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Norwegian fans get naked for Robyn

Some 70 naked Norwegians joined Swedish pop star Robyn last summer for a long-delayed music video that has finally seen the light of day.

Norwegian fans get naked for Robyn
VG Screenshot

Shot at last year’s Hove Festival in Norway, the video is the work of director Luke Gilford, who took time out from documenting the star’s stage show to film fans who had answered the rallying cry to “get naked for Robyn”.

“The natural landscape at Hove seemed an ideal place to do something so surreal,” Gilford told newspaper VG.

“I also thought it would be interesting for such a popular artist to have an emotional experience with her fans,” he added.

Clad only in splashes of body paint, the willing extras filed into the forest to shake their stuff to the Avicii remix of the single Hang With Me.

Gilford had earlier pitched the idea to Robyn’s management, but it wasn’t until the day before the singer was due to arrive in Norway that he finally heard back from her.

“She called and said: ‘Can we still do it?’”

Flyers were quickly distributed around the festival area calling for volunteers over the age of 18 to bring along their partners and shed their clothes.

Now, a year on, the video has finally received Robyn’s seal of approval.

“Robyn wasn’t satisfied with the first edit, so Luke sent over a new final version to Robyn a couple of weeks ago,” festival spokesman Gaute Drevdal revealed.

“The new version is quite different and this is the video Robyn has approved,” he told VG.

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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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