AND HERE'S...JOHNNY
WHO THE HELL IS JOHNNY HALLYDAY?
One expects artists of note - Picasso, Rembrandt, Dalì - to be known by their surnames. Politicians too - Mitterand, Churchill, Trump. Some writers also rate the honour - Hemingway, Shakespeare, Salinger. But how many personalities are identified by their Christian names alone?
Well, there's Elvis, and Orson, and maybe Adele - and, in France, another rare example. No French person will wonder whom you mean if you ask what they think of "Johnny".
Singer and actor Jean-Philippe Léo Smet, alias Johnny Hallyday, was a phenomenon - but only in France. He sold more than 110 million records, among them five Diamond albums, 22 Platinum and 40 Gold - but all in France: appeared in fifty movies - almost all made in France - and repeatedly sold out concerts before hundreds of thousands of people which were then watched by millions more on television - but only in France. As a (British) obituary put it, "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.”
If someone was to introduce France to a post-war world dominated by American pop, Johnny was your man. Rugged, handsome, aggressively heterosexual, he was an outsized and noisy cuckoo in the cosy nest of French popular music. His competitors were folksy chansonniers like George Brassens, Jacques Brel and Charles Trenet who sang about clouds, flowers and the girls of yesteryear, or such balladeers as Charles Aznavour, complaining of loneliness and lost love. Any balls in the business belonged to the late Edith Piaf, who, a generation earlier, would have taken Hallyday to bed. He was just her type.
Foreign critics accused Johnny of imitating Elvis Presley - but he imitated everybody. More than a quarter of his recordings were covers of American hits. His breakout hit was Let's Twist Again - sung in English. In 1967, at the height of Flower Power, he recorded Scott McKenzie's San Francisco. After watching him sing it on television, wearing silver lamé trousers, white shoes, beads, a velvet jacket with floral motifs, and carrying a rose, one French critic commented sourly "Johnny poses with a lost, dreamy gaze, reminiscent of a beaten dog."
All that changed when he discovered his forté, the staged concert, and his image, a synthesis of Clint Eastwood, Elvis Presley and the Marlon Brando of The Wild One, leather-clad leader of the Black Rebels Motor Cycle Club. "Whatcha rebelling against, Johnny?", someone asks. Brando, with a sneer, responds "Whatcha got?"
Stylists worked to maximise Johnny's physical presence - the stentorous baritone, the leonine glare, the mane-like quiff - and put him in what became his standard wardrobe, a distillation of Biker Chic; blue cotton vest, often sweat-soaked; snug jeans; biker boots, and a leather belt, heavily buckled. Jewelery tended to knuckle-duster rings, silver skull pendants, and chains.
Titanic quantities of machinery and a team of hundreds lay behind his stage manner of arrogance and isolation. In 1998, just after France won the World Cup, Hallyday filled the vast 80,000-seat Stade de France. A helicopter lowered him by cable to its roof, from where he descended, in a cloud of smoke and fireworks, to a stage afloat in an ocean of ecstatic fans. Expressionless, he surveyed them, removed his dark glasses and tossed them into the mob. Que la fete commence! His Millennium show at the Eiffel tower outdid even this; a million people attended, and ten million watched on television.
After Charles de Gaulle snorted that all this frenzy suggested the youth of France had too much excess energy, and might do better if drafted into road gangs, Johnny made it his business to cultivate friendships in high places. He got on with president Jacques Chirac, who liked to present himself as working class, and was even closer to Nicolas Sarkozy. The latter officiated at one of his weddings . Chirac awarded him the Legion d'Honneur.
Not overly creative - he confessed to only writing a couple of songs, and those while high on cocaine - Johnny kept close to the limelight, but always slightly out of its glare. Rather than make physical contact with the crowd, he entered from above, or from darkness. Sometimes he rode his Harley on stage and remained straddling it while he sang. Rather than mingle, he utilised a silent team of bodyguards that materialised out of the dark. Ringed by them, Johnny made a deliberate, menacing progress through the human ocean, alone in an island of space.
He was careful to maintain his American credentials, living part-time in Los Angeles (though legally in Switzerland, a fact that led to accusations of tax irregularities), partying with the Rolling Stones and Jimi Hendrix, but periodically riding his Harley into the Nevada desert, where, if his publicists could be believed, he enjoyed staying in small motels, incognito - but never, cynics noted, without a video crew close at hand. Despite five marriages and numerous liaisons, he put down roots nowhere. That was part of his image. Just a drifter. Just passing through. Moving on. Still French. Still Johnny.
Since September 2021, he has had a monument in Paris. The forecourt before the arena in Bercy where he appeared in more than a hundred concerts became Esplanade Johnny Hallyday, with a creation by Bertrand Lavier entitled Quelque'chose de.../Something about..... High overhead, a real Harley-Davidson perches on a column in the form of a guitar neck. The title refers to Quelque'chose de Tennessee, a 1985 hit inspired by playwright Tennessee Williams. A video clip produced for the song shows Johnny, ever the loner, driving a truck and hitchhiking across a monochrome American midwest. Reverently, Johnny's mistress of the time, actress Nathalie Baye, reads a quote from Williams' Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. "Oh, you weak, beautiful people who give up with such grace. What you need is someone to take hold of you - gently, with love, and hand your life back to you..." Ah, Johnny. If it wasn't for the cocaine, the tax evasion and the girls, you could almost qualify for saint.