Cyril Mokaiesh

"Be yourself, everyone else is already taken".

Sitting in the café in Ménilmontant where he writes every day, Cyril Mokaiesh playfully picks up Oscar Wilde's famous line to describe his fifteen years (and counting) at centre stage, as well as in the parallel corridors, of French chanson.

Kicked off by the striking success of Communiste in 2011, after warming up with a rock quartet that bore his name, this trajectory of a former top-level tennis player turned troubadour of concert halls resembles no other.

Passionate, ardent as fire, an engaged citizen, sometimes enraged, and yet a voice of wisdom, Cyril has, since his debut, been mapping out a restless world like the origami of lost causes, in which he searches, come what may, for glimmers of hope and reasons to believe.

" A passing case of the blues? A clear-eyed observation, half-spoken half-sung in the manner of Léo Ferré, facing the headwinds of an age of influencers, hucksters and algorithms?

This mood piece, not without humour and self-deprecation, ends with a cry of "Bonne chance pour la suite" [Good luck for what comes next], the title of an album in which what comes next, precisely, beautifully disproves that admission of powerlessness.

It had been almost a decade, since Clôture (2017), that Mokaiesh had not found himself alone with himself.

He has in turn released a vibrant, collective album, tied to his Lebanese roots, blending electronica and traditional music (Paris-Beyrouth, 2020), another of duets with the best of his peers (Dyade, 2021), then delivered a full-scale tribute to the prince of nonchalance, Georges Moustaki (Le temps de vivre, 2023).

This man who writes "so as not to end up dry, bitter and pompous" has never lost faith, in humankind as in himself. He...