At a time when some are enjoying a well-deserved retirement, others are returning to work. This is the case of Michel Sardou. The 75-year-old singer has just announced that he will be back on stage next year for an exceptional tour even though he decided to give up everything a few months ago. This turnaround, the fans owe it to Anne-Marie Périer, the singer’s wife since 1999. If he had promised himself never to go back on stage to sing, his wife decided otherwise: “Me, I have nothing to do with my return, for nothing! I didn’t want to come back. But I got screwed in the big widths by my wife” he said in an interview granted this Thursday, November 10 to the Parisian.
Over the months, seeing Michel Sardou resume the concerts seemed obvious to Anne-Marie Périer. The latter gradually succeeded in convincing her husband to return to the front of the stage, for the music: “It started a year ago. She was coming back from the market and she said to me like this: ‘I listened to a song of yours on the radio, it’s really good, why didn’t you ever sing it on stage? You should’. But I can’t, I don’t sing anymore. And she leaves… A month later, she says to me: ‘Here, your musical is going to Caen. You should go see her.’ It’s thirty miles from us, so we’re going.”
She ended up persuading me
By listening to the rich repertoire of his career interpreted by others, Michel Sardou seems to rediscover it, with emotion, astonishment and surprise: “I listen to my songs, for the first time, in the middle of the public… I didn’t recognize some of them. […] I had never seen my audience on the public side and it was very moving to see their reactions, to listen to their comments. And very pleasant. I told her on the way home and she eventually persuaded me. Anyway, she was threatening to leave me and go back to her brother… She blackmailed me!“
Michel Sardou does not do it just to please Anne-Marie. He also wants to find his audience. If he could, he would have started the tour much earlier, but the timing does not depend only on him: “There was no free room before. With the Covid and the postponements, everything is taken. And then honestly, I need a year of vocal preparation to have a toned tone. One day, I sat down at the piano to see what my voice gave… There, I no longer knew how to sing.“By then, Michel will be ready. And as he said so well, “the world is funnier, it’s less hopeless while singing.“