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MUSIC

NorthSide: Radiohead to play first Danish gig in eight years

The 2017 music festival season is already heating up thanks to Tuesday’s announcement that Radiohead will headline the NorthSide festival in Aarhus.

Published: 25 October 2016 10:37 CEST
NorthSide: Radiohead to play first Danish gig in eight years
Thom Yorke and the rest of Radiohead have not played in Denmark since the 2008 Roskilde Festival (pictured). Photo: Sara Johannessen / SCANPIX
The Oxfordshire band has not played a show on Danish soil in eight years so the booking is seen as a major coup by the festival, which having started in 2010 is still largely seen as a ‘little brother’ to the more established Roskilde Festival. 
 
 
“We are proud and honoured that Radiohead has agreed to play NorthSide in the summer. They are the perfect band as a headliner for our poster and today’s announcement is the culmination of several years of hard work,” festival spokesman John Fogde said in a press release. 
 
He added that the booking was “a dream come true” for the Aarhus team. 
 
Radiohead have sold more than 30 million albums worldwide and have topped numerous polls and critics’ lists as one of the best bands of the 1990s and 2000s. Their ninth album, ‘A Moon Shaped Pool’, was released to great fanfare and a warm critical reception earlier this year. 
 
In other festival news, the Copenhagen heavy metal festival Copenhell recently announced that System of a Down will headline its 2017 incarnation. The Armenian-American band will perform their first ever Danish festival show and first concert in Denmark in nearly 12 years. 
 
With the two big-name announcements from its competitors, all eyes will be on the Roskilde Festival when it rolls out its first batch of names on Thursday.  

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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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