French idol comes home to perform

Allwright's folk songs captured the restiveness of late-60s France. Picture / Mark Mitchell

As he walks the streets of Paris, Strasbourg, or Marseilles, people often recognise him. But as 79-year-old Graeme Allwright emerges into the arrivals hall at Auckland airport on only his third visit since leaving 58 years ago, he passes unremarked.

Chin stubbly, grey hair mussed, and wearing a checked blue brushed cotton shirt, he looks like someone's grandad planning an afternoon weeding the garden.

To the French-speaking world, Allwright's moniker is almost unpronounceable, but it's been a household name since his folk songs captured the restiveness of late-60s France.

Adults can reel off a list of hits, originals and his French-language adaptations of Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan, and schoolchildren learn his songs. Anywhere there is a campfire and a guitar - and, often when there's a wedding - there is an Allwright song.

It is largely because of a chance meeting with a young Kiwi musician in Paris that Allwright has come home to play, for the first time, the songs that made him famous. He is doing five concerts.

Allwright is a heart man. He can't sing words that haven't sprung from the heart. He sings about and supports issues that he thinks will make a better world.

His latest crusade is an online petition, supported by several other household names, to change the martial words of the 1792-penned French national anthem ("may their impure blood flow in our fields!") to something more conciliatory, along the lines of a version he has written and recorded ("let's sing of love and liberty ... ")

Allwright decided to act after hearing in September that it had become compulsory for schools to teach pupils the words.

"It made me so upset I thought I'd try to do another version." Now that would be a headline: "Kiwi forces change to La Marseillaise."

Paris-based Allwright is friendly, modest in word and lifestyle; he seems astonished by what happened to his life. It's not false modesty.

"You know, that's what's extraordinary about life," he says in a neutral accent bearing neither a Kiwi twang nor the ersatz British vowels of the era in which he grew up.

"You never know what is going to happen. Going to France wasn't in the plan. I never had a plan. Things happen by meeting other people."

He appears ambivalent about adulation, and lapsing in and out of French - "my English is a bit rusty" - says he has "taken a certain distance" on it.

"I don't want to let my ego get in front, so I step back." Still, he adds, "sometimes it's very touching the things people say, how the songs have helped them on their way. That's pretty rewarding. If I can apporter du bonheur aux gens [make people happy], that justifies what I'm doing".

Allwright grew up in a musical family. His dad, Robert, was a piano-playing stationmaster with a "great baritone", mum Doris was a soprano. With eldest child Peter, three years older than him, the family sang in hospitals and at church. (Peter was conscripted into the air force the day he turned 18, and was killed above Italy.)

Allwright's childhood was spent in Wellington and Hawera. His memories of trains, beaches, and bush are "engraved in my mind like it was yesterday".

A Wellington College old boy, he wanted to be an actor, but knew the options were limited in a country without a professional theatre company.

Luckily, former Prime Minister Peter Fraser saw Allwright perform in an Ibsen play and arranged for a bursary to attend London's Old Vic. There, Allwright met French fellow student Catherine d'Aste.

Cherchez la femme ... he turned down a job with the Royal Shakespeare Company to follow her to France, where they married in 1951. His French stretched little further than the "oui" required for the nuptials.

Allwright's parents attended, but the occasion was bittersweet: "They lost their first son, then I stayed in France ... which means they lost their second."

Allwright's first years in France were spent getting to grips with the language, helping out in his father-in-law's theatre company building sets and doing bit-parts as his French improved. He learned guitar and found his heartfelt songs well-received.

He eventually landed a nightly cabaret gig. A record company executive in the audience one night set Allwright on a new path.

In 1966, his eponymous album was a hit, striking a powerful chord with the students who would explode with rage in 1968.

Allwright was 40; old pictures of him in concert show a sexy-scruffy, wiry man in jeans and T-shirt, hair awry, feet always bare, a far-away look in those arresting eyes.

He never hid his roots, and one of his songs, Pacific Blues, recounts his affection for New Zealand and his horror that France was then testing nukes in the Pacific. If the tests were done off the Brittany coast, he sang, there would be an outcry.

So what is it about Allwright which saw him become so popular with the French? Paris-born Aucklander Michel Cassin explains: "I discovered Graeme Allwright towards the end of the 60s at French holiday camp.

