Last Thursday, the Swiss singer Patrick Juvet, one of those artists who best exemplifies the danger of enjoying the most colossal and bad success for a couple of years, was found dead at the age of 70 in his Barcelona apartment and in circumstances yet to be clarified. assimilation of a subsequent failure, as sudden and fortuitous as was the dream of climbing for too short a time at the top of all international charts.
That dizzying fall without a parachute from heaven to hell, where drugs and alcohol give us back the most extravagant and ridiculous image of that blond angel who dazzled the most fleeting fashion and disco music altars.
Patrick Juvet chez, in France in 1972.Michel GINFRAY / Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images
Born in Montreux (Switzerland), in 1950, he represented his country without much success in Eurovision in 1973. It will be in France, however, where he will develop his career, with his pair of international successes within the disco music scene that at the end of the Seventies was imposed all over the world.
First with
Oú sont les femmes
, (1977), a song co-written with his friend and producer, the electronic musician Jean-Michel Jarre, who curiously in this case will deal with the lyrics while the artist composes the catchy melody and, later, with
Got a Feeling
and especially
I Love America
, songs composed in English and directly thought for the international market, with the production of Jacques Murali and Henri Belolo.
The latter would become his most colossal success, a song whose original version would go no less than fourteen minutes, ideal to liven up the disco sessions and performed in that falsetto that at the time they had already canonized, as one of the signs of gender identity, the Bee Gees.
Jean Michel Jarre unites electronic music and oriental influences
A powerful image with blonde hair blowing in the wind, a body covered in leather and nods to David Bowie in his most glamorous stage, appeared on television sets around the world taking advantage of those fifteen minutes of fame.
This stage would be followed immediately by the ostracism of a career that, with some anecdotal and punctual success whose repercussion would no longer jump to the other side of the French borders, (the most remarkable is his participation in the sensual and beautiful soundtrack of David Hamilton's film ,
Laura, les ombres de l´été
) would immediately fall into oblivion from which he will only come out to visit the pages reserved in the tabloid press.
There he recounted his unfortunate and tortuous love life (where he would have a place from his colleague Jean-Michel Jarre to the actress Melanie Griffith), his fall into the world of depression and alcoholism and the ravages of that face that captivated men and women and that she was wasting her beauty in the repeated aesthetic operations that betrayed her inability to assume the passage of time.
In recent years, he would be seen walking through Barcelona, hardly anyone recognizing the figure of that stellar singer, visiting with some frequency some art galleries in search of young painters whom he tried to help achieve their dreams by pulling an old agenda. who, however, seemed completely resigned to accepting that her best days would never return.