Born on June 17: Does Lio still like "Banana Split"?

Born in Portugal in 1962, the singer—who has both Belgian and Portuguese citizenship—is celebrating her 64th birthday.

Take a deep breath before pronouncing her official legal name: Wanda Maria Ribeiro Furtado Tavares de Vasconcelos. Her three-letter stage name, Lio (a reference to Barbarella, the heroine ofJean-Claude Forrest’s comic strip), is much easier to remember…

Just like France Gall when she sang “Les sucettes,” written by Serge Gainsbourg in 1966, without realizing the implied double meaning, Lio wasn’t even 18 when she fell for “Banana Split,” which Jacques Duvall (under the pseudonym Hagen Dierks) concocted for her in 1979 to music by Jay Alanski. She, too, likely didn’t grasp the more risqué interpretation of the lyrics.

Her singing career is certainly peppered with superb songs, most of them written by Jacques Duvall, such as “Amoureux solitaires” and “Sage comme une image” (1980), “Mona Lisa”—a reference to the Red Brigades (1982), “Les brunes ne comptent pas pour des prunes” (1986), “Seules les filles pleurent” (1988), and—though not a major hit— “Je suis comme je suis” (2000), which sounds like a confession.

But Lio doesn’t just sing; she also has a surprisingly eclectic film (and television) career. Beneath her apparent lightheartedness, Lio identifies as a feminist. It’s no coincidence that she readily works with female directors such as Diane Kurys (“After Love”), Catherine Breillat (“Dirty as an Angel”), Manon Vernoux (“Nobody Loves Me”), Aline Isserman (“God, My Mother’s Lover, and the Butcher’s Son”), Yolande Moreau (“Henri”), and even Chantal Ackerman (“The ’80s”).

With her strong-willed personality, Lio notably supports the feminist movement Femen and even performed topless for their tenth anniversary in 2018. On the French TV program Arte in 2020, in the wake of the #MeToo movement , she declared without pretense, “I’ve moved on from Serge Gainsbourg. “He was a harasser. He was a total jerk to girls.” She is the first to dare to challenge the myth of French chanson in this way—with, it must be said, a rather compelling argument. Lio also wears her heart on her sleeve. When her friend Plastic Bertrand asked her to join a lineup of ’80s stars—from Alec Mansion to Zouk Machine—on stage at the Cirque Royal in Brussels in April 2022 to raise funds for Ukraine, she answered the call without a moment’s hesitation. That’s Lio for you!

Having herself been a victim of severe physical, psychological, and sexual abuse at the hands of her then-partner, musician Alexis Zad, in the 1990s, Lio recently spoke out candidly about the multiple cases of alleged rape (particularly involving minors) of which singer Patrick Bruel stands accused in Belgium, France, Switzerland, and Canada. “We’ve known for years that he behaves this way toward women. He needs to get help!” she declared bluntly to the French regional daily La Dépêche du Midi. She added that she categorically refuses to separate the man from the artist.

Photo: Portrait of Lio in the bar of the Amigo Hotel in Brussels (Belgium) in December 1988