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Sweden’s ‘exhausted’ Lykke Li cancels tour

Swedish indie pop singer Lykke Li has pulled out of festival dates in New Zealand, Australia and Singapore due to illness.

Published: 5 January 2015 14:29 CET

Sweden's 'exhausted' Lykke Li cancels tour

Lykke Li performing in 2014. Photo: TT

The electro star released a statement saying that health problems meant she could no longer perform at the popular Laneway Festival dates where she was set to headine in January.

"It's been a long time coming, but unfortunately tour life has caught up with me and it's been recommended that I take a break. I'm devastated," she said.

The singer, who has had hits with tracks including 'Gunshot', 'I never learn' and 'No rest for the wicked', said she was determined to come back "stronger" after her rest.

Ariel Pink, Dan Deacon and Iceage are set to perform at the festival to make up for Lykke Li's non-appearance.

The Laneway Festival is one of the most popular one day music events in Australia.

Starting off life as a series of weekly shows at a Melbourne bar, it spread to other cities in the country before going international five years ago.

Lykke Li made headlines in the UK recently when ut was revealed that 'Gunshot' was the most 'Shazamed' song to feature in a UK advert in 2014.

The track – which appeared in Peugeot's recent 108 campaign – was searched for more times than tracks by the likes of Electric Guest, Tom Odell and Clean Bandit.

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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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