Daniel Balavoine

Daniel Balavoine
Also known as	Bala
Born	5 February 1952(1952-02-05) Alençon, Orne, France
Died	14 January 1986(1986-01-14) (aged 33) Gourma-Rharous, Mali
Genres	Pop New wave World music
Occupations	Musician Singer-songwriter Producer
Instruments	Acoustic guitar Piano Synthesizer Fairlight CMI
Years active	1971–1986
Labels	Disques Vogue (1971–1973) Barclay Records – Universal Music Group (1975–1986)
Notable instruments
Fairlight CMI

Daniel Balavoine (5 February 1952 – 14 January 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, and Michel Berger, his closest friend. 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 powerful voice, his wide range and his lyrics, which were full of sadness and revolt. He was emphatic, and his songs for the most part talked about despair, pain, and death. Hope was present as a theme as well.

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.

Daniel Balavoine (1984)

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 Hall" 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 various sound effects.

Being an accomplished composer-songwriter with an endearing baby-face made him the audio-visual colossus of the Eighties. His principal 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 hit and sustain very high notes. In this sense, his voice is similar to that of Freddie Mercury. In 1984, with other French singers, he contributed to ABBACADABRA, a musical for children using songs of Swedish group ABBA. On "Belle", a song based on the music of ABBA's track "Arrival", he performed a duet with ABBA brunette Anni-Frid Lyngstad.

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 14 January 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 1986, Belgian francophone artist Lara Fabian released her first single, "L'Aziza est en pleurs" (composed by Marc Lercs) in honour of Balavoine.

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

Discography

Studio albums

• De vous à elle en passant par moi (1975)
• Les aventures de Simon et Gunther... Stein (1977)
• Le chanteur (1978)
• Face amour / Face amère (1979)
• Un autre monde (1980)
• Vendeurs de larmes (1982)
• Loin des yeux de l'Occident (1983)
• Sauver l'amour (1985)

Live albums

• Sur scène (1981)
• Au Palais des Sports (1984)

Compilations

• Ses 7 premières compositions (1986)
• L'essentiel (1999)
• Sans frontières (2005) (a 12-CD box set containing all of his recorded works, studio and live)

Other projects

• Starmania (1978) (sings 5 songs)
• Chrysalide, of Patrick Juvet (1974)
• Patrick Juvet vous raconte son rêve (1973)
• Catherine Ferry "Vivre avec la musique" - producer and composer (1984) WEA
• Abbacadabra (1983) – a children Musical based on songs of Swedish group ABBA

Filmography

• Alors... Heureux ? (1980)
• Qu'est-ce qui fait craquer les filles... (1982)

External links

• Official website of the association Daniel Balavoine
• Biography at Radio France Internationale (in English)

Persondata
Name	Balovoine, Daniel
Alternative names
Short description
Date of birth	5 February 1952
Place of birth
Date of death	14 January 1986
Place of death