Jean-Jacques Goldman briefly came out of retirement to participate in a school show. The French singer responded favorably to the request of a teacher from Vénissieux, near Lyon, who asked him to compose a song for her students’ play about the Resistance, as reported this week in Le Progrès.
Nadia Bachmar, a teacher at the Louis-Pergaud school, spoke with the singer of Good idea since 2016 through the postal address of his record company. “I always felt great admiration for him,” he explains to the regional newspaper.
long term project
In 2019, she expressed her desire to put on a show about the Resistance with her CM1 students and suggested he participate:
“He knew that his father had been a resistance fighter in Vénissieux and that he had participated in his liberation within the resistance with the FTP-MOI (Francs-tireurs et partisans – immigrant labor), on August 26, 1944 , so it made sense to ask him,” he explains to Le Figaro.
Delay due to confinement
The singer accepts but Covid-19 suspends the project. The show titled Vénissieux the beautiful, the rebel It is installed during the following year and the first performance by the students, then in CM2, will take place in 2021.
Michael Jones, who lives in Lyon, agrees to take part in the show and sings. I give you with the students. Nadia Bachmar sends the recording of the show to Jean-Jacques Goldman. And it wasn’t until the following year that the collaboration with the 72-year-old singer became a reality.
Nadia Bachmar’s students went to university but continued with the performances when she received a message from the artist’s artistic director: “He told me (…) that it was always yes for the song.”
Remote work
Then, the singer sends the music and works with the students via video conference on the text. This is how the title was born. Resist!: “In June 2022, we recorded it in Michael Jones’ studio, in the east of Lyon,” he says. “Jean-Jacques couldn’t be there, but he added his voice as an introduction later, reciting an excerpt from the letter written by Armenian resistance fighter Missak Manouchian.”
And the adventure may not end there: according to the professor, the singer “is not opposed” to playing this song in public…
Jean-Jacques Goldman left the spotlight about twenty years ago to live a life away from the spotlight in Marseille and then in London. But sometimes he gets ahead of himself: in 2020 he posted a video in which he sang a revised version of They were changing lives in tribute to the caregivers, in the midst of the Covid crisis. He also keeps in touch with his fans, to whom he responds periodically.
Source: BFM TV
