Lara Fabian remembers Johnny Hallyday’s words at the Stade de France

The author, composer and performer, Lara Fabian is the exceptional guest of Le Monde d’Élodie Suigo from July 15 to 19, 2024. Five days, five songs to better understand this artist who has become a must on the international scene.

Lara Fabian is the special guest of Le Monde d’Élodie all this week. Five days to talk about her 30-year career with its ups and downs. The one that the French saw arrive from Quebec in the 1990s with a powerful voice that touches the heart, has become, over the course of her 16 albums, an artist who counts in both French-speaking and English-speaking countries. It is without filter that she opens up by evoking bits of her history, memories of life around her songs that have become cult: I love you , Adagio, I Will Love Again, I still believe in, Immortal, You are my other, Humana or The difference. She returns on his meeting with the boss, Johnny Hallyday, who gave her confidence, on her vocation to transmit what she learned to others and then above all she underlines the importance of a feeling which warms closed hearts: empathy.

For three decades, Lara Fabian has never ceased to offer insight into life, with its joys and sorrows, pages that turn and adventures that begin, to her precious audience. As a prelude to the release of a 17th album planned for the end of 2024, she offered us last January the single Your pain, written and composed with Slimane and confirms that a tour is coming.

franceinfo: The year 1998 was essential in your career. The album Purea Victoire de la Musique, an exceptional tour and this meeting at the Stade de France with Johnny Hallyday, anchored in the memory of the French and the Belgians. The title is Requiem for a fool. Is that also a moment etched in your memory?

Lara Fabian : Yes, moreover, this moment takes root at the Enfoirés since it is there that he presents himself in front of me with a bouquet of orange roses. He tells me: “Would you agree to sing at the stadium with me? You are the only woman I want to invite“. Later, he would say this incredible sentence at a press conference when asked why me and he would simply answer because”Lara, it’s me as a girl“.

You can feel that he is moved when you are with him on stage. You can feel the fusion.

Yeah. And then at some point he’s really going to grab me by the collar and say, “Now you take your place“Because at the beginning, it’s not that I was going there feeling my way, but still, you also have to put yourself in my shoes. I’m 28 years old, it’s the first time that I’m going to experience something of this level, to be facing a giant like him, facing a pitch with the heads of 80,000 people. And he tells me with this force: “You will take your place because I am here for you to take your place.“. And he will let me enter this universe, in front of all these people, surrounded by 300 choristers and around fifty musicians.

“The size of the Stade de France was so much bigger than the music itself that to find my place alongside Johnny, I really had to force myself a little at the beginning.”

Lara Fabian

to franceinfo

I wondered if it hadn’t been an electroshock for you because until then, it wasn’t that you were apologizing for being there, but we felt that there was a problem of legitimacy. At the same time, you entered the Grévin Museum. Did things change at that moment? Did you gain the confidence that you lacked?

Not really. I would add that I still dress my little insecurities very early in the morning. I dress them better, but still, even if there is something that is of the order of a great reverence and welcomed by the public, it is still a duo that precedes me today. These insecurities, which you speak of, are an integral part of who I am.

Following your first French-language albums, a contract will be signed so that you can release albums in English and there will be the title Adagio. Tell us about this title that has shocked many people.

In fact, there were two in parallel. There were Adagio which you are talking about but also I Will Love Again. They will be released in parallel. In some countries of the world, I will be presented as the girl who sings this drama by Albinoni, rewritten in both Italian and French. In other countries of the world, I will be presented as the new dance sensation of Anglo-Saxon music. It will really create a kind of dissociation in the minds of the public that I will carry for many years, but which will ultimately be an incredible card because it will have allowed me to cross from one style of music to another. But theAdagio still remains the moment that everyone is waiting for.

In 2001, you returned with Nakedthis is your fourth album. It’s all in the title, right?

I had already suffered a lot so I really wrote from my most vulnerable point of view. Naked was an album full of great wounds, but which I used to transform them, to transmute them.

You are my other with Maurane is a special title. It is the fusion of two voices, but also of two women who have common wounds, things to say, who look straight ahead, who have become symbols for many. Tell us about this duo.

I so desire, at that moment, to mingle with the one who, for me, is one of the three greatest female voices in the world. Even though I have known her since I was 14, it is a mutual friend who introduces us at that time, and even if everything seems very normal, very natural, musically, she seems inaccessible to me. To woo her, I am going to write this song with Rick and it is really very feverish that we are going to present it to her hoping that she accepts. That was my stance towards Maurane, so much do I love her, so much do I admire her. She comes to seek in me a dimension that I did not yet know of my sensitivity. And when she accepts, it is extraordinary. It’s extraordinary to be in front of someone you admire to this point and who agrees to mix all along because it’s one of the rare duets where we don’t exchange anything, we are with each other, we are the missing part of the voice of each of us and we mix like a cylinder takes shape.

“‘Tu es mon autre’ with Maurane was perhaps one of the greatest duets of my life, musically. It’s my favorite!”

Lara Fabian

to franceinfo

She is no longer physically here, but she is still here.

Yes. His voice will never be absent.