Une Nuit de Malaise
Nice, le 15 juillet 1999
Review by Antoine (translated for this page by Andy FitzGerald)

IMPORTANT WARNING:
I found it extremely difficult to write this review of Véronique Sanson's concert, for the simple reason that this was not a Véronique Sanson concert: It was one of a musician, courageous and resolute, something well understood by all, but still let show that evening become something else... something otherwise more beautiful, or else perhaps, more endearing: a woman, a person of flesh and blood, fallible, and human.  An ideal being? No. Someone, that evening, had maybe forgotten it.

I could have refused to write on this show, not to write a single line on the topic, as if it had never existed.  Now that I've chosen to take on the task despite all that it brings, this is not to rub salt into the wound.  If I chose or if I choose, not to come unstrung, it is merely because I committed myself to you numerous folks who read this site, to write about this show, without knowing what lay in store for me in Nice, and without knowing that I would finally return home with eyes full of water, rather than that excitement in my heart.

As invited by the Nice Jazz Festival, Véronique Sanson went on stage as expected around 21h30.
The game kicks off, but something is not right: Her voice is unsure, deprived of the energy that usually characterizes it. As soon as the second song, Mariavah, it becomes clear: Véronique has a problem.
Songs follow each other one after one, but often laboriously, enamelled with roads that go more or less into emptiness. The lyrics derail and the voice follows, or rather, it doesn't follow, until the mirror breaks, an irony of fate, at the beginning of "He who does not try" ("Celui qui n'essaie pas"). Véronique stops, apologizes, and quits the stage.

On coming back some minutes later, she attacks Bernard's Song in vain, it will remain incomplete: and a new eclipse to backstage. A quarter of an hour later, the ultimate return.

Bernard's Song, Un être idéal, Rien que l'eau, a strange final ingredient gets thrown in the pan, and niçoise salad is served.

In all honesty this concert, in respect to the public and to the artist, should have been cancelled. Why had this not been done?  I can only see one plausible, or acceptable explanation: The Nice Festival takes place high over the city, in the Cimiez Gardens, ten minutes from the city centre: the majority of spectators get there thanks to the free shuttle services, which also bring them back them in city towards midnight. However, with access to the Festival site being allowed at 18h, a significant part of spectators who had come to see Véronique Sanson were already there, on the site, long before 21h30.

To cancel a concert where the gates of a venue are closed again and the spectators return home again by their own means is one thing. To cancel it when the crowd is already there and that the shuttles buses have returned to the garage is another. The access to the festival venue is limited enough and the layout is rather poor, and a cancellation and a massive influx towards the narrow exits could have caused a real shambles.

To go up on stage before thousands of spectators, when for reason X it does not work out, and to cling to the pretext that the show must go on, is an achievement. In this sense, Véronique Sanson was, as wrote Nice Matin the morning after, exemplary.