RENAUD. The singer Renaud celebrated his 70th birthday this Wednesday, May 11, 2022. The opportunity for him to indulge in some secrets about his projects, his life, his health and his new album.
[Mis à jour le 12 mai 2022 à 14h50] Renaud celebrated his 70th birthday on Tuesday May 11, 2022. A new decade for the popular singer, in the spotlight on Tuesday evening on France 2 with the show Happy birthday Renaudwhere many artists followed one another on the stage of the Dôme de Paris to take up some of the standards of Renaud, also present.
This 70th anniversary is also an opportunity for the “Phoenix” to confide in his life today, his projects, his desires and his addictions, which he finds difficult to get rid of, even if he wants to be, in the press, reassuring about his state of health.
On the occasion of this 70th anniversary and the release of his new album, Renaud spoke extensively in the press about his state of health and his state of mind. If he claims to be well, or in any case better, the singer notably confided in the columns of Parisian, on May 5, that these 70 years did not enchant him: “70 years, it does not water, it despairs. I do not like it. Aging is a shipwreck”. Eternal tortured, he evokes “stress, life, the loss of childhood, the anxiety of aging, not seeing grow [s]es children”, but also “fragile friendship and impossible love”. Subjects which seem to haunt him and which he mentions today explicitly to explain his addictions. The recording of the France 2 program, which was dedicated to him on May 10, was itself difficult: Renaud lets go of having been “terrorized”, before finally being “carried by the enthusiasm of the public”.
A sign of this desire to move forward, despite the obstacles, Renaud also revealed to RTL a week ago that he wanted to record two new albums, another cover album after metic just released (read below) and an album of songs of its own. Politics (he voted Poutou in the first round of the presidential election then Macron by “pinching his nose”) or the death of Yvan Colonna could give him inspiration, when, by his own admission, ideas are lacking. “I’ve only written two new songs so far,” Renaud told Le Parisien, mentioning a “rock song inspired by a Margerin comic book, ‘I want a Harley'” and another on George’s death. Floyd.
Renaud also delivered secrets about his health in an even more prosaic way in this series of interviews. On the website of Sunday newspaper, this Friday, May 6, 2022, he notably returned to the heart operation undergone last year. “I had heart surgery last year. I had a stent put in because of a clogged artery. Since then, I’ve been doing very well,” he said, when rumors of his death broke. have stopped accumulating in recent months.
Death therefore, again and again, Renaud’s main terror: “It’s always an anguish. Every day, I get up and I say to myself: it’s the last day of the rest of my life. All this coupled with an unfailing paranoia”, confesses the singer on RTL.
“I no longer drink a drop of alcohol, but I still smoke like a firefighter”, also detailed Renaud on the radio as in Le Parisien. The singer, whose voice appears more and more rocky with each of his appearances, which have become rare, assured the Ile-de-France daily that he was now in the process of healing after years of addiction to alcohol and cigarettes. “I reduced the cigarette. When I sang, I was at fifteen a day, instead of forty. But I went up to twenty. It’s harder to stop than that (he shows his glass). I’m at the Bitter San Pellegrino. It’s been a year and a half since I’ve had a drop of alcohol. I’m holding on,” he told the newspaper.
Renaud once again dwelt on his addiction problems in the various interviews granted this week: “It’s my life, bistros. A place of conviviality, meeting, sharing where we remake the world”, explains- he on RTL. “When I think of the number of times I drove home with 2.5 grams of alcohol in my blood … There must be a god for drunks!”, he also remembers in the JDD.
A speech that complements the one he has already had for several years on his discomfort, in his songs as in interviews: “I drink because I’m not good in my skin, in my rind. I have psychoses , anxieties, a bad life, a nostalgia for my childhood. And it gets worse with all these friends who are dying around me, “he already explained to Serge magazine in 2010. “I find it difficult to express my feelings. I am taciturn, withdrawn, rather introverted. And I find it difficult, especially in interviews, to deliver my heart (…) I have the impression that I am being violated when I am interviewed”, a- he also dropped on RTL last Thursday.
Five days before his 70th birthday, Renaud is back. The singer published, Friday, May 6, a new album called metic and composed of thirteen titles, which are not new songs, but covers of great standards. “I had this idea for several years. I sang some of them to warm up my voice on tour and I told myself that I would record them one day. And then in Isle-sur-Sorgue (Vaucluse), where I live almost year-round, I was bored, I had no inspiration for a new record. I said to myself: ‘Now is the time’. I made a list of about fifteen titles that marked me”, confides the artist still in The Parisianevoking “songs, which marked [s]we childhood and [s]for life.”
Renaud therefore offers a new version of thirteen songs, of which The Metecof George Moustaki, The cherry season by Yves Montand Friendshipby Francoise Hardy, The mad lament by Charles Trénet or even If you buy me a drink, borrowed from Serge Reggiani and whose clip was unveiled on March 31. We discovered Renaud, leaning on a table at the Lux Bar, on the Butte Montmartre, facing his friend, the actor Jean-Paul Rouvé.