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Daniel Balavoine (Alençon, February 5, 1952 – January 14, 1986) was a French singer and songwriter. He was hugely popular in the French-speaking world, and inspired many singers in the 1980s, such as Jean-Jacques Goldman. He took part in French political life, and is known for a 1980 televised verbal confrontation with François Mitterrand.

In the French music-business, Balavoine earned his own spot with both his acute and powerful voice and his lyrics, often full of sadness and revolt.

Biography

Musical career

In the 1970s, Daniel Balavoine took part as a chorus-singer in the musical La Révolution française, then as a backing singer at the concerts of Patrick Juvet. This latter offered Balavoine the opportunity to record a song on one of his albums, a break that enabled him to be noticed as a singer-songwriter by Léo Missir, artistic director at Barclay Records, with whom he formed a very strong bond.

It is the title track on his third album, Le Chanteur (1978), which brought Balavoine to the general public's attention. The same year, his participation in Michel Berger and Luc Plamondon's rock opera, Starmania increased his notoriety with a slightly rough image in "Quand on arrive en ville".

His successive hits, creative talent, alto voice and catchy tunes stood out and quickly put him on the same artistic footing as Michel Polnareff and Michel Berger. Just before Mitterrand was elected French President in 1981, Balavoine became a voice for French youth.

In the Eighties, Daniel Balavoine asserted himself quickly as the King of French synthesized pop music (aka Electropop). A musical pioneer, he was one of the first in France to acquire, at considerable expense, in 1984, a Fairlight sampler, a kind of computer-assisted synthesizer which would shape the music of the 1980s. At the beginning of the decade, he accused a majority of established French artists of making "Music Halls" music, disconnected from the aspirations of youth, who were turning increasingly towards English language music. His music was characterized by detailed melodies, elaborate percussions, and the use of predominantly sustained synthetic sounds resembling the violin and the organ, the whole mingled with synthetic effects.

Being an accomplished composer-songwriter with an endearing baby-face made him the audio-visual colossus of the Eighties. His principle strengths were a popular yet avant-garde musical taste and clever and engaging lyrics, which depicted various facets of society (fame, divorce, childhood, money and social success, work, wars, politics, love, tolerance and racism, humanitarian dramas, life and death, etc). Above all, Balavoine had a unique and inimitable voice, if a little bit rough at the edges, and a range spanning practically three octaves. He was able to reach and sustain very high notes. In this sense, his voice is similar to that of Freddie Mercury.

Death

In the 1980s, Balavoine fell in love with Africa and started using his fame to fund the building of water wells for the Sahel. He participated in his first Paris-Dakar motor rally in 1982. Four years later, on January 14th, 1986, while flying over the rally, Balavoine died, along with Thierry Sabine and three other people, when their helicopter crashed into a dune in Mali.

Balavoine's legacy

The French public look proudly upon songs like "Vivre ou survivre" (1982), "Dieu que c'est beau" (1984), "L'Aziza", "Sauver l'Amour", "Aimer est plus fort que d'être aimé", and "Tous les cris, les SOS" (1985), comparing Balavoine favourably to English language groups like Eurythmics, Queen and Depeche Mode.

Balavoine’s songs have been interpreted by many artists, for example Catherine Ferry for whom he wrote near 20 songs, Jeanne Mas, Liane Foly, Frida Lyngstad, Lena Ka, Johnny Hallyday, Pascal Obispo, Patrick Fiori, Florent Pagny, Grégory Lemarchal, as well as Marie Denise Pelletier (from Quebec) who had an enormous success with her own rendition of the song "Tous les cris, les SOS" in 1987.

In 2006, to mark the 20th anniversary of the singer's tragic death, Barclay Records released his complete recorded works as a boxed set entitled "Balavoine sans frontières".