Journalist at RFI (ex-DW, BBC, CBC, F24...), writer (on art, music, culture...), I work in radio, podcasting, online, on films.
As a writer, I also contributed to the New Arab, Art UK, Byline Times, the i Paper...
Born in Paris, I was based in Prague, Miami, London, Nairobi (covering East Africa), Bangui, and in Bristol, UK. I also reported from Italy, Germany, Haiti, Tunisia, Liberia, Senegal, India, Mexico, Iraq, South Africa...
This blog is to share my work, news and cultural discoveries.
Thanks to Maria Popova and all she posts on her lovely website.
This weekend, reflection on creativity and loneliness, a deep relationship indeed, and necessary, and in the end valuable. Let's not forget it.
Virginia Woolf on the Relationship Between Loneliness and Creativity
“If I could catch the feeling, I would; the feeling of the singing of the real world, as one is driven by loneliness and silence from the habitable world.”
BY MARIA POPOVA
There is a kind of loneliness that lodges itself in the psyche and never fully leaves, a loneliness most anguishing not in solitude but in companionship and amid the crowd. If solitude fertilizes the imagination, loneliness vacuums it of vitality and sands the baseboards of the spirit with the scratchy restlessness of longing — for connection, for communion, for escape. And yet it is out of this restlessness that so many great works of art are born.
“We have all known the long loneliness,” Dorothy Day wrote, but some — artists, perhaps — know it more intimately than others and few artists have articulated this knowledge with more stunning and stirring lucidity than Virginia Woolf (January 25, 1882–March 28, 1941). Loneliness permeates A Writer’s Diary (public library) — that abiding source of Woolf’s wisdom on such varied dimensions of existence as the paradoxes of aging, the elasticity of time, the key to lasting relationships, and the creative benefits of keeping a diary. In fact, it is precisely the transmutation of loneliness into connection with the universal human experience that lends Woolf’s writing its timeless penetrative power.
In the late summer of 1928, a month before the publication of Orlandosubverted stereotypes and revolutionized culture, 44-year-old Woolf found herself grappling once more with the yin-yang of loneliness and creation. In a diary entry penned at Monk’s House — the countryside cottage she and her husband had bought in Sussex a decade earlier, where she crafted some of her most beloved works — she writes:
"Often down here I have entered into a sanctuary … of great agony once; and always some terror; so afraid one is of loneliness; of seeing to the bottom of the vessel. That is one of the experiences I have had here in some Augusts; and got then to a consciousness of what I call “reality”: a thing I see before me: something abstract; but residing in the downs or sky; beside which nothing matters; in which I shall rest and continue to exist. Reality I call it. And I fancy sometimes this is the most necessary thing to me: that which I seek. But who knows — once one takes a pen and writes? How difficult not to go making “reality” this and that, whereas it is one thing. Now perhaps this is my gift: this perhaps is what distinguishes me from other people: I think it may be rare to have so acute a sense of something like that — but again, who knows? I would like to express it too."
The following fall, thirteen days before the publication of A Room of One’s Own — that ultimate paean to the relationship between loneliness and creative vitality — Woolf revisits the subject in her diary, contemplating the strange ways in which we deny or confer validity upon our loneliness. Loneliness, after all, is an interior chill independent of externalities and often thrives precisely when our circumstances appear most enviable to the outside world — a warping of reality that is itself intensely, almost unbearably real. Woolf writes:
"These October days are to me a little strained and surrounded with silence. What I mean by this last word I don’t quite know, since I have never stopped “seeing” people… No, it’s not physical silence; it’s some inner loneliness".