"Adolescents were hugely attracted by any music originating from Britain, the Beatles and Led Zeppelin among others.

"Then, all of a sudden here was an English-speaker in the style of Bob Dylan, writing meaningful songs in French. And being played on French radio. It was a miracle.

"His adaptation of American songs into French - like Cohen's - seemed to us to be mysterious, meaningful, very exotic and charged with emotion."

But Allwright was disconcerted by his sudden fame: "It was too much for me when I saw all these young people singing the songs in my audiences - it did frighten me a bit and I don't think I was strong enough personally to resist ... the ego-trip. I also had the feeling I was getting too French ... "

So in 1969, he abandoned his wife and three young sons, and disappeared. He travelled to Egypt and the Sudan, and ended up living in Ethiopia for six months. A pattern was set: record an album, drift off. There was a lengthy stay in the Reunion Islands and around eight trips to India, where Allwright was attracted to eastern philosophies.

"When you're travelling in these countries you've got much to learn from their culture - you've got to go with a certain humility," he explains.

"It's a wonderful school, travelling. I didn't even think about the singing when I was travelling."

The silences provoked rumours of his demise and added a dramatic, mysterious allure to his public image. But the absences were disastrous for Allwright's family. His first marriage collapsed, as did the second, to Claire Bataille, with whom he had a daughter.

Allwright's second son Christophe was once asked by a schoolmaster if his dad was dead. The teacher had been listening to an erroneous radio report. Christophe had no idea.

"I regret maybe that I didn't [live up to] my responsibilities as far as my family [is concerned]," Allwright admits. "I think maybe my children must have suffered from me being away for so long."

That said, "There was a certain period, in India, that I didn't want to come back, but I had my family there, and my children ... "

Nicolas and Christophe are both actors, both in their early 50s. They occasionally perform with their father. Jacques, in his late 40s, plays classical clarinet. Jeanne, 31, is a former social worker. Allwright has five grandchildren.

Remarkably, Allwright remains on good terms with both ex-wives and his children: in fact, Bataille is his manager. Jeanne is the first of the Allwright children to see New Zealand.

Allwright's companion of the past five years, Mijanou Pirois-Dare, arrives early next month.

Allwright's 10-week visit is the third since he headed for London 58 years ago. He first came back in the 1950s when his father was ill, and his last visit was 13 years ago.

In that time, New Zealand has occasionally come to him; Prime Minister Helen Clark has seen Allwright perform.

It was a recent meeting in Paris with Lucien Johnson, a 24-year-old, Massey University-trained jazz saxophonist, that provided the impetus for his return home, says Allwright. They will play together during Allwright's tour.

Allwright, who has always loved jazz but hasn't played much of it publicly, first heard Johnson at a Paris gig and picked his Kiwi accent. Johnson knew nothing about Allwright's history. Putting on an Allwright CD for the first time, he was surprised when his French flatmate started singing along.

"He has a lot of energy for such an old guy," says Johnson of Allwright. "He's definitely captured in the minds of the French as a representative of hippydom, but I'm not so sure that sits easily with him. He's a very generous guy who is dedicated to causes."

Allwright supports various development charities and was doing fund-raising concerts before Bob Geldof got around to it. He is, he says, "not particularly wealthy, not particularly poor".

He doesn't own a car, preferring to tote his guitar on the Metro.

Being back in New Zealand has been strange and marvellous, he says: the sun's heat is more intense than he remembers, and the last full moon was the clearest he had ever seen.

He never got used to European class systems, and enjoys being in a place where "people relate more easily".

A French camera crew is following Allwright around, documenting his return home.

Ask him to define his cultural identity and he takes a lengthy pause. "I don't feel like I'm particularly French," he finally says.

"I may be more of a global citizen. But my origins are very strong, and they are still there."



Graeme Allwright's New Zealand tour:
Dec 1: Auckland University Music Theatre, 6 Symonds St, 8pm
Dec 2: Morra Hall, Waiheke Island, 8.30pm
Dec 3: Auckland University Music Theatre, 6 Symonds St, 8pm
Dec 9 and 10: The Happy Bar, Wellington, 8pm
Tickets are $30, available at the door or by email: topshelf@top shelfproductions.co.nz, phone 0800 370 158. They can also be purchased at Top Shelf Productions, level 3, Imperial Building, 41-47 Dixon St, Wellington.