Jean-Louis Murat, an angry rocker

He had become the grump of the Burons. Died on May 25 of phlebitis at the age of 71, Jean-Louis Murat often went there “with a bazooka” as he said. Because he deplored a media law which, after recognition and public success, had made him disappear from the screens. Angry, the Auvergne singer defined himself as an "outsider". He was also delighted not to have the fame of Johnny Hallyday. “Obviously I would not say that I sought failure, but to be dubbed by a people who swear only by Johnny or Patrick Bruel would have bothered me a lot”, he confided to Inrockuptibles in 2019.

Jean-Louis Murat was shooting on sight. He went so far as to classify the idol of young people in the box of "shabby and old-fashioned singers" who pushed by their popularity to "cultivate stupidity as a national standard". “The day he died was a relief like June 6, 1944 for music. Because of him, we went for losers for fifty years,” he added.

"There's a new Dylan? There's a new Neil Young? No. The rest is small fry… Might as well have the best as references”, the singer got carried away in our columns. Jean-Louis Murat lamented that in France, in 2016, we capitalized on artists like Renaud, Polnareff or the Telephone group, rather than on the young French scene.

“There should be more vitality in society for an artist to be able to give his maximum in reaching maturity. Polnareff, he was already singing under de Gaulle, and he is still there. This is indicative of the slowness of career development. If Chirac and Mitterrand were still there, we would have them in the next presidential election. To be a man of progress is to release and trust the youth. There are newbies putting out records that are going to get stifled. That's the crisis today,” he said.

Noting, bitter, that no microphone could carry his voice, he was looking for his place. “I am somewhere else. I have to work. It's the first year I can't shoot. Because the big guys took it all. Between the tours of the stars of the 1980s, Polnareff, Telephone, the promoters say to themselves “we have everything”. I was thinking of shooting in the spring, it's impossible. In the fall, the same. I am intermittent in the show, I embark the musicians and the technicians in a beautiful galley by not turning with my new album ”, lamented the musician with Figaro.

Still in our columns, in 2019, the singer will go further by qualifying PNL as a “vast and fatal joke” and “Macronist music, as there was a Pompidou music whose acme was Telephone.” "These are little Macrons trying to make money with the IQ of a fork! NLP is at Club Dorothée level. Even La Bande à Basile was better,” he declared, before defining the President of the Republic as a “vulgar apprentice, a false intellectual and a real villain”.

Recently, he had attacked Angèle. In full promotion of his new album Baby Love, Jean-Louis Murat thus attacked with virulence the young Belgian singer in the columns of Paris Match. "Angèle is a Chantal Goya 2.0," he said of the interpreter of Balance your what.

The musician also criticized him for his position on gender issues. "Us guys, she hangs over us with crazy nerve, she tells us 'You don't look, you don't touch'", he regrets. But his resentment didn't stop there. He even went so far as to compare Angèle's dances to peep-show choreography.

In this same interview, he took the opportunity to settle his accounts with Jean-Jacques Goldman. “Alain Souchon wanted to cover one of my songs at Les Enfoirés, and Goldman said 'Murat, no way'. Because he didn't like my position on the intermittents, which was to say that the current system was going to create cultural apparatchiks. This guy judged me violently, kicked me out of the clan without ever telling me about it and that pisses me off. Especially when you see that he no longer writes songs…”

Murat had become the fallen angel he sang about when he started out. His excesses, his anger should not make us forget the great singer he was. A new romantic who rocked so many listeners since 1989 and his song If I had to miss you...