Johnny Hallyday, who has died aged 74, was France's rockeur national. In the course of a career spanning more than half a century, he recorded more than 1,000 songs, sold more than 110 million records, and was seen live on more than 180 sellout tours by an estimated 28 million 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 copied almost every major rock star from the 1950s on, from Buddy Holly to Elvis Presley, the Who to the Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix to Bruce 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, a Belgian who at the time was married to another woman. His parents separated within 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.
Early influence
Desta's husband, Lee Halliday, an American whose stage name Hallyday borrowed and misspelled, was an early influence: one song the young Johnny performed in the mid-1950s was The Ballad of Davy Crockett. Aged 14 and back in Paris, Hallyday saw Elvis Presley's Lovin' You at the cinema: it determined, he would later say, the course of his life.
He began performing regularly at an early Paris rock venue, Golf-Drouot, and in late 1959 was signed by Vogue records following an appearance on the Paris Cocktail radio show. His first record was released in March 1960; the second single from that four-track EP, Souvenirs Souvenirs, marked his breakthrough.
President Charles de Gaulle was so disgusted at this corruption of the country’s youth that he suggested Hallyday fans should be drafted into road-gangs “because they clearly have too much energy to spare”.
Remarkably, the singer’s immense popularity in France never really waned. He was, for better or worse, the god of Gallic rock, with all that came with it: the alcohol, the orgies, the fights, the tax scandals and the fast cars. There was a suicide attempt as early as 1966, and a now-famous drugs confession many years later.
There were weddings, flings and divorces. Hallyday was married four times: first, to the pop singer Sylvie Vartan, from 1965 to 1980, with whom he had a son, David; then, in succession, to the actors Babeth Étienne and Adeline Blondieau; and, finally, in 1996, to Laeticia Boudou, a model. He also had a relationship in the 1980s with the actor Nathalie Baye, with whom he had a daughter, Laura. All of it helped earn Hallyday some 60 Paris Match covers, more than any other Frenchman. He was a friend of Jacques Chirac, who made him a chevalier of the Légion d'honneur in 1997, and an even closer friend of Nicolas Sarkozy.
Love affair
Cruel tongues said that Hallyday's popularity reflected a cavernous void at the heart of French popular music; the deep-seated envy of a country that has never produced its own Beatles or Rolling Stones. Others blamed France's enduring and hugely nostalgic love affair with the post-war US of Route 66 and Rebel Without a Cause, a love affair that Hallyday, blond, beleathered and Brylcreemed, took considerable care to nurture (his favourite pastime, he said, was riding one of his many Harleys through the Californian desert and staying in small motels).
Hallyday's abiding tragedy, as he himself admitted, was to have been born in France, land of the sentimental chanson. The language of Molière and Descartes, he knew, did not work with riffs and quiffs. "French lyrics are too unwieldy for rock," he said. "Our words are too long. You just can't sing rock'n'roll in French."
He received a diagnosis of colon cancer in 2009, then, later the same year, endured an operation on a herniated disc that resulted in him being put in a medically-induced coma for three weeks. When news leaked, the doctor responsible for the surgery was attacked in his home by a masked gang.
Hallyday recovered to put out the album L'Attente in 2012, promoted by his first-ever gigs in the UK, at the Royal Albert Hall in London. Two more followed, in 2014 and 2015, as well as a 90-date tour called Rester Vivant (Staying Alive), that ended last year.
In the end, then, perhaps one of Hallyday's greatest achievements was simply to have survived at the top for so long. "I'm just an interpreter," he once told Le Monde. "I've only ever written a few songs in my life, and I needed a lot of cocaine to do that. But I can put across to an audience some of my feelings. And I cannot live any other way."
He is survived by Laeticia, their daughters, Jade and Joy, and by David and Laura.
Johnny Hallyday – Born: June 15th, 1943; Died December 6th, 2017