🤺 Paris 2024: The French Musical Performers For The Closing Ceremonies 🎶
Musical director Victor le Masne chose a wide range of music that highlighted some of France's most talented artists.
The Paris 2024 Games are done, and now Paris gets a small vacation before the Paralympics start later this month. But before the city turned out the lights and passed the torch to LA for 2028, the Closing Ceremony gave a variety of French musical stars the chance to step into the global spotlight:
Victor le Masne
The official musical director for the Paris 2024 Games, he is part of the French synth-pop duo Housse de Racket. The Opening and Closing ceremonies reflected his eclectic tastes in music, from classic to pop to metal to…some songs that can’t be categorized.
Zaho de Sagazan
This 24-year-old singer-songwriter released her first album last year, “La symphonie des éclairs,” and it immediately became a massive hit. Earlier this year, it was named album of the year at France’s version of the Grammy’s. She kicked off the Closing Ceremony by singing “Sous le ciel de Paris,” the title song of a 1951 French film that Edith Piaf later covered.
Zahia Ziouani
She is one of France’s most renowned conductors. In 1998, she formed her orchestra, Divertimento Symphony Orchestra. Her life story was made into a 2022 film called Divertimento. During the closing ceremony, she conducted her orchestra in a performance of “La Marseillaise” arranged by le Masne and sung with the Maîtrise de Fontainebleau.
Pop Classics
The crowd in the stadium sang impromptu karaoke versions of 2 French cheeseball classics: Joe Dassin’s “Les Champs-Elysées”; and “Emmenez-moi” by Charles Aznavour. Warning: These are the Mother of all French Musical Earworms.
Benjamin Bernheim + Alain Roche
French tenor Benjamin Bernheim teamed up with Swiss pianist Alain Roche for an unforgettable new arrangement of “Hymne à Apollon”, which was written for the first Olympic Congress in 1893. Roche is known for playing from unusual positions, and on Sunday his piano was suspended in the air as Bernheim sang.
Mixtape: Phoenix + Angèle + Kavinsky + Air + VannDa
French Pop band Phoenix is one of France’s bigger musical exports, having been nominated for Grammy Awards and played at festivals like Coachella. Organizers gave them a 17-minute slot to do whatever they wanted. So the band invited several of their favorite collaborators to share the spotlight.
The band played their hits “Lisztomania” and “1901” in a sea of athletes to start and end the set.
They were joined on stage by Air, another “French Touch” icon, to play their hit “Playground Love.” That was followed by Belgian singer-songwriter Angèle and French DJ Kavinsky on the latter’s “Nightcall” and then Phoenix’s “If I Ever Feel Better.”
The band also had rapper VannDa join them on stage for “Funky Squaredance” and Vampire Weekend’s Ezra Koenig for “Tonight,” a recent collaboration.
Yseult
The Parisian singer-model Yseult got the final spot, performing “My Way,” the song made famous by Frank Sinatra. The original tune comes from “Comme d’habitude,” a song by Claude François, or “Cloclo,” the 60s and 70s French pop sensation. Claude’s version is a real downer, about a couple going through the motions of a dying relationship:
I get up / And I push you / You don't wake up / Comme d'habitude (As usual) / On you I pull up the sheet / I'm afraid you're cold / Comme d'habitude / My hand caresses your hair / Almost in spite of myself / Comme d'habitude / But you turn your back on me / And then I get dressed very quickly / I leave the room
Alas, poor Cloclo dreamed of success in the Anglophone world, but never quite achieved it. His career was cut short in the late 1970s when he electrocuted himself changing a light bulb while he was taking a shower. His life story was told in the 2012 biopic “Cloclo.”
Claude’s closest brush with international success came when Paul Anka heard the tune and rewrote the lyrics into an anthem for Sinatra released in 1969. That soaring version provided a fitting closing tune for Yseult, the professional name of 29-year-old Yseult Marie Onguenet, who has indeed done it Her Way.
Her debut album, Yseult was a flop in 2015. She was angry by the lack of support from her label, Polydor, so she broke her contract, set up her independent label, and subsequently became an international star.
While the LA Game organizers assembled performers with much bigger names for their part of the Closing Ceremony, I don’t think anyone would argue that these Mega Stars were overshadowed by the performances of the French artists.
Good luck, LA 2028!
Chris O’Brien
Castelnau-d’Aude
Great piece Chris backed by solid research like always. Have just restacked.