"I was walking up Bedford Place is it — the straight street with all the boarding houses this afternoon — and I said to myself spontaneously, something like this. How I suffer. And no one knows how I suffer, walking up this street, engaged with my anguish, as I was after Thoby [Woolf’s brother] died — alone; fighting something alone. But then I had the devil to fight, and now nothing. And when I come indoors it is all so silent — I am not carrying a great rush of wheels in my head — yet I am writing… And it is autumn; and the lights are going up… and this celebrity business is quite chronic — and I am richer than I have ever been — and bought a pair of earrings today — and for all this, there is vacancy and silence somewhere in the machine. On the whole, I do not much mind; because what I like is to flash and dash from side to side, goaded on by what I call reality. If I never felt these extraordinarily pervasive strains — of unrest or rest or happiness or discomfort — I should float down into acquiescence. Here is something to fight; and when I wake early I say to myself Fight, fight. If I could catch the feeling, I would; the feeling of the singing of the real world, as one is driven by loneliness and silence from the habitable world… Anything is possible. And this curious steed, life, is genuine. Does any of this convey what I want to say? But I have not really laid hands on the emptiness after all".
Le Royaume-Uni va-t-il quitter l'Union européenne ? C'est la question qui sera posée aux Britanniques le 23 juin. Les uns plaident pour une souveraineté retrouvée. Les autres brandissent le coût économique que représenterait cette démarche. Quoiqu'il en soit, le résultat du référendum aura des conséquences sur le reste de l'Europe. Emission spéciale avec un reportage de Melissa Chemam à Bristol.
Au
Royaume-Uni, le référendum programmé par le Premier ministre David Cameron pour
le 23 juin a profondément divisé la population. Si les partisans de l’Union
dénonce le gaspillage et les risques pris par ce vote et sa campagne,
indéniablement les débats ont permis aux uns de réaffirmer leur choix, aux
autres d’approfondir leurs doutes et enfin de renouer avec l’élan démocratique
après les législatives de 2015, qui ont révélé les failles d’un système
bipartisan et contrôlé.
Si
les principaux tenants du Brexit se révèlent être des hommes politiques
excentriques - tels Nigel Farage, leader de UKIP, ou encore l’ancien maire de
Londres, Boris Johnson, ainsi que riches entrepreneurs dont les activités sont
basées dans des paradis fiscaux, le Britannique moyen semble soit dérouté soit
passivement europhile. Mais dans quelques villes, les pro-Union sont aussi très
nombreux.
C’est le cas de la capitale bien sûr, réel pôle de mixité européenne,
mais aussi de la ville de Bristol, à 150 km à l’ouest. Une ville où l’on peut
entendre plus de 90 langues, marquée par le métissage, et qui a été l’an
dernier Capitale européenne de l’environnement. Si la vaste majorité des voix à
Bristol sont pro ‘Remain’, les débats y sont loin d’être éteints mais penchent
vers des arguments rarement entendus dans les médias étrangers…
Reportage : Mélissa Chemam
--
Should they stay or should they go ? Rester ou
partir ?
Depuis le début de cette campagne, les voix se sont faites
de plus en plus discordantes au Royaume-Uni… Pour l’ancien maire de Londres, Boris Johnson, l’avenir du
pays est dans l’autonomie, autrement dit le Brexit...
Pour le leader du Parti travailliste, Jeremy Corbyn, il
faut réformer l’Union européenne et pour cela, y rester.
Entre ses universités très internationales, son industrie
aéronautique centrée sur les usines d’Airbus, et sa culture très métissée, la
ville de Bristol est l’une des plus résolument européennes d’Angleterre. Mais
le débat y faire également rage.
(Bristol - Colston Hall)
Un samedi après-midi pluvieux, Richard Stephen installe
ses revues au bar du principal auditorium de Bristol. C’est là qu’il vient
régulièrement partager les idées de son groupe politique, le Socialist Workers Party.
