Gérard Bertrand : Good evening everyone — it is Friday, it is 7 o'clock, we are faithful to our live Wine Food Music appointment, and we are with Chef Laurent Chabert. Welcome, Chef

Chef Laurent Chabert : Good evening everyone!

Gérard Bertrand : And we have the privilege this evening of welcoming our friend Michel Fugain.

Michel Fugain : And off we go!

Gérard Bertrand : Good evening, Michel.

Michel Fugain : Hi everyone, how are you?

Gérard Bertrand : How are you?

Michel Fugain : Wonderfully well! With you, things can only go well, Gérard.

Gérard Bertrand : I am jealous because I know you are even closer to the sea than I am. We are not far, but you are right next to it — I believe you are in Corsica.

Michel Fugain : I've been living here for quite a few years now. I'm in Corsica — I was in lockdown in Corsica, I spent two months, already two and a half months even, on this island which is itself a kind of confinement, so it all went well. I'm not at much risk here because I have a bit of land, so everything is fine.

Gérard Bertrand : You are looking well! Our friend Chef Laurent Chabert. Where have you been, Laurent?

Chef Laurent Chabert : I went to Cap Corse

Michel Fugain : Yes, it's the start of Cap Corse, just after Bastia.

Chef Laurent Chabert : And then I also spent 9 months in Porto Vecchio, in the bay of Santa Julia

Michel Fugain : It is a magnificent spot, the bay of Porto Vecchio is very beautiful.

Chef Laurent Chabert : This evening we are going to revisit Corsican produce — the lobster and the dentex.

Gérard Bertrand : What are you going to cook for us this evening?

Chef Laurent Chabert : For the first course, for the first wine, it will be the lobster — I already cooked it just before, to keep things simpler during the live — and of course the dentex.

Gérard Bertrand : It is a fish from Corsica — I didn't know that

Michel Fugain : It is called that because it has two front teeth like this, which makes it very recognisable. Laurent, don't hold it against me, but the best dentex I have ever eaten in my life I ate because the fishermen of Île Rousse had invited us onto the rocks on which there is a red lighthouse — it is very recognisable, that is why it is called Île Rousse — and they simply boiled a dentex in a fish kettle in seawater, and it was a pure marvel; there was nothing but the fish and the seawater.

Gérard Bertrand : It is fabulous, and at the same time it is 7 o'clock now and everyone watching us is starting to salivate. And after that, what are we going to have?

Chef Laurent Chabert : And then a duck, I worked it whole earlier — it comes from a producer nearby, close to Carcassonne — the thigh we are going to confit as well, and then pan-fried, served with a small pesto salad with garlic flowers.

Gérard Bertrand : So Michel, he is working away and I am like you — I am going to have a drink, so what I suggest, Michel, is that we have a quiet little drink together. We are going to drink the Clos du Temple, a rosé. I have a great piece of news to share with you: the new vintage has just been voted the best wine in the world by Drinks Business, which is the biggest magazine covering rosés in the world, based in London. A panel of experts ranked it number one worldwide, so we are very pleased because it truly is a wonderful rosé, in a bottle shaped like a temple. We are lucky because we will be able to toast together, even if it is virtually, Michel — we are going to taste it together, the two of us. And for all of you watching us, cheers — if you are having a drink, we are glad you are there, out of lockdown.

Michel Fugain : It is a wine for men.

Gérard Bertrand : In fact it's multidimensional, because it's powerful and at the same time vibrant — meaning it has both horizontality, verticality and depth, which is no easy feat for a rosé — and because it's a rosé vinified in barrels, and therefore vinified under the same conditions as a great white wine. It's a magnificent terroir with low yields in Cabrières, a beautiful terroir of both schist and limestone — a collision that gives it this unique taste that makes your mouth water. It's fascinating because we've placed rosés in the world of great wines, and that was a challenge for us.

Michel Fugain : It is magnificent in taste, it is splendid!

