Belgian singer Claude Barzotti is dead

The songwriter with the slightly hoarse voice died aged 69 in his bed, surrounded by his two daughtersin Court-Saint-Étienne, between Brussels and Charleroi, in Belgium, its manager and conductor, Laurent Comtat, told AFP.

” Barzotti preferred to be called a singer of emotion rather than a romantic. He was a lively flayed man, a real sensitive, who drank to fight against his stage fright. »

Ill, Barzotti had stopped his career in 2020 and died of pancreatic cancer.

I am rital and I remain so / And in word and in gesture / Your seasons have become mine / But my music is Italiansang Barzotti in his greatest hit, THE Rital (1983).

Born Francesco Barzotti on July 23, 1953, into a family of Italian immigrants from the Marche region, the singer with curly intense brown hair evoked his origins and his condition. from abroad in this song, which the new generations could hear in the film Camping.

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, ballads 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 participated in nostalgic tours Tender age and wooden headwith Marie Myriam, Frank Alamo, Demis Roussos or Patrick Juvet.

someone sad

Barzotti had spoken several times publicly about his alcohol problems, confiding on Belgian TV to having 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 facthe blurted out on the screen.

” Claude Barzotti was the “French lover italiano de service”, an endearing and sincere guy, who suffered a lot because of women. »

It was the idol of the Middle East! You were going to a night club, if you were French, to make you happy, we sent you Barzotti’s records. You went to New York, you heard Barzotti in Little Italyunderlined Hervé Vilard.

His songs, it was not marshmallow. He needed the words, he was a Latin. And that was another timehe continued.

Barzotti? A delicious, funny, humorous man, he loved life and that is perhaps what won himtold his side to theAFP producer Olivier Kaefer, organizer of shows in the 1980s. We will very much regret it.