2023-06-24 12:57:00
The Italian-Belgian singer made a name for himself with several hits in the 1980s, including “Le Rital” or “I won’t write to you anymore”.
By Le Point.fr with AFP
Published on 06/24/2023 at 12:57 p.m.
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Italian-Belgian singer Claude Barzotti, author of several hits in the 1980s, has died at 69. He died at home from pancreatic cancer., announced his manager to Agence France-Presse.
The singer-songwriter with a slightly hoarse voice “died at 69 in his bed, surrounded by his two daughters”, in a town between Brussels and Charleroi, in Belgium, said Laurent Comtat. “Barzotti preferred to be called a singer of emotion rather than a romantic. He was a lively flayed, a real sensitive, who drank to fight against his stage fright, ”he said.
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Top of the Top 50
“I am rital and I remain so / And in word and in gesture / Your seasons have become mine / But my music is Italian”, sang Barzotti in his greatest hit, “The Rital” (1983). Born Francesco Barzotti on July 23, 1953, into a family of Italian immigrants from the Marche region (center), the singer with curly intense brown hair evoked his origins and his condition as a “foreigner” in this song – which new generations could hear in the film Camping. His father was a minor. Claude will train in his youth in music theory, classical guitar and singing. He will begin his career in the 1970s, but success will not come until the 1980s.
“Madame”, “Le Rital”, “I will not write to you again”… From 1983, this Italian-Belgian singer monopolized the first places of the sacrosanct Top 50. His romantic ballads fit perfectly into the fashion for late-night slows.
alcohol problems
Barzotti had spoken several times publicly about his alcohol problems, confiding on Belgian TV to having drunk at times up to five or six bottles of whiskey a day. “I am a sad person. I can’t explain it, because I have everything, but I have nothing in fact, ”he blurted out on the screen.
“Claude Barzotti was the ‘french lover italiano on duty’, an endearing and sincere guy, who suffered a lot because of women”, remembered for Agence France-Presse the singer Hervé Vilard (“Capri, it’s over”), who rubbed shoulders with him in particular in concerts. “He was the idol of the Middle East! You went to a nightclub, if you were French, to please you, we sent you Barzotti’s records. You went to New York, you heard Barzotti in Little Italy! he pointed out. “His songs, it was not marshmallow. He needed the words, he was a Latin. And that was another time,” he continued.
Barzotti? “A delightfully funny man, full of humor, he loved life and that is perhaps what won him over,” producer Olivier Kaefer, show organizer, told Agence France-Presse. on the 1980s. “We are going to regret it a lot. Among the reactions to his death on Saturday, the secretary general of the French Communist Party Fabien Roussel said he was “sad to learn of the death of Claude Barzotti, interpreter of “Rital” and of so many songs from the 80s that made us vibrate and dance.
In the 2000s, he had participated in the nostalgic tour “Tender age and wooden head”, with Sheila, Patrick Juvet, Frank Alamo or Stone and Charden. But then, suffering from a serious illness, he preferred to end his career.
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