Not Fade Away
This month’s obituaries
YoUng Jean-Philippe Smet wasn’t the first teenager to fall under the spell of Elvis Presley. But upon seeing
Loving You, Presley’s 1957 movie, the 14-year-old bought a guitar and began mimicking his hero, his obsession soon turning into a vocation under the alias of Johnny Hallyday. “The first time i saw him, i was paralysed,” he explained later. “His voice, the way he moved, everything was sexy.”
Hallyday began his recording career as the French equivalent of Elvis, adopting the black leather look and dishing out American rock’n’roll covers in his native language, though his cultural identity grew to transcend such limitations. At the time of his death, Hallyday had sold over 100 million albums, received the Légion d’Honneur and was lauded by President Macron for bringing “a part of America into our national pantheon”. Macron’s contention that “the whole country is in mourning” was borne out by a funeral procession attended by a million people, with a further 15 million watching live on TV.
Hallyday was still in his teens when “Viens danser Le Twist”, his 1961 version of chubby checker’s “Let’s Twist Again”, gave him his first no 1 hit in France. He appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show, The Jimi Hendrix Experience opened for him during their first ever tour (in october 1966) and Jimmy Page, Peter Frampton and the Small Faces were among those who backed Hallyday on his late-’60s albums. despite everything, however, he failed to translate to an international audience, remaining instead a curiously homegrown phenomenon.