FLORENT PAGNY. The singer Florent Pagny gives news on his state of health and talks about his new projects.
[Updated June 19, 2023 at 5:44 p.m.] A tour, a new album… Florent Pagny is well and truly back. A year and a half after revealing that he has lung cancer, the singer, who continued his treatment after a relapse a few months ago, talks about his (many) new projects in the press and gives news on his condition. health. “It’s going really well”, he assures the microphone of BFMTV this Monday.
In line with this reassuring news, Florent Pagny will return to the stage this summer, for a festival tour. “I hear a lot of people telling me ‘I’ll be there.’ People want to come and see the moment when I return after a year and a half of withdrawal from the stage. Good, great. I’ll be happy to find lots of friends, lots of people. Above all, I will find the public who also say to themselves, ‘Our old messenger can still send us his messages with the vibrations that go well with it?'”, comments Florent Pagny at the microphone of RTL.
In addition to this summer tour and an autobiography published in April, Florent Pagny announces the forthcoming release of an album of duets, including a new version of Caruso with Patrick Fiori and Welcome home with Slimane, the radio believes.
Florent Pagny detailed in Seven to Eight from March 2023 the relapse of lung cancer that he had announced a few weeks earlier. This took the form of a “fixed lymph node”, detected during new examinations carried out after a violent fit of coughing at the start of the year. The singer evoked, in this program broadcast at the beginning of March and shot at the end of January, the “not terrible” images of his exams and his return to Paris, “to see what is happening.”
In his remarks granted to the Sunday meeting of the first channel, the artist let his disappointment and a certain form of guilt dawn. “It sucks this story. It never stops. There is always something that ends up reappearing. Now it’s a ganglion that marks”, lamented Florant Pagny. “I didn’t follow the immunotherapy treatment, so I have to go home quickly. Maybe if I had been in France, I wouldn’t have this lymph node that appears like that, if I had followed the program. It’s a bit of my fault,” he admitted. In question: a hasty return to his home, in Patagonia, as early as June 2022, when there was talk of remission.
In 8:30 p.m. Le Dimanche, on France 2 this time, Florent Pagny detailed: “I played a little, when we don’t play with that. The treatment had worked really well, I was a little stupid for four or five months. The immunotherapy cycle is worth four months, and in the fifth month, one night, it kicked in, I coughed all night.”
“The bullshit is me doing it. If there is a relapse, it’s because I found myself wanting to do a little Zorro, saying ‘ok come on, the medicine has done its job’ “, he again summed up at the microphone of RTL. Florent Pagny should this time settle in Buenos Aires after his stay in France, the capital of Argentina, in order to be closer to a hospital.
After the reassuring news of recent months, Florent Pagny had announced in October 2022, his return to the stage, after having had to cancel the concerts of his 60th birthday.
This new summer tour should take the interpreter of Knowing how to love from June 30 at the Nîmes Festival to July 30, 2023 at the Colmar Wine Fair, via the Aluna festival or the Poupet festival, but also the festival of Carcassonne and the ancient theater of Vienne.
Florent Pagny revealed that he had lung cancer on January 25, 2022 on social networks. A “special announcement” from the artist, which then pushed him, during the treatment, to put his career on hold. “I will not be able to complete my 60th anniversary tour. I have to cancel all of my concerts, following a health problem”, explains the artist in a video posted on Instagram.
“I have just been diagnosed with a tumor in the lung, a cancerous tumor that is not very sympathetic and cannot be operated on, so I have to go into a 6-month protocol of chemotherapy and X-rays”, continued the singer, saying to himself “ sorry” to his fans, but reassuring: “When this is all over, we’ll meet again, I’ll be back to finish what I started. It may be the 61 tour”.
