Duo with former Miss France Mareva Galanter, sample of François de Roubaix, French soundtrack genius, for his hit Supreme: between France and Robbie Williams, Thursday at the Vieilles Charrues festival, it’s a long story. “He loves Paris, he loves France, he finds that France and the French have a crazy charm. His wife (actress Ayda Field) speaks French extremely well, he understands it quite well, ”describes Mareva Galanter to AFP. The one who was Miss Tahiti and Miss France sings with him on Une Tahitienne à Paris, a piece from his album Paris-Tahiti.
Mareva Galanter had met Robbie Williams a year before: “He knew Nouvelle Vague, the group in which I sang”. When choosing a crooner to sing in French with an English accent for his duet, the artist hesitates because the interpreter of Rock DJ is “too big a star”. “At worst he says no: I send him the song, the lyrics, resituating the context of pieces recorded in Tahiti”.
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The singer with more than 80 million albums sold is “hyper spontaneous, reactive”, responds “in less than a day”, finds the song “Frenchy, Parisian, lovely”. “I couldn’t believe it, it was a huge surprise. I didn’t say it for five months, if it ever didn’t happen, but, at the start of 2023, he arrived two days earlier for his concert at Bercy (Accor Arena, in Paris) and we were able to record. He was available, pro”, continues the singer.
She will not be able to appear Thursday at the Vieilles Charrues, in Carhaix, being then in Tahiti. And, when she performs at the Alhambra on November 23 in Paris, she will turn to Melbourne, Australia.
But, at Les Vieilles Charrues, Robbie Williams, 49, on the heels of XXV (2022), an album celebrating his 25-year career, can draw titles in the language of Molière. He recorded French versions of Time on Earth and his hit Supreme.
Logical, because this piece is based on a sample of the soundtrack of the film Last Known Home (1970), signed by the composer François de Roubaix. Without forgetting that his first Parisian festival in solo, after his escape from the boy band Take That, was the first edition of Solidays in 1999, an appointment which serves to finance the association Solidarité Sida and its international aid programs for patients with HIV. “Robbie Williams said, ‘Solidays, I want to do this. He had shifted other things, ”reminds AFP Luc Barruet, boss of this event.
Fond of holidays in the south of France, the singer of Angels also sometimes returns there to work. As during the filming of the clip of Lost, for which the Marseille production company Shot in Mars directed the star to Provence Studios in Martigues. “We were told: ‘It has to be all blue, all black and dark'”, told the daily La Provence Micke Ristorcelli, development director of Provence Studios. And to describe “an artist who has the bottle. With him, it’s lodge, preparation, filming, lodge.