In Toulouse, serious and light, Alain Souchon has nicely dressed our cheeks
Alain Souchon resumed his tour on Thursday February 3 and it was Toulouse that had the first of the reunion, which more than 4,000 spectators tasted with immense pleasure.
They were patient and had nothing to regret from these two years spent waiting. Last night, at the Zénith, Régine and Jean-Claude, Marie-Christine and André… and all the others were there, their tickets clutched in their hands, like a sesame they had never intended to part with. Régine came to “remember the 80s” when Souchon punctuated our days on the radio. Jean-Claude, he wanted to reconnect with the songs he had discovered on vinyl used today. Marie-Christine appreciated finding an artist who had “remained himself”; a man “whose lyrics were so close to reality” that had stood the test of time perfectly, like this “Amour à la machine” that the singer was going to cover just for her – well, she had every right to believe in it.
Alain Souchon therefore hit the road again yesterday, reconstructing a tour cut short by the pandemic. He was not annoyed by so many disappointments but the opposite of a teenage joy that saw him jump in his clumsy way – cat hesitant to jump puddles – going damn far, for more than two hours slightly energy efficient.
Right words and funny stories
Impeccably sounded (clear voice, right words), Souchon sang his new songs (“Ames fifties”, “Almost”, “A sloping ground”…) and his ripped classics (“Hello mama bobo”, in introduction, just at the acoustic guitar with an immediately complicit audience; “Rame”, at the end, which always takes the guts, and then “Never happy”, and then “On s’aime pas”, and then “Sentimental crowd” and then so many others).
Souchon told his tender and funny little stories: about the 50s, adolescence, the good guys and the bad guys, the salamanders and the dragonflies, the loneliness that weighs so heavily…
Souchon tenderly thanked those who accompany him, an excellent rather rock quartet made up of Michel-Yves Kochmann on guitar, Jean-Luc Leonardon on keyboards, Olivier Brossard on bass and “the real” Eric Laffont on drums. Without forgetting Damien Dufaitre whose lights, simple, swirling, all in warm roundness superbly illuminated the troop.
And that’s how the evening was beautiful, with a nostalgia dressed in fresh, lively and captivating, more marvelous than rosy.