Aragon and Castile, your Katie left you, Bobo Léon… Boby Lapointe has written and performed crazy songs, full of puns, contrepèteries, paronomases or alliterations. Yet while we celebrate the centenary of his birth, this weekend, in Pézenas (Herault), his city, this friend of Georges Brassens probably does not yet have the place it deserves in memory.
“In Pézenas, and in the region, he is very much alive, smiles Dany Lapointe, his granddaughter. At the national level, perhaps this centenary will help to put it back in the minds of many people. Give him a spotlight, which was needed. Because Boby Lapointe had a fairly short career. It started in 1954, when Bourvil chose Aragon and Castile for one of his films. And stopped abruptly when he died in 1972, at the age of 50. “He was not necessarily known, during his lifetime, continues his granddaughter. It’s mostly after… He was probably a little too different. »
“He put the measure where … where it should not”
Tom Belhomme, the vice-president of Eh! Say Boby, the association of Friends of Boby Lapointe, which organizes lots of concerts and events this weekend in Pézenas, is convinced: Boby Lapointe was “too ahead of his time”. “And he left too soon,” he says. Rhythms, incessant puns, double meanings, it’s something that was not done. Georges Brassens says it himself, Boby Lapointe had something special. He even says that if he wanted to do Boby Lapointe again, he wouldn’t be able to do it, because Boby, he was putting the measure where he shouldn’t. »
This genius of words, who was, before the Second World War broke out, a brilliant budding mathematician, put in his songs a rarely equaled rhythm. Even if this very shy tended to “accelerate to finish faster, laughs Dany Lapointe. The musicians who accompanied him had to manage to follow him”.
An “infinite artist”
In recent years, Boby Lapointe, who is studied by children at school, with his famous mother of fish, is increasingly taken up. “Every day, we hear about shows being staged around the work of Boby Lapointe, covers of his songs, etc., confides Tom Belhomme. Something has been going on for some time! Renaud, in his next album, which will be released on May 6, takes up It comes and goesone of Boby Lapointe’s songs.
On Friday (9 p.m.), the group C’Dric et Danito will offer a creation around the work of Boby Lapointe. This duo was already playing songs by the artist some twenty years ago. Boby Lapointe, the artists take it back “a little more today than during his lifetime, says Danito. But we think that it is not yet recognized enough, not celebrated enough. We know a lot of these songs, and yet we regularly discover new puns. He is an infinite artist. »
The entire program for Boby Lapointe’s centenary, it’s this way.