Looking mischievous, Olivier Lorquin, in his office at the Maillol Museum, rue de Grenelle, in 7e Parisian district, repeats it, two or three times: « Improbable. » Record, at almost 75 years old, a rock album which has just been released, The Funny Roadbetween a tense approach, electric energy and melancholic ballads, with his texts and a few covers, including one by Georges Chelon – not the most rock of singers –, when you are president of the Dina Vierny-Musée Maillol Foundation, dedicated to the works of the sculptor and painter Aristide Maillol (1861-1944), this can be described as« improbable ».
“I lost a little of the highs, but my voice is still therebelieves Olivier Lorquin. I think I use it more pleasantly than in the early 1980s, in my 45s. » A bit of the grain of Bill Deraime or Paul Personne, a bit of Eddy Mitchell when he doesn’t force the crooner aspect too much. Lorquin returns to his first musical passions, as a teenager. “I was listening to Brassens, and then I discovered Ricky Nelson, Gene Vincent or Eddie Cochran, which was a great revelation. Then there was Johnny, The Black Socks, with Eddy Mitchell, and the Beatles, the Stones… Suddenly, my generation had its musical identity. » Later, it will be the English pub rock of the early 1970s, the punks, also friendship with Willy DeVille (1950-2009).
Four 45-rpm records
Eldest of the two children of Dina Vierny (1919-2009) and Jean Lorquin (1924-1999) – Dina Vierny, Maillol’s muse, for whom she posed for ten years, kept her name from a first marriage –, Olivier Lorquin meets “decisive”at the beginning of the 1970s. That of Olivier Kowalski, then bassist of the group Comintern (album The Dead Rat Ball, in 1971). Both participated in the recording of songs… at the initiative of the Situationists. “It was in 1973, an idea from Jean-Louis Rançon, Guy Debord’s right-hand man. We went to Pierre Barouh’s Saravah studio. It never came out, but Olivier and I never left each other. He composed a good part of the music on the record and made the arrangements. »
After this essay, Olivier Lorquin worked in advertising, writing jingles, adaptations of Anglo-Saxon songs, and in cinema. On film sets, he also supervises the rental of horse-drawn vehicles from his mother’s collection (“whose carriage Megalomania [1971], by Gérard Oury, in the Molière [1978], by Ariane Mnouchkine…”). He wrote his first texts. Between 1980 and 1982, four 45s by Olivier Lorquin and La Connection marseillaise were published. “Guys from the Panier district, more into hard rock. I had also met Frank Margerin and I insisted to the record companies that he design the covers, he had just created the suburban rockers of his series Lucien. »
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