In his autobiography published on April 5, 2023, of which BFMTV revealed several extracts, Florent Pagny reconsidered his choice to announce his illness directly to his fans via Instagram. “I followed my instincts as well as a certain practical sense in going public with what was happening to me. I thought the most direct way to explain to people who had bought their tickets for the remaining forty concerts that I couldn’t honor my dates was to tell them straight up,” the artist wrote. “Instagram will have been used for this. Revealing this twist of fate. Then giving reassuring news along the way”, continues Florent Pagny, who also indicates that he was “supported from all sides”.
As soon as Florent Pagny announced his lung cancer, on social networks, comments and speculation multiplied. More particularly on the supposed addictions of the singer, in particular to cigarettes. In 2016, on Le Divan by Marc-Olivier Fogiel on France 3, Florent Pagny confided in his consumption of soft drugs.
“It stabilizes me (…) I was hyperactive. I was a very, very speedy kid. worth a hospital stay. “I ended up in the hospital after a drink, where I could have stayed. I had a bad feeling one evening and I started drinking and I ended up in the hospital with a hole in my stomach. belly”, he detailed, as reported by the TF1 site.
On RTL, April 5, 2023, Florent Pagny also mentioned his regular consumption of cannabis, assuring that it had nothing to do with his lung cancer. “I don’t have cancer from forty years of smoking. Forty years of smoking leaves lots of little traces and I don’t have them. It’s not the firecracker [which is responsible for my cancer]. I don’t don’t know where he came from, he corresponds to this cancer without it being him”, he explained to the red microphone.
After learning that he was struck by cancer, Florent Pagny would have considered the worst, before pulling himself together. This is what his wife Azucena said in a documentary broadcast on TF1 at the start of 2023. “On January 6 (2022 – Ed), his test was negative, so he had his lungs x-rayed. , tumor… He calls me, he was preparing his funeral”, loose the companion of the singer in this document. Florent Pagny’s wife therefore worked to be positive: “I tell him: ‘Wait, stop, it can be anything, let’s wait to find out a little more, calm down'”.
Florent Pagny himself said it again on RTL in April 2023: “I have the information, I have a 4 cm tumor, and something will have to be done very quickly”. The singer then prepares the first video in which he announces his illness to his fans. Too long, too detailed, too pessimistic… Azucena and her children will also be there to help her with the form. Because basically, the news is very bad: “The exams are progressing, and, all of a sudden, things are getting worse, it’s not operable, it’s a nasty tumor. We’re going to have to attack a violent treatment …”, will tell his companion to the first channel.
A documentary is also in preparation on the 60th anniversary tour that Florent Pagny is supposed to do. The singer will then ask director Michel Jankielewicz to continue, despite the illness. “Florent told me to continue, he wanted nothing to stop. He said to me: ‘I am going to fight not to die, you are continuing what you had started'”, will tell he at Télé Loisirs.
In “Pagny by Florent” (Fayard – April 2023), the singer recounts in more detail the precise moment when he learned that he had lung cancer. “When the information drops, I’m knocked out,” he wrote. “I take a slap that fucks me up before I flatten myself on the ground, my throat so tight that I have trouble breathing. The earth is collapsing,” he continues. Bad news he learns while he is recording the show The Voice. “Alone in my dressing room, I receive the uppercut”, he recalls in his autobiography. “I don’t take the time to cash it. I hang up. Ten seconds later, I push open the dressing room door and head for the set.”
On May 10, 2022, Florent Pagny posted a new video on Instagram to give news of his health. Fans then discover the singer with his head completely shaved and wearing tinted glasses, stigmata of his treatment. Once again, the artist wants to be reassuring. “I only have chemo left, I can tell you that I’m doing very well,” he explained, also praising the doctors for the most powerful treatment provided against his cancer.
“I was very well accompanied by my half, my children, and then there were these thousands of messages, testimonies of love, support and good vibes”, also underlined Florent Pagny at the time. “If all goes well, we’ll meet again next year to finish what I started: the 61 tour.”
