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Rihanna rages at pushy French fans

Pop star Rihanna let rip in a series of foul-mouthed Twitter posts, saying she had to fight her way out of a Paris train station after a crowd of French fans gathered to greet her.

Published: 3 September 2012 09:34 CEST

Rihanna rages at pushy French fans

The singer from Barbados had earlier posted a photo showing herself at London's St Pancras station — and the time of her train's departure for Paris
marked on a station sign.

She has 25 million followers on her Twitter account.

She arrived at the Gare du Nord in Paris on the Eurostar late on Saturday to find an enthusiastic crowd waiting to greet her.

The station's security team and her own bodyguards struggled to protect her from the crush as she tried to leave the station.

"The French are fuckin insane!!!" she tweeted a little later.

"FYI, if u push me, you WILL get pushed the phuck back!" she added.

"I just had to fight my way out of a damn train station!!!" she exclaimed.

Rihanna later appeared as special guest of British band Coldplay for their sold-out concert in front of 80,000 fans at the Stade de France.

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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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