Gérard Bertrand : I noticed there's still quite a bit going on for you at the moment, because you've done — we'll take a look at it shortly — you've done something special called "Les Chevaux Sauvages", can you tell us a little about it?

Michel Fugain : Listen, it's something we did as soon as we were confined with my whole team, with my mates whom I miss in a way you can't even imagine — we said right, damn it, we're going to do something, we're going to do something, and then we saw all our friends, all our fellow artists, male and female, saying thank you, bravo to the healthcare workers, and I said right, we're going to…

Musical moment

Michel Fugain : We do it and we realise that there are songs that speak about life from beginning to end, and for me that is wonderful.

Gérard Bertrand : So Michel, we are going to watch it, and for all of you watching us, enjoy these few minutes that you are about to see as a preview — let's watch!

Musical moment

Gérard Bertrand : So were you swept away like Michel, because there you were confined but with the energy you sent out — it really sends you — they truly are wild horses!

Michel Fugain : I have this image — it is inevitably an artist's vision — but for me the wild horses had become a group of young people with long hair like this, running with their hair flowing behind them, and I think to myself, bloody hell, that is the next generation, that is what is coming and they are going to change the world, damn it.

Gérard Bertrand : You know that an idea can change the world, and you, in the world of creativity, can carry people along with you, and it's true that, with the emotions you deliver, it's quite something special because there aren't many professions like that — we do it too, but we do it through interaction, meaning we can make a wine and move people from a distance, but we're not necessarily always connected either — but the fact of being on stage like that in front of thousands of people, you transmit an energy that is quite incredible. I suppose you must be eager to get back on stage?

Michel Fugain : It's terrible, I miss it in an incredible way, but we don't have such very different professions, Gérard — they are human professions, we work for human beings. We were saying off air, I'm not someone who goes from one gastro restaurant to another, certainly not, especially since I live with a vegan so it's safe to say that's not really on the cards. But what I love is the end result of food — a good table, a good meal, there's a staging to it, we do very similar work.

Gérard Bertrand : And you know, I remember — because when you came to play at Château L'Hospitalet, I often ask artists: have you ever sung in the middle of the vines? Very few artists have played in the middle of the vines. I didn't realise to what extent music gives good vibes, because it is truly very good for the grapes — those positive waves you transmit make the wine better year after year. I think that at the time of the jazz festival at the end of July, when the grapes start to change colour, it is very inspiring, because you know we often play music during the winemaking process, and many winemakers play classical music, and it is true that it is quite good. The fact that this music and jazz festival takes place in the middle of the vines gives a momentum, and people are in harmony. So I was also saying earlier that in the world that follows, we will need to respect nature a little more, because we have knocked it about a bit, and so we have questions to ask ourselves about how we are going to be kind to nature.

Michel Fugain : It seems obvious to me and the battle is going to be just as difficult with what I would call global money, that is to say the financiers who always want to do things that will cost them the least, but we realise — and I am appalled by this — that there is also work to be done with citizens who lack a little civic sense; we saw the number of masks ending up on the ground, lying around and making even more of a mess. I think there is work to be done there, an awareness that depends on education — perhaps a few slaps along the way — who is that?

Gérard Bertrand : The Chef is ready!

Chef Laurent Chabert : Here is the lobster.

Michel Fugain : So Laurent, this lobster — what should I drink with it? The Clos du Temple perhaps?

Chef Laurent Chabert : Clos du Temple, it's the perfect pairing.

Michel Fugain : With Clos du Temple, it seems obvious to me.

Chef Laurent Chabert : So, we made a carcass jus that we lightly set into a gel, which is served cold. The lobster that I cooked this morning, and then we added a shiso sorbet which will bring a little peppery flavour, and the last little touch is black garlic, marinated in seawater.

Michel Fugain : You are offering dishes with lobster because lobster isn't very flavourful on its own?

Chef Laurent Chabert : We reduced the carcass jus as much as possible to bring out maximum flavour.

