Johnny Hallyday, who has died aged 74, was France’s rockeur national. In the course of a career that spanned more than half a century, he recorded more than 1,000 songs, sold more than 110m records, and was seen live on more than 180 sellout tours by an estimated 28m people – the equivalent, roughly, of a third of the population of France. It would be difficult to exaggerate the place Hallyday occupied in the collective memory and hearts of his countrymen. Outside France, with the honourable exceptions of French-speaking Belgium and Switzerland, he was viewed mostly with bemusement. Hallyday’s detractors pointed to the derivative nature of his material: he faithfully copied almost every major rock star from the 1960s on, from Buddy Holly to Elvis Presley, the Who to the Stones, Hendrix to Springsteen, Jon Bon Jovi to Prince. More than a quarter of all his recordings were French adaptations of English-language songs. Even his sternest critics, though, would concede that Hallyday was one of rock’s great showmen, almost certainly the only French performer capable not just of selling out, on three successive nights, the Stade de France, but of holding its 80,000-strong crowd rapt in the palm of his hand. His last great free concert, on Bastille Day 2009, at the foot of the Eiffel Tower, drew a live audience of between 800,000 and 1 million people.
Born Jean-Philippe Smet in the Cité Malesherbes estate in Paris, Hallyday was the son of Huguette Clerc and Léon Smet, an itinerant Belgian who at the time was married to another woman. His parents separated within a few months of his birth and Hallyday was raised by a paternal aunt, Hélène Mar. Her two daughters, Menen and Desta, were professional dancers, and from an early age Hallyday accompanied the family on tour in France and abroad. His aunt paid for dance and guitar lessons, and by the age of nine Hallyday was performing on stage during his cousins’ costume changes.
Desta’s husband, an American whose stage name, Lee Halliday, Hallyday borrowed and misspelled, was an early influence: one song the young Johnny performed in Copenhagen in the mid-50s was The Ballad of Davy Crockett.
- Theguardian.com