Cyril Mokaiesh

“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.” Seated in the Ménilmontant café where he writes every day, Cyril Mokaiesh swiftly quotes Oscar Wilde’s famous aphorism to describe his fifteen (years) on centre stage and in the parallel corridors of French chanson. Initiated by the sensation of Communiste in 2011, after a rock warm-up with the quartet that bore his name, this trajectory of a former high-level tennis player turned concert hall orator is indeed unlike any other. Passionate, ardent as fire, a committed citizen, sometimes enraged, and yet a voice of wisdom, Cyril has, since his beginnings, unfolded the cartography of an unquiet world like the origami of desperate causes, for which he tirelessly seeks glimmers of hope and reasons to believe. It is with a quote from a contemporary, Vincent Lindon, so raw, that he opens this eighth and new album with the explosion of Regarder passer les trains: “I’m getting better and better at a job I like less and less.”

Is it a passing bout of the blues? A lucid observation, spoken/sung in the style of Léo Ferré, facing the headwinds of the era – that of influencers, hucksters, and algorithms? This mood song, not devoid of humour and self-deprecation, ends with a shout of “Bonne chance pour la suite” (Good luck for what’s next), the title of an album where what’s next, precisely, beautifully disproves this sense of powerlessness. It had been nearly a decade, since Clôture (2017), that Mokaiesh hadn’t found himself alone with himself. He successively released a vibrant and collective album, linked to his Lebanese roots, blending electro and traditional music (Paris-Beyrouth, 2020), another of duets with the best of his peers (Dyade, 2021), then delivered a grand 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 pedantic” has never lost faith, in humanity or in himself. He