Nicolas Peyrac is a singer, author, composer and novelist. He wrote and composed a lot for others, notably for Marie Laforêt, Gérard Lenorman or even Johnny Hallyday with the title I’ll never forget. His title, So Far Away From L.Amade an impression and has not aged a bit since its release in 1975. In total, he recorded 20 studio albums in a half-century career, but what really characterizes him is the writing that always accompanied him.
In 1997, his first novel was released No matter the boulevard where you wait for me. This Thursday, June 2, 2022, Nicolas Peyrac publishes his fourth book: Without forgetting that one day we loved each other published by the Archipelago. It is the story of a hidden love of summers and the chances of life that cause two people to meet.
franceinfo: In this novel, we pull a thread, that of life and its very happy coincidences, with the hope that arises even when we no longer believe in it or even when we have not necessarily thought of it before. This is the strength of this novel, it is to talk about the twists and turns of life. There are many in this book. You like to play with the player!
Nicolas Peyrac : When I write a novel, and I wrote this one during confinement, every day, I immerse myself in the characters, in the mythologies. I’m very impressed by the cinema, I have about 7000 films at home, with a projection room, so it’s my universe. When I write a novel, I imagine images, flashbacks, things that I have seen a lot in the cinema, so maybe that comes through in my writing.
Photography, writing, music have always been part of your life even when you were a medical student. What makes it flip?
My father is accepted at Gallimard when he is 20 years old, he does not sign because he must finish his medicine to support us, my mother and me. I think he will drag this all his life. He was a country doctor and one day he had this great phrase that I repeat over and over again: “It is by risking to miss your life at 20 that you are sure to succeed“. So, when I was in first and second year of medicine, he did everything to help me, that is to say, he bought me a tape recorder, guitar, etc., saying to me: “If you want to risk things to advance in the artistic, go for it“.
Singing is good. It feels good when you write it and it makes others feel good when they listen to it. In fact, I am a bit of a doctor!
Nicolas Peyracat franceinfo
You will first write for others and then write for yourself. I would like to talk about this title: So Far Away From L.A released in 1975. It will be unanimous immediately. How are you living this moment?
I’m experiencing this very strangely because people started putting a face to my name with the song: And my father of which we sold 25,000 copies a day, and So Far Away was a kind of revelation, but no one knew who I was, so I was a bit of a UFO. We didn’t know, ‘he’ was coming out of six years of medicine, good.
Faced with success, it’s not you who necessarily take the big head or the melon, it’s not that, it’s that people change in relation to you because they no longer dare to come see you, talk to you like before because they heard you on the radio, they saw you on TV. Me, I see myself now at my age, after everything I’ve been able to know, I’m exactly the same, except that it’s maybe more revealed now because I don’t give a fuck about anything anymore. As much as I’m delighted to write, delighted to do concerts, to do things, I have nothing more to prove.
This song is 46 years old and it hasn’t aged a bit. Is it the same for you ?
Without ‘So Far Away From L.A’, I wouldn’t exist. It’s like an extension of my right hand and my left hand.
Nicolas Peyracat franceinfo
What’s left of So Far Away, 46 years later? The same happiness to have written it and to know that one day, Nolwenn wanted to take it back and that it’s a song that goes into people’s collective memory.
In So Far Away, on a certain March 21, you announced that you had leukemia. How are you today ?
I am very well. As the hematologist says, I’m in complete remission, even though I lost some hair but found it back, even though I’m wearing a hat. I’m fine !
You have collaborated with many people, you have written for others. What do you keep from these beautiful collaborations? I’m also thinking of the one with Johnny Hallyday on I’ll never forget.
Johnny, it’s funny because one day when I was alone at home, Pierre Billon, who was working with Johnny, came to see me and said: “For Johnny’s Sports Palace, it would take a very sad song, he has just lost his wife, a song where he is almost crucified. Etc.“And so me, since I wasn’t in great shape because my fiancée had just left, I said: listen, I don’t know if I’m going to be able to do this, but I’m going to try. So I wrote I’ll never forget and when I was at rehearsals at the Palais des sports and heard Johnny sing it, I stayed like two rounds of flan. It’s like Elvis Presley recording a song for you!