France has lost its cultural nuclear deterrent, its favourite granddad, its permanent teenager, one of its greatest national treasures and its longest-running national joke. Johnny est mort.
After 58 years as a rock icon confined to one country, Johnny Hallyday has squeezed into his outrageously tight trousers and brushed his coiffed, blond mane for the last time. Hallyday, né Jean-Philippe Smet,died on Wednesday at the age of 74.
The 50s and 60s generation of rock stars is indestructible, but few of them rocked for as long as Johnny Hallyday. In 1960, when he made his first record, the UK charts were dominated by Elvis Presley, Buddy Holly, Tommy Steele and Lonnie Donegan.
Hallyday remained, until the end, the most popular live act in France: notre rockeur national, one of the country’s biggest sellers of discs and downloads, popular with both grannies and their grandchildren. He recorded 1,000 songs, sold more than 110m discs, performed more than 100 live tours, had four wives, two children, two grandchildren and two adopted children. He attempted suicide twice and made dozens of films. He was the subject of more Paris Match front covers than any other person.
And yet none of his hits (tubes in French) penetrated far beyond the French-speaking world. Joue pas de rock’n’roll pour moi; C’est le mashed potatoes; Laissez-nous twister; Quelque chose de Tennessee (by far his best song). They left the international charts undisturbed.
It was common for foreigners to mock Johnny Hallyday, once described by USA Today as “the biggest rock star you never heard of”. He was also mercilessly teased by French satirists and despised by the many tribes of French intellectuals, both of the right and the left. And there was something comical about his determination to copy – and some would say murder – every passing fashion in Anglo-Saxon popular music for half a century: from rock in blue jeans, to guitar-smashing pop, to psychedelic, to hard metal, to reggae, to disco, and back to rock in blue jeans.
Yet I think Johnny Hallyday deserves more than mockery. He deserves to be remembered as one of the most remarkable of all rock stars, even if he never mastered or extended or transcended the genre like a Presley or a Jagger.
His life and career were a musical tragedy wrapped in a political enigma. He started as a half-Belgian “corrupter of French youth” and ended as a national totem, a symbol of French cultural resistance.
His early concerts caused riots. If Johnny wanted to go to a nightclub in the early 1960s, he would try to drive his car through the front door. Cities all over France banned him. President Charles de Gaulle condemned him as a fifth columnist for “American cultural imperialism”.
He became the musical equivalent of the French independent nuclear deterrent: proof that France is a grown-up country that does not have to rely on US missiles or US pop stars. He was a warm, genuine, big-hearted, uncomplicated man and a surprisingly good actor. He became a personal friend of two presidents who declared themselves spiritual successors to De Gaulle, Jacques Chirac and Nicolas Sarkozy. He became a Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur, the order reserved for the “living elite of the nation”.
Le Figaro, the conservative newspaper, once excoriated him. It ended by declaring him a “phenomenon … whose every song sticks like [Marcel Proust’s] madeleine in the memory of millions of French people”.
This was the Hallyday enigma – part of a broader French enigma. France’s fear of cultural colonisation by the US forged a national icon from a man who turned American popular music into French popular music.
He had a rich, deep, gravelly voice – a voice that sounded as though it had been marinated in Gauloises cigarettes and cheap red wine. And this was his tragedy. He sincerely adored rock’n’roll. He sincerely adored America. He spent much of his later life living incognito in Los Angeles, where he could drive his Harley-Davidson out into the desert and pass as another ageing Elvis wannabe. But, though half-Belgian, he was irretrievably French.
His most memorable songs were ballads that could have been sung by Edith Piaf. But Hallyday’s wonderful voice sounded odd and unconvincing when he tried to rock. He once blamed the French language, which he complained had too many syllables to make good rock lyrics.
Listen to him, though, singing a ballad in the chanson Française tradition, such as Quelque chose de Tennessee, or Oh Marie or Que je t’aime. Johnny the rocker was an amiable imposter. As a French chanteur, Johnny was a genius.
• John Lichfield is a journalist who has been based in France since 1997