Gérard Bertrand : Michel, I am ready — here we go!

Michel Fugain : Gérard, are you the one doing the tasting?

Tasting moment

Gérard Bertrand : Delicious!

Michel Fugain : You're the one doing the tasting and I'm the one doing the drinking.

Gérard Bertrand : There we go! And so these are dishes that we will find on the menu at Château L'Hospitalet, since the restaurant is reopening this evening — we have Dominique Rieux and his band putting on a jazz dinner concert on site. Michel, I have some good news: we are going to hold the jazz festival from the 22nd to the 26th of July; it will be one of the rare festivals taking place in the south of France, so we have taken precautions — we have reduced capacity by 30% — and we are still going to hold a festival, because I think it is important that life resumes and that people can once again listen to music in complete safety.

Michel Fugain : And it is really great that you are doing that, because I tell you, I repeat it to you — we cannot get back on a stage before the autumn of 2021; it was September–October 2021, that is the official date for producers, so if things go well — fingers crossed — if things go well we might perhaps be able to start again around January, that would be really good. We are going mad, our profession is completely devastated. There are so many things changing even in people's souls, so we want to catch up with them, we want to be with them to bring first of all that kind of emotional support, and then to feel them, to sense what is coming.

Gérard Bertrand : And also simply to live, because in the end we cannot stop living and above all stop doing what we love most, because what we love most is being together — because if we are alone on a desert island we get terribly bored — and music and food and wine pairings and living together, as you said. We have a dinner a little beforehand, then there is the show, and then there is the After Jazz, so we start at 7 in the evening and finish at 3 in the morning, and we are happy and we love to share

Gérard Bertrand : I don't know how you do it — I wanted to ask you a question because I am intrigued. I tell myself that you swim in the fountain of youth, because you have an energy that is always renewed, always there. What is your secret?

Michel Fugain : There is no secret, Gérard — I have inevitably analysed the comments about how you still have such energy; I am going to be 80 in two years.

Gérard Bertrand : It is incredible!

Michel Fugain : I think it is our profession that does that. That is to say, as long as your eyes are full of energy you have no age — you are as old as your gaze. The moment you have a jaded look, or one that no longer wants anything, no longer hungry, with no desire

Gérard Bertrand : And so you say there is no secret?

Michel Fugain : No, there is no secret — no, but in fact I have lived the life I wanted to live. I live in a gang, I live with a gang — that is why I tell you we miss each other. We create and we do things as a gang. The world can crumble around you, but you know it well in a business like yours — that is to say, combining the restaurant, the hotel, and so on — if you are not a steamroller, you are done for!

Gérard Bertrand : At the same time, you carry the team but the team carries you!

Michel Fugain : But of course, energy plus energy plus energy makes an absolutely unstoppable energy.

Gérard Bertrand : So, Chef, what have we got in store for the second course?

Chef Laurent Chabert : The dentex!

Gérard Bertrand : The fish that bites — the dentex!

Chef Laurent Chabert : The dentex, I cooked it on the barbecue — I like the slight barbecue flavour with fish, and especially with red wine.

Gérard Bertrand : Here is the Or & Azur wine — it's actually made in the Languedoc and it's an organic wine, and on top of that Bee Friendly, meaning we respect the bees, we go even further than organic. It's a superb red wine from the Languedoc — I'm raising a glass with you, Michel, and I think it will go beautifully with the dentex. I do enjoy drinking light reds with fish.

Michel Fugain : Yes, I agree with that — fish that absolutely demands white wine alongside it is not a given.

Gérard Bertrand : There are two grape varieties that work well with fish — Pinot Noir of course, and also when it is grenache-based, because these are grape varieties that produce fairly light wines. You don't need the flesh of meat for the red wine to be absorbed by the fat of the meat, whereas here it works well

Tasting moment

Gérard Bertrand : The dentex — you have the privilege of eating it often, and you told me it was one of the best fish you had ever eaten.

