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Petter Northug (a cappella)

English-language lyrics for Swedish group DEO's song of praise to a Norwegian ski legend.

Read all about it and watch the video.

Kvartetten DEO – Petter Northug

Who’s strong, who’s fast, who’s hard as steel?

Who’s best and always crosses the line first?

Who gets to hear the crowd roar?

Our hero Petter Northug!

And he lives his life by a philosophy

Of taking to the track with a wolfish scowl

Only to reveal in the sprint that he’s really a swine

Our hero Petter Northug!

He’s as handsome as a Greek Adonis, oh yes

All the girls are captivated.

For daily use and formal attire, he always wears a Norwegian cardigan

Sewn from the skin of polar bears

And his manly body bears a scent of tar

Paint thinner, oil, hard liquor and rust.

When he sleeps in the mountains of Svalbard

His chest hair is coated with frost

And when mere mortals have retired and the hour is late

He’s out chopping wood, hunting elk and carrying rocks

(Lots of rocks).

He has style, he has grace, he has heroism

And his chin is the size of a country shed

He has liquor and petroleum in his blood

And he’s steady as a pine trunk.

When Statoil’s oil prognosis fell apart

Well, our ski king really lost his temper

Slammed his fist on the bottom of the Skagerrak strait

Causing the oil to flow once more.

 

(Wax, wax, re-wax, re-wax etc.)

 

As a baby, Petter was the real deal

Spitting out tobacco and clubbing seals

When he turned eight

He had a hairy thigh

Clad in fur like Shere Khan

Even in the spring of his youth:

Bearded like a Taliban

And it’s said that he once wrestled with God

And won the bout without breaking a sweat.

He makes generations of men go from being

Heteros to homosexuals

And with his two-day stubble he can polish

Even the rustiest of scrap vehicles.

When he heads out to hunt whales in his Viking ship

He uses a net

And he only eats chili, wasabi and meat

He doesn’t even cry during Bambi when the mother dies

(She dies).

With a washboard solid as sub-volcanic rock

And a stare that can cut through Plexiglas

And a voice of rumbling infra-bass

Our hero Petter Northug!

He’s the man who’s idolized everywhere

He’s loved by each Russian, Inuit, and Baltic dweller

The entire cosmos proclaims it thousandfold:

Our hero Petter Northug is

Powerful as an emperor of steel

(A man of cast iron and his…)

His victory cry, loud as a male lion’s roar

(He roars loudly and he…)

He is a god among gods and a man

Who can do everything

A true hero

A Don Juan

A king

He’s the one who’ll make you

Weak at the knees and give you butterflies in your stomach

Northug is super strong and utterly bizarre

(He can do kung fu and judo)

Not to mention the fact that he’s a whizz on guitar

(He strums the axe and his…)

His muscles are so flexed

What a guy (he’s everyone’s dad)

He’s got it all (got all the answers)

And the way he skis (he keeps nothing in reserve)

A ski Barbarian (a real man). Yes, he’s

Petter Northug, hero of heroes

Bloody Norwegian, this is your fanfare!

 

(Wax, wax, re-wax, re-wax etc.)

Translation: The Local

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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.

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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