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Bells at Oslo’s City Hall to honour David Bowie

Just days after adding a Motorhead song to honour rock legend Lemmy, the bells at Oslo's City Hall will now also ring to the tune of David Bowie's 'Changes'.

Published: 12 January 2016 13:41 CET

Bells at Oslo's City Hall to honour David Bowie

Bowie performing at an Oslo concert in 2004. Photo: Heiko Junge / SCANPIX

'Changes', from David Bowie's 1971 album 'Hunky Dory' will join the musical lineup at the Oslo City Hall on Tuesday.

“We received so many requests and there was such unanimity that we just decided to do it. To be honest, there wasn't really even any discussion about it,” bell ringer Laura Marie Rueslatten Olseng told AFP.

The clock tower at Oslo's City Hall marks the passage of time with different musical pieces every hour.

Featuring such classic composers as Edvard Grieg, Eric Satie and Vivaldi, as well as more modern hits such as 'Imagine' by John Lennon, the programme is sometimes changed to reflect current events.

Bowie will thus join a playlist already featuring heavy metal group Motorhead, which was added after the death of the band's frontman Ian “Lemmy” Kilmister last week.

See also: Oslo city bells pay tribute to rock legend Lemmy

A few days after the Paris attacks on November 13th, the bells played “Til Ungdommen”, a Norwegian hymn about peace.

So why pick 'Changes' from Bowie's five-decade career?

“Musically, the chords and the melody suit the programming machine” for the bells, said Olseng. “And it's a song that came out many years ago and which means something to a lot of people.”

The first bars of the song will ring out every day at 7pm until May 31.

Bowie died on Sunday after a bout with liver cancer. Tributes to the singer poured in from all over the world, including a strong reaction from Berlin, where Bowie lived in the late 1970s.

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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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