Hits What happened to these singers who killed you 25 years ago, whose hits you have sung and of which nothing has been heard since
Stories Without You: the well-known ballad of Mariah Carey that carries three deaths behind her back
30 years ago,
a French boy, just four years old,
achieved a
Guinness World Record
for becoming "the smallest singer to get a number one".
However,
Jordy Lemoine
-known simply as Jordy- not only managed to reach the top of the rankings of his country, but of 14 nations (including Spain), in addition to debuting at number 58 on the prestigious
Billboard
list .
And it is that for much of 1992,
Dur dur d'être bébé!
[How hard it is to be a baby!, in Spanish] managed to
sneak into every disco, beach bar
and radio in Europe.
What's more, Jordy came to do
a mini tour
world and appeared a couple of times in Madrid, where he declared that he liked singing more than playing, that his favorite toys were Barbies and that when he grew up he
wanted to be "a doctor, a policeman and a singer".
But, as the years went by, his dreams collapsed.
Jordy Lemoine was born in 1988 in Yvelines.
And although at three years old he seemed like a child like any other, his father
De he Claude Lemoine - a producer
who was involved in the success of the French band Rockets - realized that Jordy had a
special talent.
A gift that could make him attractive to audiences, so he decided to take him to a
diaper
ad casting .
At the audition, Jordy had to say the sentence "how hard is it to have a wet diaper!"
and, according to some of Claude's interviews, something about that line sounded extremely musical to him.
In this way, the producer began to
think about the phrase
and, after a few days, he managed to transform it into "how hard it is to be a baby!", which soon became a
promising hit.
However, her little son did not feel like singing it at all.
Less record it.
According to some French media, the former radio presenter Patricia Clerget - Jordy's mother - took weeks to persuade him and
"teach" him to rap
in front of the microphone.
Still, she preferred to state totally different things.
For example, in 1993, Clerget told the
Washington Post:
"It comes naturally to Jordy to sing, because he loves to do it."
"Jordy doesn't feel any kind of pressure on him.
For example, it all started because we were in the studio with Claude and he took the microphone. And instead of telling him 'don't play anything', we left him, because we realized that he liked it," said the mother.
But the newspaper found his behavior suspicious and, in pursuit of the truth,
and that his parents
blackmailed
him that, if he didn't sing, they wouldn't take him for a pony ride.
In fact, many journalists during that time asked his parents if they "promoted" their son's career.
But Claude and Patricia always responded the same:
"There is no way to force a child to go on stage,
because they are not like puppets. For him this is a game and we have nothing to do with it."
Despite this, the evidence said otherwise.
The Lemoines
had given up their careers to "help Jordy"
and basically lived off their performances.
That is why they took him in less than a year throughout Europe, the United States and part of Japan, Korea and Hong Kong, in addition to making him record three albums.
The first of them -
Pochette Surprise
- was a hit with
Dur dur d'être bébé!
.
However,
and
Récreátion
were nothing more than anecdotal and, according to experts,
did not mean profits for the Lemoines.
And what happened then?
Claude and Patricia installed
a kind of amusement park
with the image of Jordy.
But, due to the scarcity of hits, the industry's interest in the boy began to wane and the family
's source of income
dried up .
As a result, the marriage of the Lemoines went into crisis and they ended up
divorcing
.
Claude went one way and Patricia went the other.
Specifically,
to an isolated farm
.
In this way, according to the Libération
newspaper
, in 1999 Jordy began to live as an ordinary child, who
liked football, playing the drums
and practice judo.
However, his tranquility only lasted until 2005, when he began to be aware of his history, he reviewed his assets and realized that
he did not have the money
that he had once earned.
His father had squandered it all.
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In this way, Jordy - then 17 years old - decided to return to the public eye and
make "his true self" known,
without pressure, in a reality show called
La Ferme Célébrités
.
In it, the former singer recounted harsh passages from his childhood, that
he did feel exploited
and that his success had not been as happy as it seemed in the 90s, for which the public quickly took pity on him and, after a few weeks , transformed him into the new
winner of the program.
But the former star was not satisfied with his triumph and, a year later,
he wrote a book
to vindicate his story.
It's about
I'm not a baby anymore,
where he tells why he blames his father for the abuse he suffered and why
he exonerates his mother,
who would have saved him from living on the farm.
"Claude Lemoine is the king of mind manipulation. He
stole from me and lied to me.
It was horrible to get into my account and see a paltry amount of money. There was no trace of record sales, concerts or my image rights." he stated in 2006. During the same time, Jordy attempted to
resume his music career
with a group called Jordy & The Dixies.
But his former record company SONY BMG prevented him from singing his old songs, which provoked deep anger in the young man, who - three years later - decided
to sue the multinational
and his father for damages.
And although it seemed impossible to some, Jordy won close to a million euros.
And what did he do with the money?
He used it to train as
a sound engineer, get married, have two children
and start living as an anonymous, low-key in Britain.
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