INTERVIEW
We are in the mid-1990s. Garou is in his twenties. He plays blues, jazz, rhythm and blues, in various little-known groups in Quebec. It was then that he learned from a friend that producer Luc Plamondon auditioned for the musical Starmania . Invited Friday Anne Roumanoff, in It's good on Europe 1, Garou tells us how this audition has taken off his career. And this even though he claims to have missed it.
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"I had played cash, I came to the audition and said: 'Listen to Monsieur Plamondon, I'm not going to waste your time, I do not want to do Starmania, but I came anyway because friend told me that I had to meet you, "says Garou. Intrigued, the producer, "who had found it funny", still asks him to sing. The choice of the song is on the B read of the business man .
Unable to sing
The hitch: Garou had an extinction of voice, "maybe because of the nervousness". "Arrived at the party where it explodes ( I would have liked to be an artiiiiist ), it went very badly, I stopped everything and told him, 'It's impossible for me to sing today' , remembers Garou. Before continuing: "And then Luc Plamondon, for our first meeting, took off his glasses, which I rarely saw.He said: 'What is it when you sing, if there you me say you can not sing ''.
Luc Plamondon then tells him about a new comedy he is preparing: Notre-Dame de Paris . He wants to hear it again. But Garou has no news "for two or three years". Finally come the auditions. Luc Plamondon talks about Garou to Richard Cocciante, the composer. He tells her that Garou sings blues, but Richard Cocciante does not like it. "The audition lasted four hours, and it ended in two hours of blues, where Cocciante became a fan of blues," recalls, proud, the Quebec singer. "We had a good time and he said to me: you will do Quasimodo".
Notre-Dame de Paris will be played more than 5,000 times, in twenty countries. And she will sign the flight of Garou's career.