A song is sometimes a compromise. This is the case of Golden hands. Before becoming a singer, Bernard Lavilliers started out as a laborer. He never forgot his years as an apprentice at Saint-Etienne.
“Since I was also a guy who worked in rolling mills and in blast furnaces, in my youth I always have memories. The first job I did in my life was not as a guitarist, it’s not as a truck driver, that was all”, recalls Bernard Lavilliers.
In the early 2000s, factories closed one after another. Bernard Lavilliers writes like this in one go, a text that pays homage to workers facing dismissal.
“What they told me, what was my existence, that I would have a roof over my head and enough to feed my family thanks to my work, and it’s a very, very hard job too, it doesn’t exist anymore and nobody cares. So I said here, nobody cares.”
The song quickly becomes a workers’ anthem. That resounds in the sonorization of all the manifestations. The committed Lavilliers has played it many times in the factories, and in particular, at Arcelor Mittal.
“The impression of being useful for something”
Beyond the union fights, the song is taken up by the choirs, and sung in chorus by Bernard Lavilliers’ audience during his shows.
“It gives you goosebumps. You feel that at least you are up to something at that moment. Because an artist can always have eternal doubts as to what he is for, precisely”.
This is one of the highlights of Bernard Lavilliers’ tour, in festivals this summer. And in cinemas, at the beginning of the school year, in October.
Source: BFM TV
