Il n'y a plus rien


Il n'y a plus rien is an album by Léo Ferré, released in 1973 by Barclay Records. The general mood here is dark, both exasperated and desperate.

History

After having inserted two symphonic songs in his mostly pop rock oriented album La Solitude, after having re-recorded his 1950s oratorio on Guillaume Apollinaire's vast poem La Chanson du mal-aimé, Ferré feels now ready to establish himself as a complete artist, author and musician, who will do without any arrangers' services from now. So here he goes completely symphonic with his own material for the first time and he often replaces singing by intense spoken-word and declamation.
This very cohesive album opens with the straightforward manifesto "Preface", a reduction of a much longer text that precisely prefaces Poète... vos papiers!, a collection of his poems formerly published in January 1957. As Ferré says, "the most beautiful songs are songs that demand justice". The discipline of poetry is meant to teach us how to fight so we can free our mind:
The album ends with the radical, pessimistic yet epic and fighting "Il n'y a plus rien", that deals with libertarian and revolutionary utopias disappointment from the 1960s and May 68. This anarchist outburst is an example of one of the very first uses of whale vocalization in popular music.

Track listing

All songs written, composed, arranged and directed by Léo Ferré, except Ne chantez pas la mort whose text is written by Jean-Roger Caussimon.
;Original LP

Credits