Duet with the former Miss France Mareva Galanter, sample of François de Roubaix, French genius of the soundtrack, for his hit Supreme: between the Hexagon and Robbie Williams, Thursday at the festival of Old Ploughs, it's a long story. "He loves Paris, he loves France, he thinks France and the French have a crazy charm. His wife (actress Ayda Field) speaks French extremely well, he understands it quite well," Mareva Galanter told AFP. The one who was Miss Tahiti and Miss France sings with him on Une Tahitienne à Paris, a song from his album Paris-Tahiti.
Mareva Galanter had met Robbie Williams a year before: "He knew Nouvelle Vague, the band in which I sang". When choosing a crooner to sing in French with an English accent for his duo, the artist hesitates because the interpreter of Rock DJ is a "too big star". "At worst he says no: I send him the song, the lyrics, setting the context of songs recorded in Tahiti."
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The singer with more than 80 million albums sold is "hyper spontaneous, reactive", answers "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 didn't happen, but, at the beginning 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,"the singer continues.
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 shoot on the side of Melbourne, Australia.
Clip in the south
But, at the Vieilles Charrues, Robbie Williams, 49, on the momentum of XXV (2022), album celebrating his 25 years of career, can draw titles in the language of Molière. He has 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. Not to mention that his first solo Parisian festival, after his escape from the boy band Take That, was the first edition of Solidays in 1999, an event that serves to finance the association Solidarité Sida and its international aid programs for HIV patients. "Robbie Williams said, 'Solidays, I want to do it.' He had shifted other things, "recalls to AFP Luc Barruet, boss of this event.
Fond of holidays in the south of France, the singer of Angels also sometimes returns to work. As during the shooting 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,'" Micke Ristorcelli, director of development at Provence Studios, told the daily La Provence. And to describe "an artist who has the bottle. With him, it's lodge, preparation, filming, lodge."