The Rital marked the spirits, Love me Or I won’t write to you anymore made hearts capsize in the 1980s… Belgian singer Claude Barzotti died on Saturday.
The singer-songwriter with a slightly hoarse voice “died at the age of 69 in his bed, surrounded by his two daughters”, in Court-Saint-Etienne, between Brussels and Charleroi, in Belgium, his manager told AFP. and conductor, 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.
Sick, Claude Barzotti had stopped his career in 2020, and died of pancreatic cancer.
“But my music is Italian”
“I am rital and I remain so / And in word and in gesture / Your seasons have become mine / But my music is Italian”, sang Claude Barzotti in his greatest hit, Le 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 “foreign” condition in this song – that new generations could hear in the film Camping.
“French lover”
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.
Among his hits, slow songs and hit songs that rocked the booms of the 1980s, such as I won’t write to you anymore (1984), or Love me (1990).
In the years 2008-2009, he had participated in nostalgic tours “Tender age and wooden head”, with Marie Myriam, Frank Alamo, Demis Roussos or Patrick Juvet.
Alcohol but no marshmallow
Claude Barzotti had publicly mentioned his alcohol problems several times, confiding on Belgian TV to have 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 AFP the singer Hervé Vilard, who rubbed shoulders with him in particular. in concerts.
“He was the idol of the Middle East! You went to a night club, 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 underlined.
“His songs, it was not marshmallow. He needed the words, he was a Latin. And that was another time,” he continued.
Tribute to Fabien Roussel
Barzotti? “A delightfully funny man, full of humor, he loved life and that’s perhaps what won the day,” producer Olivier Kaefer, organizer of shows over the years, told AFP. 1980. “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 the Rital and so many songs from the 80s that made us vibrate and dance”.