Daniel Balavoine in Pau: the seven years that shaped the singer

We know him as the singer of ‘Aziza’ and ‘Le Chanteur’. We know he died in January 1986 in a helicopter crash in Mali. We almost always forget that in between, there is Pau – and that it was there, between the ages of eleven and eighteen, that Daniel Balavoine became a singer.

A child from Alençon who grew up in Pau

Daniel Balavoine was born in Alençon, Normandy, on 5 February 1952. Nothing predestined him for Béarn. It was his parents’ divorce in 1959, followed by his father’s transfer to Algeria, that led the family to move to the south-west: first to Biarritz, with his mother, then to Pau in 1963.

He remained there for over seven years, until 1970. Seven years that spanned exactly the age when one’s identity is formed: adolescence, the first records, first loves, first outbursts of anger. May ’68 found him at secondary school in Pau, and already keen to speak out – those who knew him at the time describe a boy who read a great deal and spoke loudly.

Dance halls, and Bob Dylan

It was in Pau that he took to the stage for the first time, and it wasn’t in a theatre. He sang at dances. Party venues, cover bands, an audience there to dance rather than listen. And his repertoire included Bob Dylan.

That detail speaks volumes. Singing Dylan at a Béarn dance hall in the late 1960s wasn’t exactly the easiest choice. It meant striking a balance between what gets people dancing and what you want to champion – the very same balancing act that any band performs today, on a Saturday night, in any village hall across the region.

We love this image because we know it from the inside. The difference between him and us is that he wrote ‘Le chanteur’ a few years later.

What Pau left behind in his songs

Few street names, few postcards. His mark lies elsewhere.

On his first album, De vous à elle en passant par moi, released in March 1975, there is a suite in several movements entitled ‘Mona Lisa’. The first of these movements is called ‘La première fille de ma vie’. His biographers interpret this as a memory of a love affair in Pau.

It’s not much, and yet it’s a great deal: at the age of twenty-three, when he recorded his first album, what he had to say still came from here.

What remains of it, twenty minutes from Pau

The Béarn region did not turn Balavoine into a monument, and perhaps that is for the best. It did something simpler: a street and a concert hall in Bizanos bear his name.

The Daniel-Balavoine Hall is an ordinary municipal venue, the sort where school fancies and community concerts are held. Nothing grand about it. A place where people sing, every week, in the name of someone who started out singing in halls just like this one.

Why are we the ones writing this?

Because TidyMess wouldn’t exist without him.

In 2005, near Pau, a tribute show to Daniel Balavoine brought together on the same stage a singer and a pianist who didn’t know each other: Nelly and Thomas. They didn’t know it at the time, but they had just begun a story that has lasted for twenty years.

In 2016 and 2017, we performed his repertoire four times in Morlaàs. On 7 March 2026, we played a special Balavoine concert at the Daniel-Balavoine Hall in Bizanos. It was a lovely full circle moment, worth marking.

We are neither historians nor biographers. We are simply two people who have spent many evenings singing his songs to audiences in the Béarn region, and who thought it a shame that those seven years should remain nothing more than a footnote.

Nelly and Thomas

The Boulevard des Pyrénées and Pau Castle on an old postcard. Bibliothèque nationale de France, public domain.