“I assume my head even if I will put glasses (during The Voice bonuses) because of the fall of my eyelashes which really makes me look sick, but the rest, I manage”, also indicated Florent Pagny a few weeks later in the columns of Gala. “What do you want, I’ve always worked on all the looks, here I’m going to the extreme! It’s the most refined!”, even ironically the artist.
After a final season tour before the announcement of his illness, Florent Pagny left The Voice on the sidelines of his cancer treatment. “I’ve had some great years and I’m so glad I got to spend all that time with all these people,” the show’s iconic “coach” said during the 2022 season finale, at the month of May, assuring of his “pleasure to finish in style.”
During several bonuses, for the final phase of the singing competition, Florent Pagny will appear again with a bald head in front of millions of viewers. Evoking his health with humor on several occasions, he will even provide the show, notably by interpreting a title by Edith Piaf alongside his two young talents, Lou Dassi and Nour, the big winner of the season.
The singer was replaced on TF1 by Bigflo and Oli, new coaches of The Voice alongside Vianney and Amel Bent, Marc Lavoine having also announced his departure from the team. Another “new” face: Zazie has returned to the red seats. Florent Pagny will have won nine seasons of telecrochet.
A few days before his final finale of The Voice, still in Gala, Florent Pagny wanted to be reassuring again about his state of health: “Now I’m out of the tunnel. I have some answers that allow me to better assess the situation and that revives in me certain things that I lost a little, arrived at my age (…) This cancer woke me up in a way, and it redefined the direction of my priorities. As soon as my protocol is finished, I I’ll move on to something else very soon!”
Florent Pagny also said more about the difficult times of this chemotherapy: “Yes, I knew this period when you don’t want anything, you don’t have the peach, your heart is on the edge of your lips, but it passes. I passed the pure chemo, the one that castagne: heartache for twelve days, it’s not funny anymore! You know, the seasickness that you keep when you’ve been on dry land for a week ” .
“From a tumor the size of a good kiwi, I went to a hazelnut after two chemos”, still boasted Florent Pagny in the weekly people. Enough to found, from the spring, a hope of cure for an inoperable cancer discovered in January of the same year. As early as last October, in a short video, made for France 2’s Taratata show, Florent Pagny continued to display his unfailing optimism. “I am in a fitness phase,” he assured. “As you can see, I feel better and better. It’s that the programs are working better and better!”.
What followed was even flash healing. On Facebook on Thursday, December 15, 2022, Florent Pagny announced a festival tour for the summer of 2023. And the relapse of his cancer, announced in March 2023, obviously did not dent this optimism. “I’m not dead yet, so I’m wickedly alive,” he wrote in his autobiography set at the same time. “This disease took me elsewhere, forced me to question my fundamentals, to fight for my skin, to rebuild myself”, continues Florent Pagny. “I built myself up until I was 60, now I’m rebuilding myself, and it gives me so much strength,” says the artist. In conclusion to his autobiography, which he finished writing in January 2023, the artist dates: “I say ‘hello’ to you friends, and I greet you, very sincerely, very friendly, let’s leave here, on this joyful prospect, to sing together again.” In the program Sept à Huit broadcast on March 5 on TF1, he indicated that he was undergoing a new immunotherapy treatment.
Florent Pagny briefly returned to music, appearing in Kendji Girac’s music video for Encore, directed by Yan Benisty and broadcast on February 15, 2023. The two singers found themselves in the wild landscapes of Patagonia, where half -time the interpreter of If you want to try me.
The song Encore is taken from Kendji Girac’s fifth album released in November 2022 and titled L’Ecole de la vie. This is one of the rare times that fans of Florent Pagny have been able to see, in pictures, the singer since the announcement of his illness.
Florent Pagny has been part of the French musical landscape for more than thirty years. Knowing how to love, And one day a woman, My freedom to think, or Where I will take you, many of his titles have become classics. In total, he has sold more than 15 million records. Florent Pagny was born on November 6, 1961 in Chalon-sur-Saône, in Saône et Loire. This is where he grew up, with his mother, Odile, secretary, Jean, his father, who sells vignettes and his three brothers and sisters. Very early on, he fell in love with music and decided, at only 16, to leave his family to settle in Paris.
