“Sheila, all these lives” is the portrait of a woman who remembers. Sheila tells Sheila without concessions or evasions, from “School is over” to “Venue d’ailleurs”. The journey of a popular icon who has never stopped fighting since the early 1960s.
“For me, sixty years of career, it’s huge. But what have I done for sixty years? Because honestly, I haven’t seen them pass at all”. This course of exceptional longevity, crowned with 70 million albums sold throughout the world, Sheila recounts it without detour or prevarication in the portrait dedicated to her by François Jougneau and Jean-Baptiste Erreca.
She remembers her childhood, her parents, her beginnings, rumors, her loves, her marriage, her son, her successes, her farewells, her return, her bereavements. Believing that I have “lived a hundred lifetimes in one. I haven’t had a normal life. I’ve had a roller coaster life. That is to say, I can’t have immense joy without having a drama”.
“Sheila, tous ces vies-là” is thus the story of a little candy seller who became a successful singer, whom talent, work, glory and hardships will complete to transform into a true popular icon from the 1960s. The idol of a whole generation who never stopped fighting for sixty years.
Squeezed like a lemon
The fairy tale begins in France with “Jolie petite Sheila”, followed by the immense success of “L’école est finie” or “Bang Bang” which also earned her her first role in the cinema. Sheila therefore remembers her audience with an average of four 45s per year and hundreds of appearances on television, under the impetus of her producer Claude Carrère. A commercial and media omnipresence that she extended in 1963 with a first tour that began in Marseille. Annie Chancel of her real name was then 17 and a half years old. Already squeezed like a lemon, she had to throw in the towel for medical reasons and would only come back on stage in 1985. Her exhaustion caused her to lose about fifteen kilos.
This first disappointment will be followed shortly after by the Une assassine of the newspaper France Dimanche which wonders if “Sheila will become a man”. A slander which the singer will remain marked for life and which she will evoke later in a song. The singer then heals her pain by designing dresses and clothes that she will sell at the 500 points of sale of La boutique de Sheila, while the events of May 68 are fast approaching. Despite the erosion of the yé-yé and her generation of entertaining singers and singers, Sheila sings unpretentiously “Little French girl average” and crosses the modes by “holding on to the branches”, as she candidly admits. in a smile.
1970s plus disco
The 1970s were a succession of novelties for her. From the famous cathodic entertainment programs of the Carpentiers to more rhythmic and disco titles offered with her Boys made up of black dancers (“Love Me Baby”) – a political act in itself for the time – or a few duets, Sheila cheerfully surfs the musical waves and experienced private fulfillment alongside singer Ringo, whom she married with great fanfare in Paris and with whom she had a child, Ludovic.
After having already orchestrated a media advertisement for this wedding that the couple wanted to be intimate, Claude Carrère even had them record “Les gondoles à Venise” as a false souvenir of their honeymoon. An element that will soon lead to the professional separation of Sheila with her first pygmalion while the singer will divorce almost at the same time from Ringo. The singer then chose to go into exile for a while in the United States, where she offered her first international hit with “Spacer” by Nile Rodgers of Chic as well as a disco album followed by a second more eclectic one recorded in California. with producer Keith Olsen (“Little Darlin”, 1981) who did not experience the same success.
>> To see: the clip of “Spacer”
New aesthetic directions
On her return to France, Sheila met Yves Martin, who became her new lyricist and companion and encouraged her to come back on stage. This will be done at the Zenith in Paris for a month in 1985. If she put an end to her collaboration with Claude Carrère, she forgot to do so for the distribution of her albums and logically sees herself financially cheated for a long time. : “I was stupid, wanted to do this slowly”, she concedes today.
Despite these setbacks, Sheila stays the course while opening up to different aesthetic and musical orientations. If she will never experience the same peaks in her commercial success again, she can count on a loyal public who still responds well after her umpteenth announcement to stop the scene in 1989 before returning to it several times in the decades to come. .
Private dramas
“My career is not just about hits, I think, but moments of life that I shared with people I grew up with,” said Sheila, recipient of a Legion of Honor in 1998. and a Victoire de la musique d’honneur for his fifty-year career in 2012. Ten years earlier, the celebrations of his longevity had been marred by the successive deaths of his mother and father, “his models “. In 2017, it was the turn of his son Ludovic to die of an overdose.
In the depths of drama and tears, “Sheila, all these lives” shows how the singer has remained standing, also sculpting elsewhere, writing novels or engaging in the fight against AIDS. A combativeness at all times raised by the many testimonies of his companions of (de) route which punctuate this documentary, from the host Michel Drucker who considers that Sheila is “a lesson of youth” to the photographer Jean-Marie Périer who affirms that “Sheila is a kind of Panzer tank”.
Olivier Horner
“Sheila, all these lives” (111 minutes), by François Jougneau and Jean-Baptiste Erreca.