“I will return in 2026 for my 65th birthday tour”: Florent Pagny, recovered from cancer, is going to “recharge his batteries” in Patagonia, with the ambition of a new record for this future singing tour. “There, I’m going to withdraw from the media, we’ve had a lot of Pagny in 2023, between activities and illness, so I’m going to try to get back into creation,” confides the artist met by AFP in Paris. All the medical signals are green regarding his lung cancer, revealed on his networks in January 2022. At 62, the singer is not, however, claiming victory. “When you’ve taken it three times, I’ve had two relapses, you tell yourself that you’re winning battles, but to know if you’re winning the war, it takes time.”
Also read: Florent Pagny: “As long as I’m not dead, it’s the right path!”
On the day of the interview, he is in great shape and no longer has his “turtle head” as he says with humor, sporting a biker goatee and crew-cut hair, which had previously disappeared during certain treatments. Before leaving for Patagonia – his wife is Argentinian and he fell under the spell of this corner of South America 30 years ago – he “tidy up” his “room”. That is to say, the artist is closing the year with a collector’s reissue of his autobiography Pagny by Florent (Fayard, sold nearly 170,000 copies, a big publishing success) and a box set planned for Friday, bringing together his albums of duets, 2 bis, released in September, and 2 released in 2001.
He hopes to combine the aftermath with “renewal, an album with creations”. And to announce: “I will return in 2026 for my 65th birthday tour, certainly with a new album in line with what I have experienced over the last five years”. It’s been a long time since Pagny stopped writing his own lyrics, relying on others and choosing songs that “correspond” to the “moments” of his life. His illness should logically be reflected in certain future titles. One of the future pieces from the pen of Carla Bruni could thus be entitled Lettre à ma mort, a discovery whose “irony” Pagny likes. Since the singer of “Know how to love” revealed his cancer, he has never been tearful. During the interview, punchlines will emerge, such as “at one point I was a bit of a tax advisor, now he’s a bit of an oncologist”. The hit “My freedom to think”, in 2003, is addressed to a bailiff – who looks like an undertaker in the clip – and is directly inspired by his troubles with the tax authorities at the time. Coming back to “the illness”, he slips: “it’s not because it happened that everything collapses, you just have to take care of it because it takes over, I find that it’s easier to talk about it, to take responsibility and not to dramatize it either.”
“I’m hiding, I’m sick, I don’t want to tell anyone: it doubles the weight. However, there are so many people directly or indirectly concerned, saying it is relieving.” The feedback has also been positive on its networks. “Doctors told me ‘it’s great to have talked about it, people are getting lighter with it’”. He chose Instagram because he had “32 dates, 110,000 people to notify at once”, thinking back to this then canceled tour. During the discussion, we understand that he would not have left it to anyone else to announce it. We also understand how his autobiography, produced with the help of the writer Emmanuelle Cosso, was born when he was approaching sixty. Pagny had rejected a first proposal at 40, “not yet old enough to look back”. “Except that others have written books about me, without talking to me, and when I took a page, I said to myself but I haven’t experienced that, guys smoke the same thing as me (laughs)”.