“I have never felt so peaceful that since I have been within these walls”. These words, Michel Delpech, suffering from cancer of the throat and tongue, had entrusted them to Gala in April 2016 when he had been hospitalized for several months. Optimistic, he explained that he had hunted “bad thoughts to heal”. However, the one who would have celebrated his 78th birthday this Friday, January 26, admitted pay for the many excesses of his youth. “I didn’t protect myselfhe explained. In my environment, drugs were more widespread. It was a way to hold on, when nothing is going well.” Before quitting smoking when he was diagnosed with cancer, he consumed “a pack of cigarettes a day, since the age of eighteen”. But, Michel Delpech assured him: “Now is not the time for regrets or remorse. I take full responsibility for everything I did. I haven’t led an exemplary life, but it was very creative!” Because the singer who died at the age of 69, on January 2, 2016, after a fierce fight against illness, lived a life punctuated by drama.
Coming from a modest family, Michel Delpech left the family cocoon at the age of 19 to become a star. Quickly, the young artist meets with success “disproportionate” during the seventies. In between Chez Laurette, Wight is Wight, For a flirt, When I was a singeror passing through The Divorced, Michel Delpech’s songs become popular and real hits. All the girls are fighting for it. “Hundreds of groupies were waiting at the exit. We spotted some for me”, he told Paris Match, as reported TV Star in January 2016. However, at the time, he married Chantal Simon, with whom he had two sons. The couple is in an open relationship. Everyone could therefore enjoy a certain freedom and have sexual relations with other partners. But while his partner wanted to take advantage of it, he took it very badly. While Michel Delpech was familiar with the summits, it’s the descent into hell for the singer who divorce in 1976. The start of a long crossing of the desert.
Michel Delpech sinks into a deep depression
© COADIC GUIREC / BESTIMAGEMichel Delpech in concert at the Casino de Paris in 1997.
⋙ The funeral of Michel Delpech
Already weakened by excessive drug usethe artist then sinks into deep depression at age 30, then became schizophrenic. The year following his separation, if he managed to record the song entitled Loir-et-Cher, it then completely disappears from the radar screens. “I was at thirty-sixth below, at the end of my strength, mentally, physically. This ended up leading me to a downfall, to depression. I felt like I had covered everything, I didn’t want anything anymore”, he confided to the magazine, admitting to having “even considered suicide”.
To cope with this dark period, Michel Delpech took refuge in his addictions. “The first coke rail was in 1979 to finish the album 5000 kilometers”, he explained. “From 1975 to 1985, for ten years I used coke – far too much for my taste – like a medicine, to hold on, to avoid falling into the grayness of normality. I mixed with weed, hashish, living in fear of the descent. It isolated me from the rest of the world… And from showbiz,” he added, specifying that he liked “drink des gin and tonic, du whiskey, du cognac…” and that he was “two packs of cigarettes a day.”
A meeting that will change everything
© CYRIL MOREAU / BESTIMAGEMichel Delpech in 2007 during the Montereau Confluences Music Festival
The singer also finds himself ruined. While he spent lavishly in his 20s and 30s, Michel Delpech knew major financial setbacks in the 1980s. “In the mid-1980s, I found myself ruined overnight. I had to start from scratch, get back into the song that I had abandoned,” he remembered. During his depression, Michel Delpech performed a sleep cure. He then leaves for India where he thinks he has found answers in Hinduism. He then returns to his parents with his children, before being interned in a psychiatric hospital where he narrowly escaped lobotomy.
But while Michel Delpech is at an impasse and is about to flee to Los Angeles with his two children, he receives a letter from a certain Geneviève, ten years his junior. And, this meeting will save the singer of depression. “Geneviève offered me a healthier and more normal life. She went back to basics: we sleep, we eat and we get back to work.”had underlined Michel Delpech as reported The Sunday Journalin August 2011. Thanks to her, who became his wife in July 1985, he will find his way back to the stage. In spiritual quest, the singer will also discover religion to which he devoted two books at the end of his life, notably I dared Godin 2013. A rebirth for Michel Delpech which will allow him to leave peacefully.
Photo credits: LIONEL URMAN / BESTIMAGE
2024-01-26 06:13:33
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