“Who are you ?” It was with this sentence, not exactly friendly, that everything began between Johnny Hallyday and Yvan Cassar. In 1998, when the singer was 55 and looking for a new breath in his career, he met a thirty-something musician and who is starting to make a name for himself in the world of music: the arranger Yvan Cassar.And if their beginnings are cold, their artistic collaboration will last nearly 20 years.
However, those who attended their debut could not have believed for a second in a friendship. While Universal, Johnny Hallyday’s record company is looking for the right person to set up a symphony orchestra for his next concerts, Yvan Cassar ends up accepting and joins the singer in Los Angeles. But their meeting is not really a success.
In a gigantic room, as he explains to the Parisian this weekend, he finds the singer and his group, who play very loudly, in the company of a sound system that plays rock on a loop all day. And the husband of Laeticia Hallyday does not really want to listen to the young arranger, he refuses all his proposals. A difficult state of mind that Yvan Cassar has trouble understanding.
“All of this completely pissed me off. After two weeks I fell ill“, he confides to the Parisian. However, learning it, Johnny ends up agreeing to meet him and finally validates his three songs. “He just said ‘I’m fine’. He wasn’t a talker“, he recalls today. Little by little, friendship is established with “the idol of young people”, with whom Yvan Cassar often has to adapt. No worries for him: as with Claude Nougaro, when the singer, rather a party animal, cannot record, he picks up his voice during the warm-up, when he does not suspect it.
“Johnny called me Mozart“, recalls Yvan Cassar, who was marked by Johnny Hallyday’s absolute love for the soundtracks of westerns. “He didn’t know how to decipher a score“, says the musician, who for his part, only rarely uses it. “But he was sensitive to the groove, to the energy“.
The music diehard will be faithful to Johnny Hallyday until the end, on four albums and for more than twenty years. On December 9, 2017, during the singer’s funeral at the Madeleine, he was obviously there, and for once, played the leading roles for his friend: he was the one who played theHail Mary at the piano, accompanied by soprano Julie Fuchs, in a moment of great emotion.
He will soon be on tour with a show dedicated to the Taulier, in which an orchestra and a choir will perform Johnny Hallyday’s most famous songs, while photos will pass in the background. An artistic way not to forget one of his most beautiful collaborations…