In the Abbesses district, at the bend of a small cobbled street, Étienne Daho opens the doors of his house to the journalist Géraldine Sarratia for The Taste of M. “People often point it out, not because it’s beautiful – it’s certainly the most rotten facade on the street – but because this house has a history,” introduces the performer of the 1980s hit Weekend in Rome. Indeed, this residence is not ordinary since it housed Buffalo Bill, an American artist from the end of the 19th century, who regularly performed in Parisian circuses.
An inspired house
Inside, “It’s like an intestine”jokes Etienne Daho, quoting Jeanne Moreau, who liked to describe this former winding artist’s studio, filled with corridors on the first level. On the second, a large living room “where the spirit of Buffalo Bill perhaps still floats…”a large library houses the singer’s loves, frames on the wall retracing the film One nightto the books of Rimbaud, Warhol, Pierre et Gilles, or even Marilyn Monroe, whose passion he nourishes. “Everyone projects something of themselves onto Marilyn Monroe. I almost bought the house where she died in the United States, which was for sale for very little, confides Etienne Daho. I am fascinated by houses, whether it is the Villa Malaparte, Syd Barrett’s apartment [membre de Pink Floyd]Bacon’s workshop… »
Etienne Daho in a pub, in April 1989, in London.
Frederic GARCIA/Getty Images
From Oran to Rennes, London and Paris
If the singer always gravitated around Montmartre, he began his life in Oran. “You had to go under the windows to avoid getting hit by bullets, I experienced it as a game when I was a child.” He quickly joined a small village near the Algerian coast with his grandparents and aunts, in “a large house divided in two, with living quarters on one side and a grocery store on the other.” When he left Algeria, he went to Reims with one of his aunts before settling in Rennes, London, then Paris. “My grandparents lived on Place Blanche, my aunts had a brasserie there, I’ve always been in that area”he explains. Opposite, he discovered rock at the Locomotive, which hosted English groups, and his career took off: after two degrees in visual arts and English, he began to reveal the songs he wrote.
Artist’s life in Montmartre
Once established in Montmartre, he surrounded himself with books and records, his most precious acquisitions. In the large living room, two sofas “with cream square poufs, lots of books and records. All in wood, like in Twin Peaks », but also a corner where the singer rehearses, writes and annotates his songs. We quickly understand that Étienne Daho is not very materialistic, but very attached to objects that carry an emotional imprint. “I lived in London for a long time with four books, three pairs of underwear and a toothbrush. I found it fantastic to have nothing, I got used to this Spartan side. In Paris there are too many things, I buy little, but I am attached to my books and my records.” Photos of Syd Barrett, his “hero”a post-modernist painting by a painter friend that brings together all his passions at once: soul music, Marilyn Monroe, London, Brigitte Bardot, George Dyer, Francis Bacon’s muse… “I am not attached to anything else, he continues. Everything happens in my kitchen: postcards, words from Marianne Faithfull or Jane Birkin, frames from artists I like… That’s what counts.”