Richard souhaite faire avancer ses idées en faveur des travailleurs, dans un
pays foncièrement libéral en matière économique. Il n’y a donc pour lui qu’une
solution : le Lexit, ou Left Exit, une sortie par la gauche de l’Union
Européenne…
L’une des communautés les plus vivantes de Bristol est
celle des musiciens. Marquée par une riche histoire qui a explosée dans le
monde entier dans les années 1990 avec le mouvement surnommé trip-hop, Bristol
est aussi une terre de jazzmen. Parmi eux, David Mowat a fondé le Bristol European Jazz Ensemble, où tous
les membres sont d’un pays différents d’Europe. Egalement travailleur social
dans les quartiers défavorisés de la ville, il va voter ‘remain’ – pour rester
-et prône une autre vision de
l’Union.
La participation des jeunes, réputés plus europhiles,
devrait être déterminante le jour J. Alors, In or Out ? Réponse le 23 juin
prochain.
Summer time? Not quite yet. British Summer Time at least.
Music is my enchantement.
Read also below an interview in the Guardian with the wonderful Patti Smith.
TRICKY TO JOIN MASSIVE ATTACK ON STAGE FOR THE FIRST TIME EVER IN THE UK! - PLUS MORE SPECIAL GUESTS ADDED
It’s time for one of the live collaborations of the year as Tricky returns to the stage with Massive Attack for only the second time ever (and the first in the UK) at this year’s Barclaycard presents British Summer Time Hyde Park on Friday 1st July!
The acclaimed artist cut his teeth collaborating with the trip hop duo in the late 1980s but did not share a stage until this year in Berlin. This will be the first time they have ever performed together in the UK.
“We’re pleased to announce that Tricky will be joining us on stage for a few shows this summer – the first one being BST Hyde Park on July 1st.” - Massive Attack
Also taking to the stage on 1st July will be the brilliant Loyle Carner, Shura and Balthazar to kick off Hyde Park’s ten-day festival!
Patti Smith: ‘You decide your fate. Are you going to fall apart or own it?’
The punk-poet genius behind Horses is finally fulfilling her wish to play Hyde Park next month. She talks about life as an outsider, New York’s scuzzy past and why she loves Peter Pan
Before meeting Patti Smith, I receive a few pointers: “She’s not a chitchat person. Do not be any later than 11.30am. Find her in the lobby bar and introduce yourself.”
I don’t fancy getting on the wrong side of her. Smith first made a name for herself on the 1970s New York poetry circuit, giving both barrels to the men who would yell at her to get back in the kitchen. “Sometimes I’d say something intelligent,” she recalls. “Other times I’d just yell: ‘Fuck you.’” She developed into a fearless performer – confrontational, physical, refusing to conform to expectations of how a woman should act on stage.
I arrive half an hour early and nervously stake out the bar - but there’s no sign of her. And it’s not as if you could miss her - at 69 years of age, she still rocks a boyish black blazer, while her hair is now a tangle of shoulder-length grey. It gets to 11.30, then 11.40, and I start to panic. At 11.50, I get a call telling me that Smith has been waiting for 20 minutes. But where? I eventually bump into her in the lobby.
“Why didn’t you call my room?” she says.
I stammer something about following instructions.
“Oh my, I would never keep anyone waiting like that,” she says, aghast. “I am so sorry.”
The next thing I know, she has linked arms with me and is telling me about her jetlag (she’s just flown in from Japan) and how she is combating it by watching her favourite detective shows. As for not being a chitchat person … over the course of an hour and a half, we manage to cover everything from the work of Japanese director Akira Kurosawa to the disaster zone that is Donald Trump, her fear of allergies, and the brief spell she spent in the early 70s working with albino blues musician Johnny Winter as a visual guide (“I would help him negotiate traffic”).
Even after I turn the tape recorder off, she is not going anywhere, offering me tips to assist my pregnant wife (“No salt, that’s my little tip, because your body retains water during summer”) and filling me in on her holiday plans. It turns out that she is actually on vacation as we speak, a three-day stint in London that involves watching her friend Ralph Fiennes in Richard III, visiting the grave of French philosopher Simone Weil in Ashford, and, er, speaking to me.
