Flagrant infraction,
released in 1971, is rightly considered one of the best albums ever recorded by Johnny Hallyday.
Two years after the very good
River, open your bed
, the singer returned to the Olympic studios in London with a fantastic team: Mick Jones, future founder of the group Foreigner, on guitar, Tommy Brown on drums and Gary Wright on guitar. organ.
The man also took with him the lyricist Philippe Labro, who had written Jesus Christ for him a year earlier and will be responsible for writing all the lyrics for the album.
Among these, a hit,
Oh my pretty Sarah!
and an adaptation of
Creedence Clearwater Revival's
Fortunate Son ,
Son of Nobody
, which would become a mainstay of the idol's stage repertoire.
In addition to the ten songs recorded during these sessions, which Labro described as hectic, under the leadership of Lee Halliday, two other titles were recorded.
Rest
and
Waterloo
, unreleased, will be present on the reissue of the album, which is scheduled for release on February 23, and which will contain the original album, a disc of unreleased studio sessions and two live discs.
Napoleon and a love ballad
But these two new tracks will be available on streaming platforms from Friday February 16.
Rest
is a curiosity: a beautiful ballad featuring an acoustic guitar arpeggio and a piano part in the verses and an electric guitar with country accents then an organ in the choruses.
This is the only ballad to survive from the sessions, which undoubtedly explains its absence from the tracklisting of the album released in 1971. Johnny Hallyday perfectly interprets this loving lament in which the narrator begs the object of his love to remain near him.
A real little nugget that doesn't stand out in Johnny's discography.
Waterloo
is more of an epic fresco.
Is the proximity of the metro station celebrating the Napoleonic debacle of 1815 the origin of this text?
“Near a village in Brabant / It was the last ambush”
Johnny sings to music that is close to the progressive rock of the time.
The somewhat heavy instrumentation (horn, strings) and the grandiloquent text do not produce great results.
We are not far from the tone of Hamlet, which would be released five years later and would be the singer's greatest failure.
This song, which was unpublished for more than fifty years, would perhaps have benefited from remaining so, but it will delight completists.