“The telephone changed my life”

Gilbert Montagné will never forget the day he held a telephone receiver in his hands. “This object has always been synonymous with an unattainable dream, we didn’t have the means to have one at the time.” But when the young singer experienced his first successes, he was finally able to obtain it. Not so easy in the early 1960s. “You had to wait three years to get it, I got it for three weeks because I'm blind.” It's the beginning of a great love affair with the telephone! Gilbert Montagné thus remembers incredible phone calls, like that night when Ray Charles called him. “He was very sensitive to the fact that I wanted to make things happen for the blind.”

A phone call from another dimension

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Another day, shortly after the death of his dear mother, Gilbert Montagné found himself on a road in Allier. “I pick up my cell phone from the time, which weighs three kilos! » At the end of the line, a small voice is heard. “'Is that you?', I answer, 'Yes', I've never heard a voice so close to my mother's, you're going to tell me it's nonsense, but who knows? » Gilbert Montagné recounts in our video his close relationship with the telephone, which “promotes independence, with it, everything is possible…”