In the capital, Florent Pagny then meets the famous showbiz headhunter, Dominique Besnehard. The latter offers him the chance to take his first steps in the cinema. He landed roles and played in La Balance by Bob Swaim, Fort Saganne by Alain Corneau or even in Inspector Labavure by Claude Zidi. In 1987, Florent decided to turn to song. He wrote the song Anything, Manifesto Against Drugs. The 45 rpm, produced by Gérard Louvin, met with enormous success (1 million copies sold) and remained at the top of the top 50 for 26 weeks.
In 1988, Florent Pagny repeated the feat with his new 45 rpm, Let us breathe. The following year, Florent Pagny obtained a music victory in the category “Male revelation of the year”. In 1990, he released his first album, Merci. The singer is rewarded with a gold disc with more than 100,000 copies sold.
However, the sudden notoriety, the money, his relationship with the young singer Vanessa Paradis and his Rolling Press title, earned Florent Pagny growing unpopularity with the media. It will be boycotted for 4 years. In 1992, he released his second album, very autobiographical, Réaliste. The success is mixed and Florent Pagny is faced with personal and financial problems. The artist is at the bottom of the wave.
Stay true is Florent Pagny’s third opus and places the year 1994 under the sign of rediscovered peace. Jean-Jacques Goldman writes to him Are you following me? and If You Want To Try Me, two huge hits. A year later, Welcome to my house is released, a compilation that contains three new songs, including Welcome to my house (1.5 million copies). In 1997, exiled in Patagonia in southern Argentina, the singer released a new album, Knowing how to love. The signatures are prestigious.
We find, Erick Benzi, Zazie, Art Mengo, Pascal Obispo, Jacques Veneruzo, Jean-Jacques Goldman… Despite the artist’s tax adventures, the disc is a commercial success with 1.4 million copies sold. Florent Pagny is logically rewarded with the victory of the music of the Best male artist. Records, tours and changes of looks followed: Ré-création (1999), Châtelet les Halles (2000), 2 (2001), Ailleurs Land (2003), Baryton (2004) and Abracadabra (2006).
Caught up by the tax authorities on January 27, 2005, Florent Pagny was convicted of tax evasion. In November 2007, the singer finally felt ready to interpret the man he considered a master, Jacques Brel. He chooses eleven songs from the Belgian singer’s repertoire and delivers an opus that has the value of a self-portrait, Pagny sings Brel. At the production, we find the guitarist Daran and Yvan Cassar, talented pianist and arranger. The singer interprets Brel with sobriety accompanied by a philharmonic orchestra. To date, he has given a unique performance at L’Olympia, on December 1, 2007, in front of a conquered audience.
In 2010, Florent Pagny released the album Everything and its opposite in which he found Pascal Obispo with whom he sang in duet. In 2011, he went on an acoustic tour to celebrate his 50th birthday. Since 2012, he has been the coach of the show The Voice, the most beautiful voice. In 2013, the single Lesmurs porters was released, the first extract from the album Vieillir avec toi, entirely composed by Calogero. The album was certified diamond disc in July 2014.
“Between taxes and me, it does not start with a love story”, quips Florent Pagny in his autobiography entitled Pagny by Florent (Fayard) to be published on Wednesday April 5, 2023, of which BFMTV has unveiled several extracts. In his book, the artist returns at length to his troubles with the tax authorities. “When I think that there are still people who imagine that I do not pay my taxes, or that I am against the principle of paying them… I want to tell them that nothing is more false”, defends Florent Pagny. When he encountered his first problems with the tax authorities in 1989, the artist explained that at the time, he “knew nothing about it”. “I had never been told what to do in order to enter the circuit. I never received a letter of summons, asking me for a statement. I show up spontaneously and I get wrung out,” he says about this first regularization with the tax authorities.
