her first single, her contract with Pathé Marconi was severed. In 1971, she wrote "La brume de Philadelphie" for Petula Clark, which was issued as the B-side of Clark's French single "La Chanson de Marie Madeleine".She and Berger had formed an inseparable team, and were offered a joint recording contract by Bernard de Bosson, CEO of WEA at the time.
In 1972, Sanson released the album Amoureuse, produced by Berger, which received a warm welcome from critics. With the singles "Besoin de personne", "Amoureuse", and "Bahia", it reached the summit of the charts thanks to intensive radio play. Françoise Hardy later declared that the release of Amoureuse marked the end of the Yé-yé era, as she confessed "When I first heard Amoureuse, I had the impression that every female singer, including myself, was left far behind". However, the success of the album had an ironic downside for Sanson, who was terrified of performing in front of an audience and therefore refused to schedule concerts. However, Berger and de Bosson believed she could overcome her debilitating fear, and forced her to perform a daily showcase at the Eiffel Tower's restaurant. She also appeared the same year as the opening act for some of the biggest stars of the time such as Claude Francois, Julien Clerc, and Michel Polnareff.
Amoureuse was closely followed by De l'autre côté de mon rêve, which also became a commercial success thanks to the singles "Comme je l'imagine", and "Chanson sur ma drôle de vie". In the meantime, she had met Stephen Stills after a concert he performed with his new band Manassas in Paris. They fell in love, and Sanson left Berger to follow Stills to New York, just as De l'autre côté de mon rêve was released – she supposedly went out to buy cigarettes, but never came back. In 1973, Sanson went on tour as a main act for the first time in Canada.
The American Period: 1973–1981
Sanson and Stills married in 1973, in Guildford, England, with guests including Ringo Starr and Roger Daltrey. She moved permanently to the United States, but returned to France regularly to give concerts and promote her music. In 1974, she gave birth to her only child, Christopher, in Boulder, Colorado. Her marriage also marked a new direction to her career, which has led the French media to constantly associate her music with Anglophone influences.She enrolled Manassas and decided to produce her next album herself. In contrast with her Beatles-inspired previous albums, the record emerged as a mixture of pop and 1970's rock'n'roll. Critically acclaimed at the time and still viewed today as a milestone of Sanson's career, Le Maudit was released in 1974, and reflects a large spectrum of musical influences such as bossa nova in "Alia Souza", or pure rock'n'roll in "On m'attend là bas". After several tours in Quebec in 1973, she went touring in France, with two concerts at the Olympia in October 1974, with Stills on bass guitar, then a long tour in 1975, with two weeks at the Olympia.
In 1976, she began a long-lasting professional collaboration with producer Bernard Saint-Paul – making 12 albums – and released the album Vancouver, recorded in London with British musicians. The record became her first platinum album, propelled by the single "Vancouver", one of her biggest hits.
By 1976, Sanson had become an established star. Her music, very much inspired by the best American producers, was a rarity in the Seventies French musical landscape. She gave two weeks of concerts at the Olympia, where her first live album was recorded.
The following year she released Hollywood, her fifth studio album. Recorded in Stevie Wonder's studios in Los Angeles, Hollywood found Sanson combining a disco-inspired sound to pop-driven melodies, which led the album to be referred to as the most representative piece of Sanson's American period. The same year she went on tour across France with Michel Jonasz as her opening act. Although she lived in the United States most of the time, she managed to remain present in the French musical landscape, travelling back and forth between her home in Colorado and her audience in France.
In 1978, she became the first French female artist to perform at le Palais des sports in Paris, which was the biggest arena in Paris at that time.
In 1979, she released 7ème, best known for the single "Ma révérence", one of her most popular songs. Overall, the album is quite melancholic, which contrasts with the lightness of Hollywood two years earlier. In fact, Sanson was going through a hard time in her life. She had decided to leave Stills and was engaged in a tough legal battle in American courts for the custody of her son.
Period of Transition: The 1980s
The transition toward the 1980s was difficult and challenging. Still tied to America by her son, of whom she did not gain full custody until 1983, she continued to split her time between the US and France. Fans and critics were enthusiastic when her new album came out in 1981. Though the record contained no memorable hit singles, it emerged as a solid ensemble of well-crafted songs. The album went double gold and she spent the following year on the road, managing to draw large audiences during a tour that ended with three weeks in a row at the le Palais des sports of Paris.In 1983, she permanently settled in France with her son, Christopher, and her boyfriend, actor Etienne Chicot. After a long break, she released an eponymous album in 1985, recorded entirely in France. This untitled album was nicknamed The white album by the press, while Sanson refers to it as The lil' trees. This synth-driven album included C'est long c'est court which became a radio hit in France during the summer of 1985, as well as the ballad "Le temps est assassin". She then embarked in a long tour during 1985–86 which met with tremendous success highlighted by a month-long residence at the Olympia in November 1985.
In 1988, she released the album Moi le venin, which included the highly controversial single "Allah". A couple of months after the release of the video directed by Dominic Sena, the song was censored in the media, and Sanson was forced to drop it from her tour's set-list after receiving threats of violence from radical Muslims. As a result of several death threats, she was put under police protection. The controversy arose because of the Muslim tradition forbidding reference to Allah in a song, and occurred just a few weeks after a fatwā was issued against Salman Rushdie. In response to the uproar, Sanson apologized and pleaded that the song was really meant to be a message of peace and tolerance. French show-business massively stood up for her, and more than a hundred artists signed a pamphlet against "the diktat of all forms of radicalism"
In November 1989, Sanson took part in the first charity tour entitled Les Enfoirés for Les Restos du coeur, alongside French rock stars Johnny Hallyday, Eddy Mitchell and Jean-Jacques Goldman.
In 1989, she realized a lifelong dream to play with a symphonic orchestra. After rehearsals in Czechoslovakia with the Czech symphonic orchestra "Fisyo", a series of six concerts took place in December 1989 at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris. A resulting live album was released the subsequent year. In 1990, she also toured with the symphonic orchestra for a dozen concerts across France.