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MUSIC

French rapper releases music video filmed in jail

A French rapper has released a music video using footage filmed during his time in jail last year, angering prison authorities who threatened to take legal action over the clip on Friday.

Published: 6 January 2017 14:58 CET
French rapper releases music video filmed in jail
Photo: YouTube Screenshot
The video from Elams, a rapper from Marseille, shows convicts in a prison in southern France exercising, smoking and in some cases wearing T-shirts to promote his new album.
  
The clip is for his single “Pretoire” (Court) and appears to have been shot on a mobile phone.

Writing on YouTube, where it has been viewed around 140,000 times, Elams urged fans to share it on social media “before it gets banned”.
   
Local prison authorities were unamused, stressing that mobile phones are banned inside jails and that the rights of fellow inmates had been infringed.
  
They “perhaps don't want other people to know they are in prison,” regional prison director Pierre Raffin told AFP while complaining that mobile phones were getting more and more difficult to detect.
   
“Disciplinary measures will be taken against detainees who were seen playing along with the game,” Raffin added. “An internal enquiry is under way and we'll pass the results on to the prosecutor's office.”
   
Elams released a video address to his fans from prison in September last year in which he talked about his sentence over a car chase in the southern port city of Marseille in 2014.
  
He talked of the difficulties of jail life, said he missed his son and encouraged others to avoid falling into crime.
   
“I'm not proud of being here,” he said.

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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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