INTERVIEW
On July 17, Hugues Aufray is releasing Autoportrait , a new country album. And a name that echoes the album Self Portrait by Bob Dylan, released in 1970. Like the American folk-rock singer, Hugues Aufray also chose a painting, made by him, to illustrate the cover of his disc. Because the 90-year-old singer has long had a passion for this art, as he explains on Philippe Vandel's microphone on Wednesday.
"Painting was my Ingres violin between galas"
"This portrait dates from 1999", specifies the singer. Confinement requires, Hugues Aufray could not take photos for his cover. "My communications director, having seen a self-portrait in my workshop, told me 'we're going to put this as a cover' and I replied that the title would be 'Self-portrait'," he says.
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"Painting is a hobby," says Hugues Aufray. "It was my Ingres violin between the galas," he recalls. "I had two passions. If I was in Paris, I mainly did painting and a bit of sculpture. And when I was in the countryside, I worked with the tractor," says the singer. "I'm a guy who loves manual labor. Besides, manual labor involves a lot of intellectual things," he notes.
Tribute to Bob Dylan and American culture
If he recognizes the tribute paid to Bob Dylan through the title of his new album and his cover, he refuses on the other hand the idea according to which he would have copied the American singer. "I did not translate Bob Dylan, I transmitted Bob Dylan because it has to be adapted musically", he observes. The American singer, which Hugues Aufray discovered in 1961, represents for him the man who made "descend poetry" who was "cloistered by the intellectual elite who wrote poems without rhyme, without rhythm, that nobody read ". "Poetry belongs to the people and it must be sung," he said.
Through Self-portrait , Hugues Aufray also chose to pay homage to the American bluesmen and countrymen. Most of the songs that the singer adapted from his album "were composed by black people," he explains. And he didn't just translate the texts of these musicians. "We transmit things and they necessarily evolve because we cannot translate a poem, but we can transmit it", stresses Hugues Aufray.