As noted by MBW yesterday, the album – the first, and likely last, posthumous LP release by Hallyday – has become a national event in France.
The numbers are astonishing. After its release last Friday (October 19), Mon Pays C’est L’Amour sold 780,177 copies in the French market in its opening seven days.
That is the biggest week-one sales tally in the history of the French charts, and equivalent to one in every 86 people in the market purchasing a copy.
The biggest debut album sales week in the United States this year, if you didn’t know, is Drake’s record-breaking Scorpion.
According to Billboard/Nielsen, Scorpion sold 732,000 equivalent albums in its opening seven days in the USA.
Of these equivalent albums, just 160,000 were actual album purchases by fans. The rest (572,000 ‘sales’) were all converted from streaming plays of tracks.
Hallyday’s Mon Pays C’est L’Amour just sold a bigger number (780k vs. 732k), in a country whose population is about a fifth of the size of the United States (67m vs. 326m).
The singer, whose hits were little-known outside the French-speaking world, went from a quiff-haired young heart-throb who introduced US-style rock and roll to France in the 1960s to the ageing bad-boy “Patriarch of French pop”, a national monument, akin to music royalty, plastered over the cover of celebrity magazines.
Hallyday’s widow called French president Emmanuel Macron at around 2am on Wednesday to inform him of Hallyday’s death.
In a statement, Macron wrote: “We will never forget the name, face, the voice or above all the concerts of Johnny Hallyday”.
sylvie vartan and Hallyday
My heart is broken, like that of all of France - said ex-wife Sylvie Vartan - I have lost the love of my youth,
and nothing can ever replace it ».
Later, Macron tweeted: “We’ve all something of Johnny in us”, a musical reference to Hallyday’s 1985 hit: Quelque chose de Tennessee (Something of Tennessee).
