Michel Polnareff

Composer and arranger, pianist, guitarist and performer with a high-pitched voice, Michel Polnareff has left his mark on the history of French chanson and rock. Born into a family of Russian émigrés in Nérac on July 3, 1944, he learned to play the piano and won a first prize in music theory at the Paris Conservatoire. In the mid-1960s, he took his guitar to London, then played the streets of Paris before being signed to Disc'AZ. La Poupée qui fait non" and "Love Me Please Love Me" brought him immediate fame, while "L'Amour avec toi" was censored on the radio. Michel Polnareff then imposed his style and multiplied his hits ("Tous les bateaux tous les oiseaux" and "La Maison vide", "Tout pour ma chérie", "On ira tous au paradis"). His dark glasses and sense of provocation became part of his legend, with the scandal of the bare-assed poster for his show Polnarévolution (1972), then his exile to the United States following a bankruptcy. From across the Atlantic, the author of the cult album Polnareff's and film soundtracks such as La Folie des grandeurs (1971) identified with American production with the album Fame à la Mode (1975), not forgetting his native land in 1978's "Lettre à France". He finally returned to France with the albums Coucou Me Revoilou (1978), Bulles (1981) and Incognito (1985). In 1990, Kâma-Sûtra is the result of a long residency in a luxury hotel room converted into a studio. For three decades, a period of doubt and waiting for new compositions followed, palliated by tours and recordings of his past hits in public(Live at the Roxy in 1996, Ze (Re) Tour in 2007 and À l'Olympia in 2016). Only a few tracks such as "Je rêve d'un monde" (1999) and "L'Homme en rouge" (2015) surfaced before the release of the complete Pop Rock en Stock box set (2017). In 2018, the long-awaited new album was finally released under the title Enfin! Now more present on stage, on record and in the media, Polnareff records the piano-vocal album Polnareff Chante Polnareff (2022) and follows this up with two tours until the release of the singles "Sexcetera" and "Tu m'entends pas", as a prelude to the album Un Temps pour Elles (2025), made up of four songs and four instrumentals.