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He wrote the first French “slow of the summer”, Aline, in 1965. Other hits followed by legends of French song, such as Les mots bleus or Les paradis perdus. The singer Christophe died in the night from Thursday to Friday, at 74 years old. But if his tubes are registered in the Pantheon of French popular culture, what do we know about his private life? On June 16, in the program En balade avec , he gave an appointment to Frédéric Taddei, in his Parisian apartment boulevard de Montparnasse. "Going to bed at 6am", he still got up early to welcome the teams from Europe 1. The opportunity for the singer to tell us about some little-known aspects of his private life.
He collected cars, flippers or ... juke boxes
Christophe loved cars, and he had almost (all) the big brands, Ferrari, Lamborghini… "I was lucky, I was crazy about cars, like all kids. And at the beginning (success ), instead of putting aside, like a reasonable guy, I blazed everything in the cars! ", he admitted to Frédéric Taddei last June.
But Christophe also liked a lot of other things, and at his place there are collections of just about everything, especially if it's "vintage": pinball machines, radio sets or even Jukeboxes. By the way, the singer confided on Europe 1 that for a long time, "he even wanted to be buried in a Jukebox". But it finally happened to him.
>> Find all of Frédéric Taddei's walks in replay and podcast here
He lost his sense of smell and taste following an "aspirin shock"
"I was very sick when I was 42 years old, I had a shock with aspirin", said the singer again at the microphone of Europe 1. "I took a lot of cortisone at that time. For three or four years I no longer had any taste or smell, I was a size 34, I never kissed ... And then one day, I ate a chocolate yogurt. It was .. .. incredible. And since that day, it's been fine, I have found my taste and smell again! ", he remembered.
He did not consider himself a singer ...
"When I was ten I loved to scream in the subway, to hear the reverberation", says Christophe again, to illustrate his “passion for sounds”, which came to him very early.
At 14, he regularly went to a famous accordion merchant from Strasbourg-Saint-Denis, in Paris. Among other things, he could hear Italian tenors come to exercise their voices. "I then really realized that we could make sound with his voice. I didn't say sung. Besides, I don't see myself as a singer, but rather as a musician with my voice", theorizes he.
What he likes is playing, trying, juggling with instruments. Like the synthesizers, which arrived in the 1970s, were a revelation to him. "It was Christmas!" He remembers.
He wanted to do a duet with PNL
In 2019, Christophe revisits several of his flagship songs, in duet. For "Crazy Success", he wanted rappers. And it is finally Nuski and Vaati who will lend themselves to the exercise. But it was not necessarily his first choice.
"I wanted PNL," said Christophe to Frédéric Taddei. "But they were doing their album, maybe they weren't interested either."
"One night, I go a little on YouTube, as I often do, when I eat, around 4am '. And there I look for rap, rap. And I come across Nuski, he continued." I flash on the attitude of the guy, on the sound, on his words. I learn that he is the son of a very, very good old friend of mine. And the other, Vaati, was the son of a guy who did my merchandising at certain concerts ", the singer still told us, praising the" hazards of life ".
He "never voted"
Regarding his music (and his life), Christophe was an eclectic character, open to many experiences. But there is one area from which he has always kept aloof: politics. He who "loves silence" mocked a world where we "talk a lot". "I have never voted in my life," he also said.
Christophe was not a committed singer. He assumed it, and again mocked those "who talk a lot". "I like to participate in things, alone, for AIDS, things on the brain, the Telethon, these are things that touch me. But I would also like to see, all the people who are grafted on these things , how much they really give, "he finally wondered.