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MUSIC

Aznavour buried in family vault after intimate funeral

French singer Charles Aznavour, who died Monday aged 94, was buried Saturday in the family vault outside Paris after a private funeral at the city's St John the Baptist Armenian cathedral.

Aznavour buried in family vault after intimate funeral
Mourners gather at Friday's homage to Aznavour. Saturday's funeral was closed to the public. Photo: AFP
Media and public were kept away from the ceremony limited to Aznavour's closest entourage, including fellow artists Serge Lama and Emmanuelle Beart.
 
Following the service the cortege headed for Montfort-l'Amaury, west of Paris, where Aznavour was laid to rest alongside his parents and son Patrick, who died aged just 25 in 1976. 
 
Afterwards, the cemetery was opened to the public to pay their own final homage to the singer who became a global entertainment name.
 
 
Saturday was declared a day of mourning, meanwhile, in his native Armenia with flags flying at half mast and masses held to mark his death.
 
Active until the final days of his life, Aznavour, who had indicated he hoped to make it to 100, had as recently as last month performed two concerts on the other side of the globe in Japan. 
 
Next week he had been due to travel to Armenia to accompany French President Emmanuel Macron for a Francophone summit and had expressed the hope he would like to breathe his last on stage.
 
The extent of the high regard in which he was held in France was underlined by Friday's homage to him at the Invalides in Paris, a ceremony which drew a television audience almost three million across three channels or almost one in two viewers.
 
That ceremony at the Invalides began with Aznavour's coffin, draped in the French tricolour flag, being carried into the cobbled courtyard to the Armenian lament, “Dle Yaman”, played on a traditional dudek flute.

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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