Officially, we are here to talk about Hyde Park, where she will perform on 1 July as support to Massive Attack. Playing there has been a lifelong dream – she remembers feeling heartbroken after Brian Jones, her favourite Rolling Stone, died, and recalls the concert the band held in the park afterwards.
Breakthrough … Patti Smith with Lenny Kaye at CBGBs club in New York City, 1975. Photograph: Richard E. Aaron/Redferns
“1969,” she says. “I was in Paris with my sister, busking. I didn’t have the money to get to London, but they had the pictures in the French papers that week and I remember Mick released all these butterflies. It seemed like all of youth was in Hyde Park that day.”
How is she going to prepare for the show?
“I’d like to get there early, so I can visit the Peter Pan statue in Kensington Gardens,” she says – and then clocks my confused look. “Have you seen it? Oh, it’s so wonderful! He’s got a pipe and there are fairies about! I used to go and see it in the 70s. I still do. When I was younger, I wanted to be just like him and never grow up. So whenever I’m in London, I always go say hello to Peter Pan.”
If the idea of Smith making pilgrimages to see a fictional flying boy during her punk heyday seems a little unexpected, then that is probably because Smith is on very casual terms with convention. By the time she was 20, she had already abandoned the life set out for her (she gave a child up for adoption when she became pregnant aged 16, and later quit a factory job) then moved to New York to pursue her dreams of becoming a poet. Back then, the city was gritty and dangerous – which was how Smith liked it.
“Much better than I do now, because it was nearly bankrupt, cheap to live in, and there was always action. It felt like the possibilities were endless. I was 20 years old, and sleeping in graveyards and subways.”
Graveyards?
“Oh it was scary!” she laughs. “But no more more scary than sleeping the night in a field in south Jersey.”
The city’s heady mix of danger and creativity seeped into the art scene. Smith, who found most of the poetry readings she attended “very boring for a young girl”, recruited Lenny Kaye from a local record store to play feedback behind her verses. “I wanted to get across the energy from my generation,” she says, and sure enough, people started reacting – both positively and negatively.
“I didn’t have any fear in dealing with anybody,” she recalls. “I never left the stage crying, and if I was booed, I would stand my ground. Eighty per cent of the time, I could turn the situation around to my favour.”
Smith often ended her sets with Piss Factory, an autobiographical tale about finding the strength to escape a dead-end job. She says the same guys heckling her at the start would find themselves relating to it and on her side by the end.
Smith says she never intended to make a record, yet it was out of these performances that her debut album, Horses, was born. Even now, 41 years on from its release, it sounds like nothing else: snarling and snotty, yet transcendental and poetic, too. She asked Velvet Underground founder John Cale to produce it – not the sensible choice, given his unconventional working methods – and the pair clashed frequently.
Yet it was Cale who spotted Smith’s gift for improvisation and, rather than try to rein it in, pushed her to explore it further. The results included sprawling masterpieces such as the nine-minute, stream-of-consciousness epic Birdland, although Smith was unaware quite how important the freeform music on Horses was at the time.
She says she expected to return to working in a bookstore after finishing it, but instead found herself inundated with offers to travel the world: to London and Paris, Finland and Sweden. Taking what she had learned from the likes of Bob Dylan and Johnny Winters, she grew into a magnetic performer, full of energy and spontaneity.
This wasn’t always to her benefit. One time, while playing with Bob Seger in Florida, Smith was lost in a performance of her song Ain’t It Strange – “spinning like a dervish” is how she puts it – and tried to bring herself to a standstill by slamming her foot on her monitor. The monitor, however, was balanced precariously on the edge of the stage and she fell 14 feet on to the concrete below.
“It was a bad fall. I fractured my skull, several vertebrae in my neck, my back, my tailbone. I broke some teeth. It was serious. And I still have certain repercussions – I never got my full eyesight back. I don’t have the range of movement that I used to.”
As she recounts the months of physical therapy it took for her to get back on stage, her phone rings and she checks it quickly: “Oh it’s my son!” she exclaims. “Can I just get this? Would you mind?”
