Juliette Gréco's five-piece backing group (led by her domestic and artistic partner of 25 years, Gerard Jouannest) gave us a few, deep double-bass pulses. Then there was a low swing of the accordion, a tinkle of ivories to put the Left Bank perfume in the air and suddenly there she was - a sheath of black, her bleached face surprisingly plump, her white arms wafting high in the air. She was like a witch-kitten.
The 1,900 fans - many French, many gay - rose to their feet and howled their admiration and gratitude. Gréco has been absent from the stage for over a decade. For those who know her only by her throaty recordings, the elaborate personal choreography is always a surprise: she is sculpting her persona as she sings, her thin, silvery arms sketching, in elegant lofty calligraphy, accusation, disdain, love destroyed.
When Edith Piaf sang she would slump before you, ragged with suffering, noisily defeated; Patachou belted songs out wholesomely for the boys in the back room. But Gréco is still a creature of the cellars, coming out of hibernation into the luminous immense grotto of the Barbican Hall, cracking her lyrics like nuts. She fractured Jacques Prévert's Les Feuilles Morte; stamped on it, the melody lost in her imperious or plaintive growling.
There is actually not much melody in Gréco. But it is not sweet tunes but this curious theatrical fabrication that the fans love. There were songs from Leo Ferré and Jacques Brel, but more suitable was material by Jouannest with lyrics by Luis Bunuel's scriptwriter, Jean-Claude Carrière. In one - Le Contre-ecclesiaste (Rien n'est Vanité) - she affirms that neither the warm skin of a lover nor the caress of fresh wine, is vanity; only the cruel and arrogant averted gaze is vanity and the bitterness of the blasé. In another, with the misleading romantic title, A Summer's Day, she meets a man with blue eyes and a straw hat who invites her to go with him; she refuses.
But when she stands up to death (La Mort! J'arrive!) snarling and whimpering, the theatricality went too far and she reduced that predator to a vaudeville character. And introducing the lovely communard song, Le Temps des Cerises, she told us that revolution was love and, following the line of the best of French idiotic philosophy, that love is revolution.
But this was not about philosophy; it was about one of those incredibly durable, disciplined self-creations that can grapple audiences world-wide to itself and hold them for more than half a century.
