An artist with a moving destiny. Étienne Daho was one of the key idols of the 80s, renowned for his timeless hits, his atypical appearance and his suave voice. However, the life of Jane Birkin’s accomplice was not a long, quiet river all his life.
From his childhood in Oran in Algeria at the end of the 1950s, Étienne Daho had to overcome the absence of his military father, finding himself alone at the age of 4 with his mother and two older sisters. “I remember precisely the moment when he left us, in Algeria,” explained the artist in Télérama in 2006. “He arrived in a Jeep, with another soldier. He took me in his arms, squeezed very tightly, and he left. With a bang. I knew he had left us for good.”
Then the singer continues. “Two or three years later, we came to France, to Reims, then to Rennes. And I didn’t see my father again until many years later. He reappeared one evening backstage at the Olympia… I I didn’t want to see it. As if to make him pay for this abandonment by turning his back on him in turn. “I was a fashionable young man, a little sure of myself, I wasn’t expecting this event at all. So, I barred him from the dressing room, I didn’t want to being caught up in the past. The past, we can talk about it when it no longer hurts. But there, it was too painful”, he confided in the pages of Paris Match, and quoted by Closer, in 2007 .
A failed reunion which does not leave Étienne Daho indifferent however, dedicating the song Boulevard des Capucines to his father who died in 1990. It was during his appearance on RFM in 2015 that the artist explained why he chose to forgive his father. “You can’t live in anger all your life,” he admitted to host Karine Ferri at the time on the show Un Dimanche avec. “Especially when we realize that our parents were our ages, that they were not necessarily armed, that they did stupid things; not because they wanted to hurt you, but because they did what they could with what they had at the time.”
If Étienne Daho had a complicated relationship with his father, this injury would have reinforced his idea that he did not see himself having children. “I don’t know how to build a family. I have a resistance to commitment. I felt guilty for the evening my father showed up at the Olympia. As if I had wanted to make him pay for his abandonment by abandoning it in turn”, confided the interpreter of Week-end in Rome in the pages of L’Obs.
However, the singer shares something in common with his father, when he reveals his hidden paternity to NEXT magazine. “I told you that I looked a little like my father… We sometimes realize that we reproduce the same mistakes as our parents… I am the father of a boy. He was born when I was 17, in Rennes. I cared about it, yes, at the injunction of my mother. And perhaps then there were others, given the life I led,” he admitted in this Libération supplement.
Another tragedy also turned the life of Étienne Daho upside down. In 2016, the sixty-year-old star lost one of his sisters. A difficult ordeal to overcome, occurring at a significant moment for the singer who lost another idol at the start of the year.
“I was burying my sister. I learned of Bowie’s death on the way to the cemetery. I was never able to listen to his last album, I’m not ready, it’s too deadly”, said the author -composer and performer with L’Obs. “My life is made up of very great joys and very great sorrows. It is never lukewarm.”
