‘My Son, My Battle’: why it still leaves an audience speechless
At a concert, there are always two or three songs that silence the whole venue. Not the polite silence at the start, nor the distracted attention halfway through the set: real silence – the kind where you can hear the bar stop serving.
‘Mon fils, ma bataille’ is one of them, forty-five years after its release. We’ve played it often enough to know that it’s no coincidence.
What the song is about
A father. A separation. A child whose custody is taken away from him and awarded to a mother who has, in fact, left the family home. And a court that rules without hearing his side of the story.
The lyrics are so raw that radio broadcasts have eventually toned them down: ‘She took my son from me’ comes across as a statement of fact, not a complaint. The song does not ask for pity. It describes an injustice, and that is all.
It was released in November 1980 on Un autre monde, Daniel Balavoine’s fifth album. It went on to sell over five hundred thousand copies.
What people think they know, but which is wrong
Almost everyone believes it to be autobiographical. This is false, and it can be verified: Balavoine had no children in 1980. His first son was born in 1984, four years after the song was written.
So he did not write his own story. He wrote someone else’s – and perhaps that is why it resonates so deeply.
Where it really comes from
Two sources, both well-documented.
The first is a separation within his close circle: that of Colin Swinburne, his guitarist, which would separate him from his son. Balavoine witnessed this at close quarters, without experiencing it himself.
The second is a film: Kramer vs. Kramer, by Robert Benton, released in France in 1980. A father, a son, a custody battle. The film had moved the whole of the Western world to tears the previous year.
A song inspired by a friend’s misfortune and an American film: put like that, it sounds almost cold. The result is anything but. In fact, that is precisely what a good songwriter does – transform something observed into something felt.
Why it hasn’t aged
Family law, on the other hand, has changed. Shared custody exists; fathers are now granted custody that in 1980 was almost automatically denied to them. On paper, the song ought to seem dated.
It isn’t, for one simple reason: it doesn’t speak of the law, it speaks of dispossession. The court is merely a backdrop. What remains is a man from whom someone is being taken away, and that never goes out of date.
Then there is the voice. In this song, Balavoine rises to a point where the singing ceases to be comfortable. This is no feat of vocal prowess: it is the meaning. A man screaming in the highest register has run out of arguments; all he has left is sound. The music says what the lyrics refuse to say.
What it feels like to sing it
Two difficulties, and they aren’t the ones you’d expect.
The first is technical and simple: the vocal range. The song lies in a range where most male voices crack. You can transpose it – many do – but in doing so you lose precisely what makes it unbearable. Lowering ‘Mon fils, ma bataille’ by a tone makes it singable and robs it of its raison d’être.
The second is more delicate. In any venue of a certain size, there’s someone for whom this song isn’t just a song. A separated father, an accused mother, a child who has grown into an adult. We know this as soon as we start playing it, and it demands a certain restraint: we don’t play it to tug at the heartstrings. We play it straight, without any embellishment, and let the audience make of it what they will.
It’s, in fact, the only song in our tribute set-list where we never ask the audience to sing along with us.
The right place in a concert
Never as the opener: it overshadows everything that follows. Never as an encore: you don’t send people home on that note.
Two-thirds of the way through the set, after something fast and before something gentle. The contrast does half the work, and the audience has had time to settle in – which, for a song like this, matters more than you might think.
One last thing
Balavoine is often associated with rebellion, with television appearances, with that line hurled at a Prime Minister. It’s true, but it’s reductive.
‘Mon fils, ma bataille’ contains no political anger. It is a song by an ordinary man from whom something is being taken away. And it is perhaps there, rather than in his political stances, that lies the reason why he remains a songwriter whose work is still performed today.
We performed it again on 7 March 2026, at the Salle Daniel-Balavoine in Bizanos – twenty minutes from Pau, in the town where he grew up. We’ve recounted those years elsewhere.
Nelly and Thomas
Sources: RTBF – ‘Mon fils, ma bataille’, a song that heralded the ‘overprotective dad’ phenomenon · Un autre monde (album)