Johnny Hallyday RIP

[naughty boy]

That crossed my mind...

[Rayge]

And yet the greatest rock n' roll record was British.

Shakin’ All Over?

I'm sure that's what he meant, and it's certainly the only truly great British rock & roll track, but Elvis, Jerry Lee, Check Berry, Little Richard and Fats Domino alone have enough to keep it out of the top 40: whence, bollocks.

[clive gash]

Ah, Wence Bollocks. I’m glad Harry Webb decided against using that nom de platter.

The Pistols remembered though.

[Geezee]

the French did not 'get' rock & roll (any more than the British)

And yet the greatest rock n' roll record was British.

No, it was Swedish.

[fange]

Shakin’ All Over?

It's a FANTASTIC tune, one of my most favourite song of all time. But best rock and roll song ever? Nah. Ray is right; it happens, occasionally.

[Charlie O.]

I figured he meant "Move It".

[Muskrat]

And yet the greatest rock n' roll record was British.

[Muskrat]

Johnny smokes his opening act...

[Nikki Gradual]

Just as with Keith Chegwin, see obit in Nextdoorland, I had two dealings with Johnny Hallyday. The second was pretty straightforward: like most people who accrued more money than they knew what to do with in the 1960s, Johnny tried to get rid of most of it on cars and racing them. Actually he had some stunners, Ferraris that would be worth millions of pounds today. Anyway, much more recently a lovely man whose name I forget, but who is a motorcycle taxi driver in Paris, wrote a book about Johnny Hallyday’s motoring history with the great man’s co-operation and photo albums. When the book was launched at Paris’ annual classic car show (Rétromobile in February, had a great evening with Neverknows one year during it), Mr Mototaxi gathered together for display a few of the cars that Johnny had owned, plus Hallyday and, as someone who had supported the project from the start, I was invited to meet and interview him. It wasn’t great to be honest. I think it was in that period when he was pretending to be Belgian for tax reasons and was having a late-life crisis about his looks. It was hard to tell whether he was just being bolshie or whether his face-skin had been pulled back so much that he couldn’t move his mouth to speak. He just sat there looking startled. Maybe I am being unfair, maybe he had not been under the knife and there was a massive bulldog clip round the back of his head, but something wasn’t natural and he was struggling to see through the slits of his eyelids.
Either way it was all very formal.
The previous occasion had been rather less so.
Despite a comfortable (that’s a nice way of saying “privileged”) upbringing and even now living in a nice, banker-infested part of London, I am not exactly of that ilk. I am a country boy at heart and couldn’t be further removed financially or culturally from the Sloane Rangers and the Chelsea Set and all the others that occupy the city and move in glamorous and glitzy circles. That is why as a 30-year old two decades ago, I had never heard of Louis Vuitton and had no idea what it was. If you asked me about my luggage aspirations, I wouldn’t have known anything beyond Samsonsite. Even more mystifying were the letters that made up the LVMH business empire, which meant nothing to me, but to a certain class of people are the most important in the world. They mean Louis Vuitton Moet Hennessy: all products that I either don’t know or don’t like, but to some epitomise everything good, everything desirable, everything worth paying insanely inflated prices for.
Anyway, 20 years ago LVMH obviously found itself with a multi-million Franc marketing budget that it couldn’t spend and decided to spunk it away on making itself a big wheel in the world of classic cars. That was the world that I inhabited.
One facet of this ridiculous, limitless spending resulted in a concours d’elegance at the Hurlingham Club in London followed by a star-studded party with the likes of Simon and Yasmin Le Bon, Chris Eubank and lots of models and TV people who I had never heard of but was told were very important. This party would take up 20 pages of Hello magazine and I was invited to it. I tended to get the bus home quite early to be honest because it really really wasn’t my kind of thing and I felt completely fraudulent being there in the first place. I thought that it was impossible to more of a fish out of water than I was there.
But I was wrong.
LVMH’s little London shindig turned out to be just an aperitif of its main event, a concours d’elegance at Parc de Bagatelle in Paris that made the London event look like the Geordie Shore Christmas party. And they invited me to it, to be one of the judges assessing the cars. Of course, because even the London event was extravagant beyond my wildest imagination, I similarly underestimated the French equivalent.
On the Eurostar carriage they had specially commissioned just to transport the British contingent to the event because Eurostar’s normal first class facilities weren’t posh enough, I repeatedly turned down the Champagne that I was offered every five minutes because a) I don’t really like Champagne, b) I thought I couldn’t afford it (assuming it wouldn’t be gratis, that’s how naïve I was), and c) because it was 9am.
