Mylène Farmer Dégénération

Mylène Farmer's fifth live album to date, No.5 on Tour, documents her 2009 tour of France in support of her most recent studio album, Point de Suture (2008). The standard edition of album includes 20 songs spread across two discs, including a bunch of her greatest hits performed in the electro-rock style of Point de Suture. Though some of these songs are also included on her previous live albums, most recently Avant Que l'Ombre…A Bercy (2006), N°5 on Tour stands apart from its in-concert predecessors on account of its new arrangements, abundance of new material, and recording quality so pristine that it sounds as though the album were recorded in a studio with overdubbed interjections of audience noise and stage banter.

Mylène Jeanne Gautier was born in the town of Pierrefonds near Montreal on September 12th 1961. Her father, an engineer, was employed in Canada at the time building a dam system and Mylène and her brothers and sister (Brigitte, Michel and Jean Loup), were brought up in the French-speaking province of Québec. When Mylène was 10 the family returned to France, settling in the Paris suburb of Ville d'Avray. In her teenage years Mylène was passionate about horses and she would devote all her free time and energy to riding. But 17-year-old Mylène's other great passion in life was acting and she would eventually abandon the stables to take a three-year course at the Cours Florent, a prestigious drama school in Paris.

It is the third best-of by Mylène Farmer, after les mots (published in 2001) and 2001-2011 (published in 2011). As with these two records, Histoires de is dressed in a particularly sophisticated visual, due to Jean-Baptiste Mondino, who had already signed the cover of disobedience in 2018. The assured posture of Mylène Farmer gives way here to a mysterious figure, a dark silhouette where only her look and her Albator haircut appear in the open. This compilation is divided into three separate parts, which respect a certain chronology.