Lhe years go by but the hoodlum Johnny Rockfort, leader of the Black Stars band, Zéro Janvier, a wealthy businessman who became president, Ziggy, a homosexual record store, or Stella Spotlight, a declining sex symbol, do not age. Born in 1978, the characters of the musical starmania, whose hits have become so many essentials of popular culture, are reborn once again. Opera-rock is recreateduntil the end of January, at La Seine musicale in Boulogne-Billancourt, before a tour of France, Belgium and Switzerland.
The world mention for the first time starmania on November 6, 1978, “a double album imagined in the form of a musical” composed by Michel Berger on a libretto by Luc Plamondon. The tunes and lyrics of When we come to town, The Businessman’s Blues, The world is stoneWhere SOS a landowner in distress are then still unknown to the French, but the journalist Claude Fléouter already seems under the spell of “the sophisticated music, full of vibrations and nonchalance of Michel Berger [qui] give to starmania like some kind of magic. The album, to his ears, “demonstrates that, even in France today, variety music can be something quite different from a sanitized and banally traditional product”.
Seduced by the show
The musical was played in Paris in the spring of 1979, for four weeks of performances. Among the forty performers, few renowned artists, apart from Diane Dufresne, France Gall or Daniel Balavoine. The world, in a report of April 13, 1979 still signed Claude Fléouter, seems at first to distance himself from a show which “is neither a musical nor a rock opera, but a vague sung story, a fragile comic strip on the city of tomorrow which is already that of today, on money, violence, the dehumanization of metropolises, the need for space and sunshine”.
A few lines later, the journalist nevertheless appears seduced by the spectacle: “Starmania moves and swings in a decor that skilfully – and completely – uses the huge stage of the Palais des Congrès (…). The imagery combines sensitivity and spontaneity, simplicity and subtlety, rigor and lyricism of the songs and the fragile world they express. » starmania is “back in the minds of the public” even before appearing on stage ; For several weeks now, the radios, especially Europe 1, which co-produces the musical, have been looping the pieces of the double album. A vast poster campaign is carried out.
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