Charles Dumont composed melodies for French and international stars ranging from Dalida to Jacques Brel, Juliette Gréco and Barbra Streisand. But the singer-songwriter, who has died aged 95, will for ever be associated with one song in particular.
Dumont, a little-known musician and trumpeter by training, was aged 31 when, with the lyricist Michel Vaucaire, he knocked on the door of perhaps France’s best-known singer on the Boulevard Lannes in Paris in October 1960.
“She’d already said no to three of my songs,” he said in 2013. “I didn’t want to go back, but Michel persuaded me.” Ill and exhausted, Édith Piaf, who had collapsed onstage months earlier and would die three years later, was disinclined to see the pair.
She eventually relented, however, and Dumont played the song once, then a second time. “She asked me, was I really the composer?” he said. “I said yes. She asked me to play it a third time, so I did, and her mood changed. She looked at me differently.
“She said to me: don’t worry, young man. This song will go round the world, and I will open my next concert tour with it.”
Piaf recorded the song the following month and performed it live at the Olympia concert hall that December to 22 curtain calls.
Non, Je ne Regrette Rien (No, I Regret Nothing) would go on to sell 800,000 copies, spend seven weeks on the top of the French charts, and become one of the best-known French songs of all time, recorded in at least a dozen languages.
“My mother gave birth to me, but Édith Piaf brought me into the world,” Dumont would tell Agence-France Presse in a 2015 interview. “Without her, I would never have done everything I did, neither as a composer nor as a singer.”
The song, which begins “No, nothing at all / No, I regret nothing”, describes how the singer has jettisoned her past and cares nothing for it, because “Ma vie, mes joies / Aujourd’hui, ça commence avec toi” (“For my life, for my joys / Today, starts with you”).
“That’s me! That’s my life,” Piaf reportedly said of the song. Dumont wrote 30 more songs for her before the singer’s death at 48 and enjoyed a successful later career as a composer and performer, making a final stage appearance in Paris in 2019.
English versions of Non, Je ne Regrette Rien have been recorded by many performers including Piaf, Shirley Bassey and Elaine Paige, while the song is also a favourite of the French Foreign Legion and features in numerous films and commercials.
The phrase is also commonly used by individuals keen to defend their actions, including the former British chancellor Norman Lamont, who uttered it after the UK’s 1992 sterling crisis and withdrawal from Europe’s exchange rate mechanism.