Of course not, go ahead, I say.
“Hi, Jack!” she beams. “Where are you? I’m just doing an interview in London about our job in Hyde Park and I was just about to talk about you.”
From the other end of the line I hear: “Aw mom, you don’t have to talk about me again!”
The punk rock icon/embarrassing mum ends the call. “Sorry, I just love my kids. They lost their father really young, and he was a great musician, so it’s like music is a continual connective force between them and their father.”
Their father was Fred “Sonic” Smith, the MC5 guitarist whom she married in 1980. They had two children – Jackson and Jesse – and she retreated from rock’n’roll for the best part of a decade to raise them. The time off had its musical benefits, too, not least because Fred taught her how to sing properly, using her stomach and lungs rather than delivering her words through her nose. It is partly for this reason that, when Smith decided she would celebrate Horses’ 40th birthday by touring the record in full, she sounded even more impassioned than she did in the 70s. Anyone who was perhaps expecting Smith to dial down the energy in her 69th year was in for a shock.
“That’s just not how I work,” she shrugs. “I’m incapable of being stripped down!”
Instead, she updated the album’s lyrics as call-to-arms for people to rise up against corporate interests (“We are all being fucked by corporations, by the military,” she would spit. “We are free people and we want the world and we want it NOW!”) and ensured that even the quieter moments such as Elegie – where she recites the names of people who have died, including Fred Smith, who died in 1994 – remained intense and emotional.
‘I’m going to be 70 soon,” she says. “And I know I can’t sing like Amy Winehouse or Rihanna. I can’t rely on that physical beauty or certain things that you have when you’re young. But what I can rely on is that, when I go on stage, I am only there for one reason and that’s to communicate with the people. I don’t have any wishes for myself. I don’t care about career. I already have a place, and a good name … there’s nothing that I really want, except for us all to experience something together.”
When Smith first brought Horses back at Primavera, she encored with her 1978 song Rock N Roll Nigger. As a piece of art, Smith’s intentions are clear – the song is about the acceptance of outsiders – but in 2015, it seemed an uncomfortable choice of song to perform, not least because the (mainly white) crowd seemed happy to shout the N-word back at her in gleeful abandon.
“I don’t play it normally,” she says when I bring it up, “out of respect for our times. Just like I don’t play Gloria in churches. I’m happy to be disrespectful, but I’m also happy to be respectful. On the other hand, when I was inducted into the rock’n’roll hall of fame I performed Rock N Roll Nigger because I promised my mother I would – it’s her favourite song, because it’s our most high-energy song – and right in front of me was Clive Davis, with Aretha Franklin and Al Sharpton. I don’t know whether they liked that or not, but that’s what I did.”
Smith says that when she wrote the song she believed in our power to transform words – “Like how if you said ‘fuck’ you thought you were going to hell because it was so dirty … or how the worst word you could call an Irish kid was ‘punk’” – but she accepts that the song’s message doesn’t really fit in the current climate.
“Sometimes I still play it because it’s my favourite song to do,” she says. “And it was really about myself - ‘Baby was a black sheep, baby was a whore’ - the lowest things you could call somebody, because I’d been through a lot of derision in my life. And what the crowd sing back to me is the line “outside of society” because that’s what it’s about: gay kids, poets, people of colour, all of us. It was a big community of people outside of society. The song just means: ‘Kicked out of there? Come here!’”
Live on the Pyramid stage, Glastonbury 2015. Photograph: Dylan Martinez/Reuters
Being on stage, says Smith, is like a microcosm of life. “All the same wonderful and embarrassing things that can happen in life can happen on stage, and you have to face them all with equal humour. You can’t think you’re a god or a queen because you have great moments, and you can’t think you’re a failure because you have terrible moments.”
“I thought to myself: ‘Well, there’s 100,000 people out there … I felt like a real asshole,’” she laughs. “And then I thought ‘What the fuck? It’s rock’n’roll! And what did I want to do more than anything in that moment?”