But it was not until three years later, in 1992, that his “first real dispute with taxes” took place. Florent Pagny thus explains that the company Glem directed by Gérard Louvin, who then takes care of its management, “would not have declared the sums that they (has) ‘given'”. Sums “rounded”, adds the artist, who specifies that it is however the company Glem which had “occupied until then to declare” its income. The artist is then confronted with “an untenable situation”. “I had no more money, now I have something more: debts. They are colossal”, writes Florent Pagny.
Another episode of Florent Pagny’s troubles with taxes: the seizure of the singer’s property in 2002, at the request of the tax authorities. As BFMTV reminds us, this affair will inspire the singer Pascal Obispo and the lyricist Lionel Florence, who will write for Florent Pagny his emblematic title entitled My freedom to think. In his autobiography, the singer returns to the outcry caused by this song in the political sphere. “I didn’t think the song would trigger such a reaction to the ministry. It’s still more ironic than mean, and above all so much less violent than what I experienced,” recalls Florent Pagny in his story.
In his autobiography to be published on Wednesday April 5, 2023, and of which BFMTV has unveiled several extracts, Florent Pagny looks back on his love story with Vanessa Paradis. The two artists met in 1988, but Florent Pagny hadn’t originally “paid more attention to him than that”. It is only a year later that they will begin their idyll, which will last three years.
The singer tells in his book why he fell in love with the interpreter of Joe the taxi. “She has the crazy charisma of the very shy people (the same as Johnny Hallyday had). These people, as soon as they arrive somewhere, everyone wants to approach them, talk to them, be part of their lives, but they are so introverted”, writes Florent Pagny.
After three years of relationship, the two artists separate. “I got out of the photo. Direct!”, he recalls. Florent Pagny is also a bit bitter on the epilogue of this love story. “That’s what I can blame her for at the end, because I was there for her so much, I worked so hard to fix everything that was wrong or unhealthy around her, and it was so successful for her. “, he writes.
Florent Pagny met his wife almost thirty years ago. After breaking up with Vanessa Paradis, Florent Pagny met a young 25-year-old Argentinian woman, Azucena Camano, at a dinner in 1993. The latter is a model, painter and creator of a brand of organic beauty products. Together, the couple have two children: Inca, born March 17, 1996, and Aël, born May 26, 1999.
Florent Pagny and Azucena Camano married in 2006. The singer dedicated his album Vieillir avec toi to her. “We are a karmic couple,” said Florent Pagny on the set of 8:30 p.m. on Sunday by Laurent Delahousse. “Our destiny was made to meet and accompany each other to precisely come back from where I was, at the bottom of the hole and to surpass myself”, he added.
If Florent Pagny is now married to his wife, their first meeting had nothing to do with love at first sight. In his autobiography to be published on Wednesday April 5, 2023, of which BFMTV has unveiled several excerpts, the singer indeed says that he was immediately attracted to the young Argentinian woman when they met, but that it was not not the case of Azucena Camano. “I found my heroine. All the cards are against me. We will have to fight for our love story to exist”, writes Florent Pagny in his autobiographical account of their first meeting. “My destiny is changing, I know it, I feel it, but I can see that on the other hand, Azucena is not aware”, he continues.
If Florent Pagny can count on his wife Azucena Camano to get through the ordeal of the disease, the singer also has the support of his two children, Inca and Aël, who now live in the United States. Aged 25 and 22, they now live in Miami and New York respectively.
Inca is passionate about street art, according to Here, when Aël studies photography. “She lives in New York. And then she loves photography. She went to photography school. She has a good eye and she’s really good at taking pictures, so she’s having fun developing that gift.” , had confided Florent Pagny on the set of Vivement dimanche in November 2021. And to add, about his Inca son: “once he had his pilot’s license, he went to do this painting and from At that point, all of a sudden, loads of people started calling them to come and do more murals.”