On arrival in Paris, I was put up in a posh hotel and given a driver who was on call to take me wherever I wanted to go whenever, but I was too bashful to use the service so I just stayed in my hotel room and wanked. The next day was the main event and I was up early and dressed in the very smartest clothes I owned: some M&S chinos and black shoes, an open-necked shirt I had inherited from my grandfather and my sixth form blazer. The thing is, it didn’t really matter what I wore because I look like a tramp whatever it is, as a man in the giant Kew M&S recently said when I was trying to buy a jacket: “You are just the wrong shape for normal clothes sir.” Well I can’t afford the alternative to off the peg, so…
As good fortune would have it, I think I might have got away with it because the guestlist was so upmarket that they are the sort of people who don’t obey little strictures like dressing smartly – being a bohemian cunt is making a statement. And tramp can look a lot like bohemian.
So, I spent the morning judging the cars and had a little Che Guevara moment in casting my vote for an Austin Seven Doctor’s Coupé that was probably a hundred times cheaper than any other car on display. Viva la revolution!
Then it was lunch. Thank fuck for that, I was famished having skipped breakfast because I was worried I would show myself up somehow in the posh hotel with its weird way of doing things and haughty manner. So I file into lunch and find that there is me and about 20 other old car bores and everyone else in the marquee is an A-lister. For the purposes of the story I will mention only two (ie I can only really remember two for sure, but it was serious stuff).
The first was Donald Sutherland who I was sitting beside. I think I have mentioned here before that that didn’t go well and he was the most aloof, taciturn and downright boring man that I have ever met. It was so tedious trying to be polite to him that I stopped bothering, which is when I discovered that he has absolutely no sense of sarcasm/irony either. So if you ever meet Donald and he proudly tells you about the time that a British tramp was fulsomely praising his impeccable Irish accent in The Eagle has Landed, well that was me.
The other was Johnny Hallyday, who I can’t recall whether he was opposite me on the same table or on the next table. Either way, his granddaughter was right beside me, so it would makes sense that he was on the same table. Except that it turned out not to be his granddaughter but his wife. Oh how she laughed at the misunderstanding. Oh how I laughed. Oh how he didn’t laugh. I did talk to him for some time at some point, but I can’t really remember that as much as the sense that I was about to get ejected for upsetting not one but two if the VIP guests.
It was a welcome tension-breaker therefore when there was suddenly a huge kerfuffle outside as Guillaume Depardieu, stoned out of his gourd, grabbed the microphone on the presentation stage and started ranting in French, then singing, then screaming as he was manhandled off the stage and out of the event by a team of security guards. Apparently this was a regular occurrence at events he attended.
After the presentations were over the was an equally posh dinner and then my table host Yves, apparently a legendary businessman-cum-bon-viveur-cum socialite but might as well have been Fingerbobs to me, asked if I wanted to go out on the town. With hand on heart I can genuinely tell you that I only said yes because I was scared of offending him.
So it was that a pissed and probably stoned Yves Carcelle was driving me through Paris like an F1 driver in a fearsomely loud Dodge Viper – loaned by Dodge, natch. It was so wild that I was relieved when the police pulled us over, but having rather more idea who this bigwig was than I did, they let him off and waved us on our way.
When we arrived at what was purportedly Paris’ most in-demand club, I forget its name, but was shocked when he gave the keys to someone on the door and they nicked his car (I had never seen valet parking), people might as well have been throwing rose petals at his feet as we skipped past the queues and a bunch of paps started taking his picture.
Inside we met up with a bunch of other people from LVMH and the event and he started ordering Champagne for everyone. In the corner was a whole table of stick-thin girls huddled around a single bottle of vodka. They looked sullen, with sunken eyes and very little flesh, they just looked ill. Apparently they were well-known models.
At some point my new best friend Yves pointed out Jean-Claude Van Damme sitting in a nearby booth. Now I am not exactly famous for my height, but this fella was tiny, pocket-sized and I said as much to the people I was with. I am not sure how it escalated from there, but someone from LVMH (probably Yves) must have known Van Damme and called him over and challenged him to get measured against me to see who was taller.
So there I was in my crumpled and ill-fitting clothes standing back-to-back with Jean Claude van Damme in the trendiest nightclub in Paris at about 3am when reports reached us that the then Mrs van Damme had been “taken ill” and collapsed in the toilet. The couple’s minders dashed in, gathered her up and started to take her home. Jean-Claude just followed them, shrugging an apology as if it happened all the time.
And that was the weekend when I met Johnny Hallyday, less the French Elvis than the French Cliff.

[harvey k-tel]

Excellent.

[Thang-y]

That is utterly fabulous. I can just see it all.

(No gold leaf on the cakes though?)

[Muskrat]

Is there any competition for post of the year? Not that I've read.