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JOHNNY HALLYDAY

Children of French rocker Hallyday go to court over album

The biological children of French rock legend Johnny Hallyday have launched court action to get access to his planned posthumous album, their lawyers said on Saturday, in the latest battle in a case that has transfixed France.

Published: 18 February 2018 02:11 CET
Children of French rocker Hallyday go to court over album
Tensions between the feuding members of the country's first family of showbiz blew up into full-scale war earlier this week when his children Laura Smet and David Hallyday challenged his “rewritten” will, in which he left everything to his fourth wife Laeticia, 32 years his junior.
 
Hallyday's 51st studio album has now become part of the spat, after the “French Elvis” spent much of 2017 recording 12 songs for the record, which remained unfinished when he died of lung cancer in December.
 
Smet will go to court to “get to know the posthumous album project in order to exercise her rights as heir, to be able to confirm that the artistic integrity of all its contents were respected in this album, which the press has announced would be completed soon,” her lawyer Emmanuel Ravanas said on Saturday.
 
Smet was “mainly pre-occupied with defending her father's work,” Ravanas said, adding that Laeticia had “sharply opposed” an amicable plea to end stonewalling over the finalised album, “about which she knows little”.
 
“Johnny Hallyday had proudly listened to the first raw recordings of some songs with his daughter Laura on October 4,” Ravanas added. 
 
Along with David, Smet has urgently appealed to a court in Nanterre, to the west of Paris, to receive information about the album project within 48 hours. They also demanded Hallyday's real estate holdings, which include several luxury villas, be frozen ahead of a hearing scheduled for March 15.
 
The fractured family was able to maintain a unified front for the funeral of the country's biggest rock star in December, when hundreds of thousands of his fans thronged the centre of Paris for a “national popular tribute”. But that uneasy truce exploded when details of the rocker's will became known on Monday.
 
Smet said she was “stupefied and hurt” that she and her half-brother David — the singer's only two biological children — had been left nothing, with everything going to Laeticia and eventually the two Vietnamese girls she and Hallyday adopted.

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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