Michel Fugain : No, the scorpionfish here in Corsica is very good — I wonder if I don't actually prefer the scorpionfish to the dentex.

Gérard Bertrand : Do you have time to go fishing or not?

Michel Fugain : No. I would have the time but it's not my thing — I am not a fisherman, I am not a hunter, I am a dreamer

Gérard Bertrand : As you mentioned your age, I just want to ask you one question — how do you manage when you have, as you do, the good fortune of — I have counted — six decades and the seventh just beginning, of experience? What is your perspective on the periods that have marked you the most and the one where you were most in tune with the times?

Michel Fugain : I am going to give you an answer that might seem obvious because there was success — it was an enormous success — it was the era of the seventies, because those were years of freedom, that is to say years of freedom that today's young people will never be able to know. When you talk to them about it they don't know what it means, they cannot imagine it. What I retain above all is the way in which the society in which we lived evolved, because indeed you are talking about 70 years, 65 years of observation, of sniffing out a society — I am the son of a doctor, a very humanist doctor, very politically engaged. I never did a single thing in my life without thinking about my father's judgement, never, even now that my father is no longer here. I watched this society evolve and it evolved in the opposite direction to everything we could have dreamed of in the seventies, which were years of freedom. So from the eighties and nineties — which I call the gift-wrap years because there was nothing inside and everything was in pretty paper — the nineties, not much, nothing interesting, and from 2000 it becomes a complete struggle with overlapping issues including terrorism. So what is left for me? That kind of gap of the seventies, which were incredible years of creation, because musically, what was done in that era is incredible.

Gérard Bertrand : Today, with the contribution of technology — since I see it in my own profession, there have been pendulum swings if you like, and oenology brought a great deal, then there was standardisation, and now we are returning to origins — has technology in music had a pendulum effect? Do you find today a creative momentum that means we are rediscovering a little more purity in what people do? How do you analyse the contribution of all the technology, the computing, the contribution to music? 

Michel Fugain : Technology has apparently brought a great many things; it has brought, as in your profession, standardisation — that is to say there is factory music, if you like, it comes out of a production line.

Gérard Bertrand : It's formulaic!

Michel Fugain : Which should normally give more value to craftsmanship, which is at the same time creative — it doesn't always do so, because the public has also changed: they are consumers, they don't know what they are being given but they take it.

Gérard Bertrand : And today, if you had to name three artists who inspire you?

Michel Fugain : Paul McCartney, Stevie Wonder for melodic creation — there are extraordinary voices I have loved forever. Michael McDonald — people like that are things that are just a little on the edge. When you listen to Michael McDonald's voice, it is not a beautiful voice; it is a voice that grabs your heart because there is an energy and a power. And Paul McCartney is a genius — he was the one who opened doors and windows for us

Gérard Bertrand : It's fantastic — when you look at your career, you've always been ahead of your time, because you compose, you play, you sing, and you were one of the first to put on shows, you've done musicals, you've created your own band, and so on. So, what does it mean to be ahead of your time today?

Michel Fugain : Being avant-garde today means either you are not heard, or you have been labelled avant-garde, or the beautiful people have labelled you avant-garde, they stick an avant-garde label on you, and then joy, you are forgotten, that's how it is

Gérard Bertrand : What I mean, Michel, when I say that, is that you have always been a few seconds ahead of what was about to happen, and so you have created movements, because you are one of those people who have inspired generations. There are artists — young artists — who have recently covered your songs. How does it feel when the whole young generation covers your songs? What does it do to you when you see that?

Michel Fugain : My first reaction was: it's a shame they are not stirring up the anthill — I would have liked them to do something genuinely different, something that comes from a long way back. But a melody has no age; it depends only on the way you interpret it. I don't think it is a question of age or period, because if you listen to songs currently that could date from 50 or 60 years ago and that feel old — and everything I hear around me — I am waiting for the one that will make me say: this one is going to last a long time.

Gérard Bertrand : Do you sometimes sing polyphonies?

