[Portrait to read in the winter issue’s special cabaret dossier of the têtu· magazine, available at your newsstands or by subscription.] A fixture at the Paris cabaret Madame Arthur for ten years, Charly Voodoo lives for the piano, when the cowards are on their knees, and soldiers stand at attention.
Photography: Audoin Desforges for têtu·
Spring 2025. At the Madame Arthur cabaret, the last of the week’s performances dedicated to the Rita Mitsouko. In the audience, some people wear T-shirts stamped with Charly Voodoo’s face, one of the four artists in the show. The evening’s star even receives flowers during his farewell speech. Well, farewell… the pianist is simply about to take a short break, the time of a theatre performance, before returning in the fall.
But the boy is not just anybody, in the famous establishment in the Pigalle district of Paris: with two other artists (Romain Brau and Monsieur K, who have since left the house), he participated, in 2015, in the relaunch (after five years of closure) of the Parisian institution born in 1946. Ten years later, the audience has returned, and the cabaret often runs to full houses. “At the beginning, there were more of us on stage than in the house! smiles the pianist. There is something gratifying and reassuring in this success, because it shows that our lives are recognized and do good to people.”
Musician Above All
When asked what his profession is to this multi-hyphenate artist, Charly Voodoo responds first with “musician” : “That’s where I come from; the classical milieu, the piano, then composition. I am very musically demanding. At Madame Arthur, it’s great, because I can make use of all my classical background.” As a child, he imagined becoming an interior designer or an actor. That was without counting an adolescence epiphany in front of La Leçon de piano, Jane Campion’s film released in 1993, which would change his life. “The music, the story, the actors, the universe, the images… Everything completely overwhelmed me“, he recalls. At the end of the film, the boy remains stunned in front of the dark screen, before telling his mother: “This is what I want to do!” Bang, the boy heads for the conservatory. “I had a second revelation the day I laid my fingers on the piano, he adds. I played seven hours a day, I didn’t eat at noon, I woke up very early on Sunday mornings… A truly consuming passion!”
The solitary adolescent would turn this flame that drives him into his career. In high school, he follows every possible music option. “That’s what got me my baccalaureate, just barely! What mattered to me was to be rid of everything else and to do only music”, he confesses. Charly then enters a musicology faculty while continuing to study at the conservatory to become a classical pianist: “I had this fantasy of the concert pianist in a frock coat who goes to give recitals. I did a bit of it… it was hell! I was eaten up by stage fright. Classical music has this merciless thing where everyone listens to you in a deathly silence, waiting for the slightest wrong note to pin you. Doing only that wasn’t possible for me.”
Beloved Freedom
Thanks to a relief substitute, he becomes a teacher at the conservatory while adding, almost by chance, a new string to his bow thanks to a friend who invites him to a Parisian neo-burlesque evening… “I discovered all these women so free, with crazy power. There was music, we sang, it was incredible”, he recalls. A new crush that leads him to dive into the adventure and transform into a performer: “It was going well, I had the chance to be one of the only boys in France to do this.” It is at this moment that he chooses his stage name, whose second part translates his fascination with dolls. A pseudonym that also sums up his artistic approach: “The idea of provoking emotions in people without touching them, just through presence and music, speaks to me a lot.”
Today, playing the piano at Madame Arthur – in Paris and on tour – is his main activity, even if he has many others: musical collaborator for brands, songwriter (notably for Arielle Dombasle), pianist for Piche, piano columnist on TV5 Monde for the show La Grande Galerie Francophone… In recent months, he has played as a musician but also as an actor in the play Que d’espoir!, by Valérie Lesort, alongside, among others, Hugo Bardin (alias Paloma). A further way to explore his artistic freedom, which he cherishes above all: “I am very afraid of commitment… And I say that while I am married and we bought a house in the countryside!”
