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MUSIC

Bowie gets a memorial plaque at former Berlin home

Berlin officials will commemorate David Bowie on Monday with a plaque in the district of Schöneberg, where he lived in the late 1970s.

Published: 22 August 2016 12:13 CEST
Bowie gets a memorial plaque at former Berlin home
Photo: DPA

On Monday Michael Muller, mayor of Berlin, is to unveil the porcelain plaque at Haupstrasse 155. The white plaquedescribeds how Bowie penned and recorded three albums – Low, Heroes and Lodger – while living in the German capital. 

The plaque also includes a line from the title track of the album “Heroes”.

KPM, the Berlin-based firm that manufactured the plaque, has confirmed that it would be able to replace it within twenty four hours if Bowie fans somehow managed to steal or damage it, as fans of the Beatles have regularly done with the “Penny lane” street sign.

The British rock star died in January aged 69 in New York, shortly after releasing his last album “Black Star”. 

Fans had wanted the city to rename Hauptsstraße, where the singer lived for two years, after him. A spokesperson for the district council in Schöneberg told RBB broadcaster that someone can only be honoured with a street named five years after their death.

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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.

Published: 17 November 2023 09:05 CET
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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