Europe's news in English

COPY LINK

ART

Paris Centre Pompidou museum shut by security guard strike

The Centre Pompidou modern art museum -- one of the biggest tourist draws in the French capital -- will remain closed this weekend because of a week-long strike by security guards, its management said.

Published: 1 April 2017 16:12 CEST

Paris Centre Pompidou museum shut by security guard strike

Centre Georges Pompidou. Photo: LIONEL BONAVENTURE/AFP

Around 100 guards walked out on Monday over a new law which forces them to become civil servants rather than be employed under the terms of their previous contracts.Talks between the guards' unions and the French ministry of culture broke down Thursday.

Management said Saturday that they had no option but to keep the museum's doors shut over the weekend when tens of thousands of visitors were expected.

The iconic gallery, which attracted 3.3 million art lovers last year, is hosting a major retrospective of the American painter Cy Twombly.

A weekend of events entitled “Imagine the France of tomorrow” was moved to another Paris venue.

Nearly 1,200 people work at the museum, which last year bucked the fall in visitor numbers of other major tourist attractions in the French capital after the Paris and Nice terror attacks.

With up to 18,000 visitors a day passing through its doors, the state-funded museum stands to lose hundreds of thousands of euros (dollars) from the stoppage.

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.

Url copied to clipboard!