Michel Delpech died yesterday evening, Saturday January 2, 2016, around 9:30 p.m., at Puteaux hospital (Hauts-de-Seine). We knew he was doomed, suffering from throat cancer. His great friend, Michel Drucker, had warned everyone a few weeks earlier. “Michel slowly passes awayhad confided the host. And if I’m telling you about it, it’s because he asked me to do so. » Drucker will accompany him to the end. At the hospital, the singer received letters and gifts from his fans every day, continuing to enjoy a small beer, defying all doctors’ predictions. He will constantly postpone the deadline before being called back to this God who will have allowed him to (re)find faith. He would have been 70 years old on January 26.
In fifty years of career, Delpech has experienced everything, from dazzling beginnings to a veritable crossing of the desert at the end of the 1970s. Popular France, that of the yéyés, discovered him in the summer of 1965 with a first success that was both romantic and already nostalgic, entitled At Laurette’s. A true tube machine, he continues with Wight is Wightsold three million copies, and choruses still in everyone’s heads and hearts. For a flirt, How Pretty Marianne Was, The Divorced, The Hunter and still the essential Dormouse and Cher.
He will celebrate his forty years of career in 2006, by revisiting, with figures of French song, the successes of his repertoire
He stands out for his crooner style, his frilled shirts and his long hair. The singer is aware of living on a cloud, from which he suddenly descends when his wife, Chantal, leaves him after twelve years of living together. He will admit: “I thought I was allowed anything, I was stupid! » What followed were several years of depression, isolation, artificial pleasures of alcohol and drugs, sleeping cures and even a religious retreat. He sings Long illness and confesses: “I identified with the singer the audience was applauding. I was wrong. I have led a parallel life for too long, in opposition to my deep nature. »
In 1992, after a long spiritual quest, he returned to the Olympia. He will celebrate his forty years of career in 2006, by revisiting, with figures of French song, the successes of his repertoire. He will again participate in the Âge tendre et tête de bois tour. And then cancer, the fierce, heroic fight against the disease, always hope, and the descent, and the end. President François Hollande will have this tweet: “Michel Delpech died before he grew old. » And we will return At Laurette’sin the hope of seeing a happy France again.