Artist: Stephan Eicher
Album: Non Ci Badar, Guarda E Passa…
Label: Universal Music Division Barclay
Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SqCshM4TBQQ
Style: French chanson
Like his two brothers, the Swiss artist was introduced to music by his father, an amateur jazz violinist. He cut his teeth in various bands, including one of his brothers’, Grauzone, which enjoyed fleeting success thanks to a single that sold several hundred thousand copies. He began his career playing electronic instruments associated with the emerging New Wave movement, but the young Stephan Eicher took his relative lack of success as a personal affront and put all his energy into gaining popularity. He then introduced more acoustic instruments into his music, even using some old ones, such as the hurdy-gurdy and the cimbalom. It was around the same time that he met the writer Philippe Djian on the set of Rapido, Antoine de Caunes’ television show. A friendship developed between the two men, leading the novelist to write most of the lyrics for the multilingual singer’s best songs in French.
The year 1989 was a real turning point for Stephan Eicher’s music, with the album My Place selling over two million copies. The following album, Engelberg, exceeded all expectations, partly thanks to the track “Déjeuner En Paix”, which seemed unbeatable at the top of the Top 50. Released in 1993, Carcassonne was of at least the same high quality, although less successful. Such success led to busy tours, as evidenced by Non Ci Badar, Guarda E Passa…, the artist’s first live recording. However, the Swiss artist did not follow the crowd, far from it: his album consists of two discs, the first of which captures what a concert on this tour must have been like, with a captivated audience and the musicians playing with appropriate emphasis, performing the songs the audience wanted to hear. The second disc features unexpected versions of the same songs, recorded in impromptu locations, often played without an audience and off the cuff, offering a different vision of the artist, imbued with the magic of the moment.
Already on the first disc, tracks alternate between those where, carried away by the energy of the rock musicians, you want to sing along, and others where there is more sensitivity and emotion, helped by Philippe Djian’s lyrics, a mixture of poetry and almost adolescent feelings. The second album takes us into something almost unprecedented, bringing us closer to the lives of musicians on tour, with the impression of sharing their moments of fantasy and latent tension. This feeling is further reinforced by the video that accompanies the album’s release but is unfortunately not available in the digital version.
Far from what an audiophile expects when listening to an album, the production takes a different approach, using an atypical sound recording technique that seeks neither clarity nor precision, but rather to create a sense of closeness to the musicians, something that can sometimes be lacking in overly polished albums, where everything is often too perfect. Non Ci Badar, Guarda E Passa… is, on the contrary, an album that overflows with love and life.