Police officers used rubber bullets and tear gas to disperse partygoers in Zurich and Lucerne at the weekend, reports say.

 

"/> Police officers used rubber bullets and tear gas to disperse partygoers in Zurich and Lucerne at the weekend, reports say.

 

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Police fire rubber bullets at Swiss ravers

Police officers used rubber bullets and tear gas to disperse partygoers in Zurich and Lucerne at the weekend, reports say.

 

Published: 18 July 2011 11:28 CEST

In Lucerne, residents complained on Friday night about the increasingly loud music from a rave being held in a military barracks, said a report in the Tribune de Genève newspaper.

After negotiations with the party’s organizers to lower the volume failed, about 120 participants clashed with the officers. Several police vehicles were damaged in the commotion, said the paper.

On Saturday night, police in Zurich seized musical equipment and attempted to evacuate revellers from an illegal party under a bridge. As the tension grew, the officers used rubber bullets and tear gas to fend off the crowd, the paper said.

Some 80 partygoers responded by hurling stones and glass bottles at the officers. There were no reports of injuries, according to the paper.

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CULTURE

New songs mark sixth anniversary of French star Johnny Hallyday’s death

Fans of the late Johnny Hallyday, "the French Elvis Presley", will be able to commemorate the sixth anniversary of his death with two songs never released before.

Published: 17 November 2023 09:05 CET
New songs mark sixth anniversary of French star Johnny Hallyday's death

Hallyday, blessed with a powerful husky voice and seemingly boundless energy, died in December 2017, aged 74, of lung cancer after a long music and acting career.

After an estimated 110 million records sold during his lifetime – making him one of the world’s best-selling singers -Hallyday’s success has continued unabated beyond his death.

Almost half of his current listeners on Spotify are under the age of 35, according to the streaming service, and a posthumous greatest hits collection of “France’s favourite rock’n’roller”, whose real name was Jean-Philippe Leo
Smet, sold more than half a million copies.

The two new songs, Un cri (A cry) and Grave-moi le coeur (Engrave my heart), are featured on two albums published by different labels which also contain already-known hits in remastered or symphonic versions.

Un cri was written in 2017 by guitarist and producer Maxim Nucci – better known as Yodelice – who worked with Hallyday during the singer’s final years.

At the time Hallyday had just learned that his cancer had returned, and he “felt the need to make music outside the framework of an album,” Yodelice told reporters this week.

Hallyday recorded a demo version of the song, accompanied only by an acoustic blues guitar, but never brought it to full production.

Sensing the fans’ unbroken love for Hallyday, Yodelice decided to finish the job.

He separated the voice track from the guitar which he felt was too tame, and arranged a rockier, full-band accompaniment.

“It felt like I was playing with my buddy,” he said.

The second song, Grave-moi le coeur, is to be published in December under the artistic responsibility of another of the singer’s close collaborators, the arranger Yvan Cassar.

Hallyday recorded the song – a French version of Elvis’s Love Me Tender – with a view to performing it at a 1996 show in Las Vegas.

But in the end he did not play it live, opting instead for the original English-language version, and did not include it in any album.

“This may sound crazy, but the song was on a rehearsal tape that had never been digitalised,” Cassar told AFP.

The new songs are unlikely to be the last of new Hallyday tunes to delight fans, a source with knowledge of his work said. “There’s still a huge mass of recordings out there spanning his whole career,” the source said.

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