Étienne Daho

The ever-changing French singer/songwriter Étienne Daho has combined Anglo-American sounds and breathy Gallic romanticism into a decades-long string of commercial and artistic triumphs. Born in Algeria in 1956, he moved to France with his family in 1965. After Daho made his stage debut at a 1979 rock festival, New Wavers Stinky Toys and Marquis de Sade helped him record his first single, "Cowboy," and debut album Mythomane in 1981. La notte, la notte, released in 1984, contained what would become his international signature tune, "Week-end à Rome" (later adapted by unrelated Brit-poppers Saint Etienne). Over the course of more than two dozen subsequent albums, Daho would pinball fruitfully between seductive electronics-influenced projects like 1986’s Pop satori and guitar-heavy David Bowie-influenced albums like 1988’s Pour nos vies martiennes. Other notable Daho releases include a jump into American R&B (1991’s Paris ailleurs), an arty acoustic tribute to writer Jean Genet (2010’s Le condamné à mort), and 2017's Blitz, a bleak Roger Waters-esque reaction to post-Brexit Britain.