She bares her teeth: “I wanted to turn up my amp and just fucking rip the strings off my guitar … because I had so much energy. You can decide your own fate. Are you going to let it all fall apart? Or are you going to own it?”
Smith might be nearly 70 but she still seems to have retained both her anger and her sense of childlike wonder. When she talks about music and art and poetry, often with her eyes closed in rapture, it is as if she is impervious to ever becoming jaded.
“I always wished I could go to Hyde Park, and now I finally can,” she says, lost in dreamland at the thought. “For me, I can go all the way back to being 22.”
Le bien-heureux stade des épreuves... Nous y voilà! Après 18 mois de bonheur à Bristol, le fruit du travail accompli est presque prêt.
Photo : Bristol's Bearpit, février 2015, par Mélissa Chemam
Je suis 'over the moon', comme disent mes amis britanniques, et je ne saurais assez remercier Bertrand Dicale, Elisabeth Samama et Stephen Carrière pour leur confiance, leur travail, leur accompagnement et leur investissement sur ce projet! La présentation du livre vient d'être publiée sur le site des Editions Anne Carrière. La voici ci-dessous. Le livre sortira en France le 6 octobre 2016. Je retourne aux relectures! --
De Massive Attack à Banksy, l’histoire d’un groupe d’artistes, de leur ville, Bristol, et de leurs révolutions
Qu’ont en commun le Pont suspendu d’Isambart Brunel, l’acteur Cary Grant, le groupe Massive Attack et l’artiste de rue Banksy ? Ils sont tous originaires de Bristol, une ville moyenne de l’ouest de l’Angleterre. Une ville marquée par une histoire riche et complexe, mais encore jamais racontée ! Marquée par une fortune précoce liée à l’ouverture de l’Angleterre vers l’Amérique, elle devient aussi un des points névralgiques du commerce triangulaire. C’est justement cette histoire qui va nourrir, de manière inédite et radicale, la génération d’artistes éclose à Bristol à partir de la fin des années 1970.
Tout prend forme lorsque qu’un jeune graffeur anglo-italien du nom de Robert Del Naja signe du pseudonyme « 3D » sa première œuvre de rue sur un mur de la ville en 1983. Avant de fonder le groupe Massive Attack en 1988 avec les DJs noirs Grantley Marshall et Andrew Vowles, il rencontrera les pionniers du post-punk de Londres et Bristol, les passionnées de reggae antillais du quartier de Saint Pauls, puis la chanteuse Neneh Cherry et le rappeur Tricky. Creuset inattendu mêlant hip-pop, reggae, soul et guitares rebelles, le premier album de Massive Attack, Blue Lines, sort en 1991 et provoque une révolution dans la culture populaire britannique. Massive Attack devient l’incarnation du succès d’un métissage à la britannique, et parviendra à toujours se renouveler, tenter de nouvelles révolutions et durer au-delà de nombreux mouvements musicaux des années 1990 et 2000, telles la Brit Pop, l’electronica et le drum and bass.
Dans le sillage de cette créativité débridée mêlant musique, art et implication sociale profonde, naissent aussi les groupes Portishead et Roni Size, les mouvements nommés trip-hop et dubstep, et le génial Banksy, inspiré dès son plus jeune âge par les graffitis de Robert Del Naja. Depuis, la profondeur artistique de ces artistes et leur engagement n’ont fait que se renforcer, tout comme leur lien avec leur ville. Ce lien va devenir le tremplin qui les porte jusqu’à l’autre bout du monde, de l’Amérique à Gaza. Il pousse aussi très tôt Robert Del Naja à se mobiliser – contre la guerre d’Irak, pour les droits des Palestiniens ou, plus récemment, pour l’accueil des réfugiés jetés sur les routes européennes. Rébellion, art, musique, engagement, Bristol synthétise ainsi une autre histoire du Royaume-Uni. Une histoire qui amène au sommet des charts et sur le devant de la scène de parfaits autodidactes, et la part plurielle et afro-antillaise de la culture britannique.
