Michel Delpech: French Chanson singer is dead – SPIEGEL ONLINE

The French chansonnier Michel Delpech is dead. The 69-year-old died on Saturday at the consequences of cancer, announced on Saturday the French news agency AFP, which referred to the wife of the singer. He had fought for three years against the disease.

There are few French people who do not know the popular songs by Delpech. Songs like “Pour un flirt”, “Wight Is Wight” and “Les divorcés” reached in the seventies top of the charts in France and Belgium. Its about 200 songs belong to the cultural treasure of France. He has also sung in German Some of his songs; “Pour un flirt” as published in 1971 as “I take care of yourself”.

President Francois Hollande praised Delpech on Sunday as a “the best singer” of France. “His songs touched us because they told us. From our feelings as our challenges,” said Hollande. Delpech was like no other expressed the seventies and was “never out of fashion” was. He had “died without ever having aged”.

Delpech was also an actor, composer and author

Pascal Nègre from the record company Universal France praised the artist as a “poet who the lives of the people told “. Delpech was an extraordinary musician and a “captivating man.” “Delpech’s strength is that he will always be with us.”

His Chansons documented social change of time – he made the shift from the traditional family picture on the subject, the rural exodus and the pollution and counted in order to the idols of the French hippie movement.

The singer was born in January 1946 in Courbevoie, a suburb of Paris, in a modest family. Its peaceful childhood, he once described as “gentle and simple”. From the mid-sixties he published songs and released a first album. The late seventies, the separation from his wife plunged him into a deep depression that lasted several years. He sought solace in Hinduism and answers in soothsayers and in psychoanalysis.

In 1992, he met Geneviève, who helped him back to mental balance. Delpech adored the Beatles and the Beach Boys, Neil Young and the Australian musician Nick Cave. The musician has also worked as an author. In his book “Vivre!” (Life!), Which appeared in March last year, he described his fight against throat cancer and his fear of not being able to sing.

According to his family Delpech was last supervised in a hospital in the Paris suburb of Puteaux.