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Berlin to honour Bowie with plaque outside old flat

Berlin-based fans wanted a street named after pop legend David Bowie, but for now they’ll have to settle for a plaque placed outside the flat where he lived in the 1970s instead.

Berlin to honour Bowie with plaque outside old flat
A fan lays flowers at Hauptstrasse 155 in Berlin where Bowie lived in the late 1970s. Photo: DPA

The plaque will be fitted at the house at Hauptstraße 155 where David Bowie shared an apartment with singer Iggy Pop in the Schöneberg neighbourhood, the Berlin cultural authority announced last week.

It remains to be agreed when and where exactly the plaque will be installed, but the memorial should be complete by the end of the year, broadcaster RBB reports.

Fans had wanted the city to rename Hauptsstraße, the street where the pop chameleon lived, after him, and an online petition on change.org has so far collected over 12,000 signatures.

But a spokesperson for the district council in Schöneberg warned RBB that fans’ hopes were likely to be dashed – at least in the short term.

In Berlin there is a law on street names which means that someone can only be honoured with a street named after them five years after their death, the spokesperson explained.

Reinhold Kleber, who runs the David Bowie fanzine davidbowie.de, told The Local “I’ve been a fan since 1970, and I live in Schöneberg near his former flat. Naturally everyone who has lost a hero wants to see him suitably honoured.”

“One can be satisfied with the plaque at first and stay focused for the street street name [if it can happen at a later point.]” he said.

Bowie died at the age of 69 of cancer in January, just days after releasing the album Black Star. Fans later gathered for an emotional memorial service at the Hansa studios where he worked on his music.

His Berlin years were some of the most productive in the British singer’s life. While living in the then western part of the divided city, he released a trilogy of albums including the seminal Heroes, produced with Brian Eno.

Another stumbling block on the road to creating David Bowie Straße is the fact that Schöneberg has a policy of only naming streets after women, Berlin daily Morgenpost reports.

The policy is contentious within the district administration, but a specific policy guide for Schöneberg and other districts in the capital says that women should always be given preference when it comes to awarding the honour of a street name.

DON'T MISS: David Bowie's Berlin in pictures

 

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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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