L'auteur
Journaliste depuis 2004, passée par Paris, Prague, Miami, Londres, Nairobi et Bangui avant d’atterrir à Bristol, Mélissa Chemam est allée à la rencontre de tous ces artistes, chez eux, et sur les routes qu’ils parcourent.
Diffusion Interforum ISBN : 978-2-8433-7809-6 Code barre : 9782843378096 Nombre de pages : 400 Parution : 6 octobre 2016 Prix : 19 €
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Photo : The 'Mild Mild West' by Banksy, Hamilton House, sur Stokes Croft, février 2015, par Mélissa Chemam
Photo : 'Wild Dayz', livre de photographies de Beezer, couverture photographiée à Saint Pauls en février 2015 par Mélissa Chemam
Bristol M Shed Museum (photo par Mélissa Chemam), février 2015 - Exposition sur le rôle des combattants des Antilles britanniques dans la Grande Guerre
La ferme urbaine de Saint Werburgh, Bristol, 17 février 2015
"Shadow selfie" à Saint Pauls, février 2015
Graffiti au début de Stokes Croft, près de Saint Pauls, à Bristol. Photo par Mélissa Chemam. Février 2015
Sur le Brexit, voici un point de vue intéressant venant du milieu musical.
Mon reportage sur le sujet pour la Deutsche Welle sera en ligne en fin de semaine et fera la part belle aux musiciens... En attendant cette perspective donne aussi de bon argument sur l'avenir des liens entre les cultures dans le rapport de force UK /UE.
Muse, PJ Harvey et Deep Purple au Montreux Jazz Festival, Iron Maiden, Massive Attack, les Chemical Brothers et Muse encore à Paléo, également Radiohead à l’OpenAir Saint-Gall… A première vue, l’été des festivals fait la part belle aux têtes d’affiche britanniques. Auquel cas, il y a lieu de se demander ce qu’une éventuelle sortie du Royaume-Uni de l’Union européenne changerait au marché des concerts. Le Brexitfait-il peur aux promoteurs, aux agents, aux organisateurs de concerts? Le Brexit peut-il péjorer l’offre musicale sur sol helvétique?
«Les agents de concerts réfléchissent comme n’importe quel capitaine d’entreprise: aucun ne veut du Brexit», répond Vincent Sager. Patron de la société vaudoise Opus One, détenue en partie par Paléo, Vincent Sager résume l’allure du marché des concerts: «Les engagements d’artistes se font beaucoup en euros, un peu en livres, également en dollars». Conséquence probable du Brexit? «Si la Grande-Bretagne quitte l’Europe, la livre baissera sans doute et le franc suisse deviendra une valeur refuge d’autant plus forte.»
Artiste anglais à la baisse
Des musiciens, des chanteurs, des groupes anglo-saxons, l’histoire du rock en a bouffé depuis l’invention des Rolling Stones il y a de cela un demi-siècle. Cinquante ans après la «British Invasion» (ainsi qu’on la nommait aux Etats-Unis), force est de constater cependant que les artistes insulaires ne fournissent plus le gros des troupes. En Europe, du moins. Or, note Christian Wicky, directeur du distributeur Irascible, basé à Lausanne, le Royaume-Uni exporte beaucoup moins d’artistes qu’il y a 20 ans. «Hier, un artiste sur deux provenait d’Angleterre. Ce n’est plus le cas aujourd’hui, du moins en ce qui concerne la scène indépendante. A l’exception d’Adele, bien entendu.»
