52The journalist of Libération Rachid Laïreche met the singer to create a portrait in the columns of the newspaper.
Placed carelessly on a colleague's desk, Pagny by Florent stirs up comments. I can't help but act smart, the book by the cracked singer from Patagonia is a hit. More than 100 sales, they say. It hums the pieces. Unavoidable question all of a sudden : "How is he ?" The singer leads the fight against lung cancer. On the verge of winning his fight, he suffered a relapse. He is undergoing treatment. All this does not answer the question of my neighbor at the creamery. We like that, we journalists, the ghosts, the survivors, the fighters, the resistance fighters and all the words that are a bit lazy for the occasion. I throw a bottle into the ocean for a portrait. He shows up a handful of days later in a brasserie in the nice neighborhoods. Shaved head, leather jacket and familiar familiarity. In good shape, the new sixty-year-old. A bit late; he apologizes because of a meeting that dragged on with his friend Bernard Montiel. I'm not going to get into the illness right away. We take side roads. Life, God, spirits, destiny. The stoner doesn't really believe in the Almighty. He feels close to Buddhists, that “matches” to his personality, he promises. I am moving forward timidly with the illness. “I’ve never really been sad. I never think about it when I go to bed. To tell the truth,
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What wouldn't we do for our children? Like all dads, Florent Pagny is ready to do anything for his daughter Aël. At 24, the young woman knows what she wants and where she is going. Very committed to the animal cause, the singer's daughter became a vegetarian. A way to fight against animal suffering and global warming. After numerous conversations with his father, Aël managed to convince him to gradually stop eating meat. “I'm not doing this to please her but because she's right. All of this has an impact on nature and I am trying to correct things on my own scale... I am not a bourgeois child. My parents are still there, they can attest to that. You must not hide, nor show off and think you have arrived”
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Son of Jean Pagny, sticker seller, and Odile, secretary, the singer moved around a lot as a child with his three brothers and sisters. He passed through Burgundy and Haute-Savoie before landing in Paris at the age of 16. He throws away his schoolbag for good, prowls at night, works odd jobs, tries his luck in the cinema and sings, hoping to become a star of the moment in search of a Warholian quarter of an hour that would play overtime. “I could become a singer or a juggernaut in the markets. This voice is a gift, I had to do something with it.” He discovered success at the end of the 80s, with Anything, a refrain about addiction; co-written with filmmaker Marion Vernoux.
Libération
