When in 1969, lyricist Gilles Thibaut offered Johnny Hallyday several song texts to set to music, he was no stranger to the profession. He notably wrote, two years earlier, for Claude François what has become an international standard: As per usual. He has since signed other titles for Cloclo. But he’s worked with Johnny before. In particular on a song mocking the singer Antoine: Long hair and short ideas. The title of his latest creation, which reflects his loving state of mind, is simple: That I love you.
Two very (too) hot verses
As much to say it and to recognize it: That I love you, an ode to physical love and the fusion of bodies, is a torrid song. Everyone remembers the following words: “When you no longer feel like a cat/ And you become a bitch/ And at the call of the wolf/ You finally break your chains/ When your first sigh/ Ends in a cry/ When it’s me who says no / When it’s you who says yes…“We remember just as much the following verse:”When my body on your body / Heavy like a dead horse / Doesn’t know, doesn’t know anymore / If it still exists / When we made love / Like others are at war / When I’m the soldier / Who dies and who loses her…“Even if May 68 passed by there, as well as a certain liberation of morals, this text is particularly daring. But there is nothing that can shock Johnny Hallyday. Until the two following verses, as reported by the site Deliberatewhich is based on an interview granted by Gilles Thibaut to the magazine I sing. We learn that the initial song had not four (as in the final version) but six verses. Two verses too overtly sexual to loop on the radios were purely and simply withdrawn by Johnny! Here is the first one:When on the unmade bed / With too sudden an impulse / Only the snow remains / Which flows between your hands / When on your long hair / My joy pours / When you open your eyes / And finally you drink it“. Hallyday would have first wanted to replace “you drink it” par “do you see her“. Before being pointed out to him that this formulation was not happier. The second verse is, meanwhile, immediately deleted. It is about a sexual practice that shocks – at least in the context of a song – up to the singer… even in a poetic form: “When sometimes you turn / Like a dead leaf / And your golden skin / Is all you wear / When my sun goes down / Your moon rises / On the dawn of your flower / And my sap flows. ..”
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“A song appreciated by all audiences”
That I love you is set to music by the composer Jean Renard who finds himself in a less exalted sentimental context than Gilles Thibaut. Its composition will, therefore, have a melancholic color, contrasting with the rawness of the words of the lyricist. The combination of words and music is all the more powerful. That I love you was created in piano-voice version, on April 20, 1969 on the antenna ofEurope 1, then in a much more spectacular and triumphant way on the stage of the Palais des sports, from April 26 to May 4. Finally, French viewers discovered the title on May 7, during the Show Smet broadcast on the first channel of the ORTF. At the same time, the interpreter of Penitentiary gates checked in That I love you in the studio, with arrangements by Jean-Jacques Vannier. Highlighted during his summer tour by Johnny, the song by Thibaut and Renard arouses public hysteria… And causes a large number of fainting! That I love you becomes, almost instantly, one of Hallyday’s standards. Who will declare, ten years later about him: “It is a song that has been appreciated by all audiences, whether rock or variety. (…) Since then, I have asked several times (to the authors, Gilles Thibaut and Jean Renard), to find me another song in this spirit, but they have never really succeeded.”
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