Se pose alors la question suivante: les artistes anglais, ceux qui s’exportent, vont-ils pâtir du Brexit? Tout dépend de qui vend quoi, et à qui. Concernant les grandes vedettes internationales, Muse par exemple, le marché procède de deux pôles distincts, pour ainsi dire invariables. Londres, d’une part, les Etats-Unis de l’autre. Les agents de Londres vendent des concerts pour l’Europe, l’Asie et, très souvent, l’Amérique du Sud également. Quant aux agents américains, car tout artiste international a un agent anglais et un agent américain, ils se chargent de l’Amérique du Nord, parfois de l’Amérique du Sud. «Les artistes anglais composent un domaine bien particulier, relève Sébastien Vuignier, de l’agence lausannoise Takk: certains jouent régulièrement aux Etats-Unis, tandis que d’autres, des pointures telles que Robbie Williams qui remplit des stades, n’ont pas autant de succès aux Etats-Unis.»
Le Brexit va-t-il péjorer les tractations entre Londres et le reste de l’Europe? «Sans doute pas directement, envisage Sébastien Vuignier. Si problèmes il y a, ils concernent plutôt les retombées indirectes du Brexit, l’impact sur l’économie globale qui, à son tour, pourrait affecter l’économie des concerts.»
Pas de rabais pour le public
Dans l’expectative, il règne comme un flou parmi les professionnels. Qu’on vende des disques, des concerts ou des chaussettes, on suit en fin de compte toujours les mêmes règles économiques. Sur quoi, d’aucuns ajouteront avec une pudeur tout helvétique: «Pas de raison de paniquer». La musique est une denrée comme un autre? A ceci près, toutefois, que les tournées d’artistes se «dealent» dans la marge de l’import-export. «Le marché de la musique passe sous le radar», constate Patrick David, de Two Gentlemen, promoteur lausannois. Des Suisse à Londres, ce sont, pour Two Gentlemen, les Sophie Hunger, Erik Truffaz et autre Young Gods.
«Sans même considérer le Brexit, la baisse de l’euro et la montée du franc ont occasionné une baisse des prix en Suisse, constate Patrick David. Mais pas dans le domaine musical. Car le client reste local. Celui qui fréquente Paléo ne va pas en France voisine écouter les mêmes concerts. Conséquence: les promoteurs locaux, qui importent beaucoup, sont encore plus riches grâce à la faiblesse de l’euro. Au contraire, lorsqu’on vend des groupes suisses dans le reste de l’Europe, on perd de l’argent.» Et Patrick David de s’interroger: «L’impression générale est au repli identitaire. Les artistes allemands, comme les Français, jouent de plus en plus à domicile.» Impression similaire du côté des distributeurs de disques. Ainsi de Christian Wicky, d’Irascible: «Les marchés nationaux, français, allemands, suédois également, grappillent doucement leur part».
Un marché mondialisé
Renversement de perspective. Si les tenants du Brexit s’inspirent du modèle suisse, de son indépendance économique, avérée ou non, n’est-ce pas la situation helvétique qui mérite d’être interrogée en premier lieu? «Vu de la sorte, souligne Patrick David, c’est l’ultralibéralisme du système économique qui pose problème.» Et le cas britannique, avec ou sans Brexit, n’est pas nouveau: «La frontière existe déjà avec la Grande-Bretagne, qui ne fait pas partie de l’espace Schengen. Lorsqu’un groupe suisse se présente à Douvres, il est déjà contrôlé. Le Brexit obligera-t-il à se fournir en visas et permis de travail pour aller jouer à Londres? Tout est question de réciprocité. Prenez l’exemple des Etats-Unis: les Américains ne paient rien pour jouer en Europe, mais les Européens ont besoin d’un permis de travail pour jouer aux Etats-Unis…»
Enfin, interroger l’impact du Brexit sur le marché du rock, c’est également comprendre que ce même marché ne concerne plus uniquement l’Europe et l’Occident en général. En faisant affaire aussi bien avec l’Amérique du Sud (Argentine, Chili, Brésil) que l’Asie (la Chine en particulier et ses festivals géants), les agents londoniens ne se focalisent plus tant sur l’Europe, qui reste un marché important, mais de loin pas le seul ni le plus grand.
