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‘Y Viva España’ singer Manolo Escobar dies

Spanish singer Manolo Escobar, whose Y Viva España became one of the best sellers in Spanish musical history, died Thursday at the age of 82 after a long fight against cancer. He was often considered Spain's first pop star.

'Y Viva España' singer Manolo Escobar dies
"Music is my life, I will never surrender," Escobar said this month in an interview with Spanish newspaper ABC. Photo: YouTube

Escobar had been treated for periods at the Hospital Clinica in the southern Spanish resort of Benidorm, reportedly for colon cancer.

"He was a patient at the clinic but he left on Tuesday and died at home," said a hospital official, who declined to be named.

Escobar had a huge following in Spain in the 1960s and 1970s with hits such as "El Porompompero" but it was his best-selling version of "Qué Viva España", a song that foreign tourists took to heart in bars and pubs across Spain's beach resorts, that made him an international star.

He was "a symbol who lived in the musical landscape of Spaniards for half a century," Spain's culture minister, Jose Ignacio Wert, said in a statement.

Messages of regret spread on social networks, too.

"Manolo Escobar, a loving family man, collector of art, kind and likeable, a singer to the end, to the end of the world… goodbye!" Spanish actor Santiago Segura wrote on Twitter.

One of Escobar's last big acts was in July 2010 when, dressed in a yellow shirt and red jacket and tie, he sang with the Spanish football team to celebrate their victory in the World Cup in South Africa.

The fifth of 10 children, he was born in the small village of Las Norias de Daza in the southern Spanish region of Andalusia on October 19, 1931.

Escobar announced his retirement from music at the end of 2012 after 50 years on the stage.

Last month, he had to cancel the final acts of his farewell tour after falling ill.

"Music is my life, I will never surrender," he said this month in an interview with Spanish newspaper ABC.

"I am happy because I have work and because, moreover, people are still prepared to pay to see me on stage. I want to return to a few of the places I have been to in my career of more than 50 years and say goodbye for good. I will sing one more time in each one so that I don't go back," he added.

Escobar started his musical career as a child in the years after the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), playing with his brothers and sisters in festivals and fairs, first in his native Andalusia and later in the northwestern city of Barcelona to where he moved as an adolescent.

In the early 1960s he shot to stardom with shows in Madrid and Barcelona and a film role in "The guerrillas" by Pedro L. Ramirez. Other films followed including "Father Manolo" in which he played a singing priest.

Escobar has lived in Benidorm for the past two decades. After music, he made painting his second passion and amassed a considerable collection.

In 1959 he married his German wife Ana Marx Schiffer, with whom he had one daughter.
 

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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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