Michel Fugain : No, that is truly cultural, it is truly a matter of identity. If you analyse it, it is not complicated, but it is a way of using one's voice that only Corsicans, Neapolitans, and Sicilians use — that is to say, very timbred voices. You know, polyphonic chants are in fact chants that were sung in churches; they were shepherds who sang them because there were no organs in the churches, and it was they who performed the liturgical chants.

Gérard Bertrand : I love polyphony very much, and when I look at how he sings — I was recently in Corsica, and when I see my friends singing Gregorian chant, it reminds me, it creates a connection because it comes from the depths, it comes from the gut, it opens the chakras. It's a music that elevates you, one that makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand up. Do you feel the same thing?

Michel Fugain : With time, my hair has stopped growing at all!

Gérard Bertrand : So, Chef, what do we have now, because we're going to drink the Château L'Hospitalet 2018, Michel.

Michel Fugain : I have already eaten with that.

Gérard Bertrand : I was told you had a good lunch this afternoon.

Chef Laurent Chabert : Here is the duck breast fillet that was cooked pink, simply with garden green beans — the first ones we had — cooked just until crisp, with an apicius sauce and a few spices

Michel Fugain : What is an apicius sauce?

Chef Laurent Chabert : With a few spices, our honey, a little soy sauce and cumin

Gérard Bertrand : Because at Château L'Hospitalet we make wine but we also produce a little honey and olive oil, all of it in biodynamics. And we can't wait to see you again to share all of that. We have something else to share with a little song that is going to be a throwback taking us back a few years

Musical interlude.

Gérard Bertrand : Life is a good time and it was a good novel? It is a beautiful story, and it is true that when we see your enthusiasm — because in enthusiasm there is Theos, there is God — and that is important because people do not remember that word. You truly embody enthusiasm, and everyone has had their own journey. When I see you on stage and when I see you here, because it has been a little while since we last spoke, I am blown away, and at the same time it is wonderful to share that with our friends who are here this evening, and I hope we will keep in touch for the years to come, because you are only at the beginning of your career.

Michel Fugain : I promised myself I wouldn't come with a walking frame.

Gérard Bertrand : That is to say, you came in 2011 so we're not going to wait another twenty years. Do you still jump around as much on stage or not?

Michel Fugain : It can happen to me, but a little less all the same!

Gérard Bertrand : There is one thing I watch in artists and that is their footwork, because I am a former sportsman — as you know, I am a former rugby player — and so you were wearing trainers when you were on stage. Last year there was Greg David and I looked at his thighs — he had the thighs of a top-level athlete, you know, when you dance and sing. There was also the singer Texas, who ran from one end of the stage to the other all evening, and that is a great feat of endurance. So you are athletes all the same, because you need to be on top form when you do that every evening. Do you do a bit of core work or nothing at all?

Michel Fugain : I have a garden, it is true that all of that exists and we are in good physical shape, but the fact remains that you cannot escape the rule — once you are past 50, when you wake up in the morning and nothing hurts, it means you are dead.

Gérard Bertrand : But you know there was a man here called Antoine Verda who was a figure of the region, a winemaker who defended the cause of winemakers and who said: I want to die, but on my feet. The most beautiful death is to die on one's feet, is it not? I would like to give a little nod to our friends at Sodibo, because they delivered the wines to you today and they represent us in Corsica — we thank them for delivering to you; they are all across Corsica. Michel, if you are in the area this summer, you are most welcome! Does that appeal to you? Michel, I wish you above all a very lovely weekend, a beautiful summer, and do get in touch if you are in the area, and as soon as your new show is launching, keep me posted.

Michel Fugain : Alright, Gérard! I say hello to everyone — hi Laurent, hi Pierre!

Gérard Bertrand : And thank you to all those who followed us this evening, and see you next Friday for another wonderful evening — goodbye for now, Michel!

Michel Fugain : Thank you and see you soon!

Gérard Bertrand : Ciao!