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Françoise Hardy: France’s girlish yé-yé star was a groundbreaking musical artist

Hardy shot to fame singing airy, carefree pop before she took control of her career, hung out with 60s rock aristocracy and became a sophisticated singer-songwriter of rare sensuality and melancholy

She was strikingly beautiful (“I was passionately in love with her,” recalled David Bowie decades later, “every male in the world, and a number of females, also were”); she was never off the airwaves of France’s premier yé-yé radio show, Salut les Copains, and never out of the pages of its accompanying magazine. This was an extraordinary state of affairs for pop music in 1962: the following year, the Beatles – the band generally credited with cementing the notion that artists could write their own material rather than relying on cover versions – would release their debut album, with just over half its contents penned by Lennon and McCartney. She was as capable of essaying a Gallic take on country rock on the 1972 album Françoise Hardy, AKA Et si je m’en vais avant toi, as she was dealing in supremely cool jazzy funk on Gin Tonic (1980) or, perhaps most unexpectedly of all, grungy alt-rock (1996’s Le Danger).

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