Calling on the muse

Kiwi journalist Garth Cartwright recalls his audience with the late Françoise Hardy in Paris.

- Garth Cartwright

'I am very old," said Françoise Hardy, who was then aged 69 and had just refused to shake my hand - she hurriedly explained that "germs are spread by hands" - and continued by saying, "and I am no longer strong. I get so tired." Okay, I thought, here we go: diva time.

I had just been ushered into Hardy's apartment in southwest Paris and, to be honest, I had no idea what to expect. It was April 2013 and Hardy's latest album L'Amour Fou had just been released in the UK, her first in a good while. I was here to interview her for the Sunday Times, many of whose readers would surely recall Hardy from the mid-1960s, when she was a pop star and one of the world's most photographed women.

But since then? Well, in French-speaking territories, Hardy, who died on June 11 aged 80, remained a superstar-admittedly, an aloof one: she hadn't sung in public since 1967 - but, to the wider world, she existed as little more than an emblem of Parisian Left Bank chic. Researching her before our interview, I kept finding the same information repeated over and over: Mick Jagger called her "his ideal woman", David Bowie stated, "I was, for a very long time, passionately in love with her. Every male in the world, and a number of females, also were." Bob Dylan began a poem on the back of his 1964 album Another Side Of Bob Dylan "for Françoise Hardy/at the Seine's edge". In more recent years, Malcolm McLaren, Blur and Iggy Pop have all invited Hardy to sing on their albums, the spell her 60s hits cast not having faded. The spell continued to work on L'Amour Fou, a striking album featuring 12 contemporary chansons. Hardy wrote the lyrics for 10 of them and one of the others was a Victor Hugo poem.