On 12 September Mylène Farmer turned 65. The date could have been an occasion for retrospectives only; with her, it is a release schedule. Her thirteenth studio album, Égrégore, arrives on 30 October, preceded by the single “C’est à qui le tour”, whose video was directed by Julia Ducournau, the Palme d’Or winner for Titane. Three days earlier, on 27 October, she meets the public in cinemas, with an hour-long film premiering most of the album’s songs as images. Retirement is not on the programme.
The numbers
They deserve one paragraph, because they are absurd. Born Mylène Jeanne Gautier on 12 September 1961 in Pierrefonds, Quebec, active since 1984: more than 35 million records sold, which makes her one of the best-selling French-language artists of all time, and twenty-one French number-one singles – eight of them consecutive – a national record. Nine NRJ Music Awards, two World Music Awards. Few careers combine this level of industrial success with this level of secrecy: Farmer gives almost nothing away, and the audience, decade after decade, accepts the terms.
The method
The method has not changed since the 1980s: total visual control, literary ambition in the lyrics, long silences between campaigns, then a return at stadium scale. The upcoming autumn follows the template – film, then disc, each feeding the other. Even the lifestyle press, reduced to reporting that her perfume is Guerlain’s century-old Shalimar (1925), ends up writing about mystery rather than cosmetics. At 65, the story is not late style. It is the same style, continued – which, in pop, is the rarest trick of all.
