Johnny Hallyday

Johnny Hallyday (1943-2017), a monument of French rock, kept a special bond with Switzerland throughout his life, and with Montreux in particular, where he performed five times between the 1960s and 1988. His concert of 6 July 1988 at the Montreux Jazz Festival, released twenty years later on DVD, remains its most famous record.

Johnny Hallyday in Montreux: five visits and a bond with Switzerland

Five times in Montreux

Johnny Hallyday sang five times in Montreux. As early as the 1960s he performed at the Le Lido hall. He returned to the Centre de Congrès in 1974, to the Casino de Montreux in 1976, then to the Gala of the Golden Rose competition in 1987, before his concert at the Jazz Festival in 1988.

The town had seen him even earlier: in August 1963 he came to the Casino de Montreux to celebrate the nineteenth birthday of the singer Sylvie Vartan, whom he would marry two years later. The RTS cameras kept a record of those moments.

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6 July 1988: the Jazz Festival concert

On 6 July 1988, in the wake of his monumental concerts at Bercy, Johnny Hallyday took over the stage of the Casino de Montreux for an almost intimate concert, as the size of the hall required. Before the audience of the Montreux Jazz Festival, he ran through the songs written for him by Michel Berger and Jean-Jacques Goldman, “Rock’n’roll Attitude”, “Je te promets”, “L’envie” or “Quelque chose de Tennessee”, between rock, blues and emotion. Twenty years later, this concert was released on DVD for the first time, “Johnny Hallyday Live at Montreux”.

Claude Nobs kept a dazzled memory of his presence: “It is strange to see how Johnny is an icon in France and nowhere else. He can just as easily play in a bar with a hat out for tips as in a huge stadium. And there, he is incredibly explosive. What a performance, what a singer! And when he is with French people, a kind of alchemy happens and it literally explodes.”

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Johnny and Switzerland

Switzerland held a constant place in Johnny Hallyday’s life. He owned a chalet in Gstaad, where he spent some of his last holidays, and the country’s great festivals welcomed him: the Montreux Jazz Festival in 1988, the Leysin festival in 1991, then the Paléo Festival in Nyon in 1996 and 2015.

His last appearance in French-speaking Switzerland dates from August 2017, a few months before his death on 6 December, as part of the “Vieilles Canailles” tour with Jacques Dutronc and Eddy Mitchell. RTS looked back on this long Swiss history, from his time at the Bochuz penitentiary to his chalet in Gstaad.

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