Since his first visit to MTelus seven years ago, Eddy de Pretto has become one of Montrealers’ favorite French artists. So much so that he “graduated” on Thursday evening to the Salle Wilfrid-Pelletier at Place des Arts, which he knew how to warm up thanks to his immense talent as a performer and his equally great humanity.
The singer-songwriter has been on tour with his Crash Cœur Tour since the beginning of January in France. It is a special version, more intimate without its imposing stage structure, which he presented for a single evening here as part of the Francos.
“I created it expressly for this room and for you,” said the singer with a sweet smile, visibly moved and “very very very happy” to find the Quebec public again. Public who gave it back to him. “I arrived at the beginning of the week and I have often been asked why I like coming to Montreal so much,” he said after one of the long ovations he received. But that’s why! Because you are madly in love. »
The show opens with a piano-voice version (with the excellent pianist Johan Barnoin) of LOVE’n’TENDRESSE, a huge success that appears on his third album released last fall, Crash Cœur, whose songs form a large part of this show. Dressed in a simple white tank top, standing under a beam of light, this stripping down gives the singer the dimension of an Edith Piaf or a Jacques Brel and places him in the lineage of the great interpreters of French song.
He continues in the same simplicity with Crash Coeur, before moving to a platform installed in the center of the stage for an explosive VR, where he sings and dances in front of a screen, on which we see… his musicians. Way to show that even if the concert is designed with recorded tapes, behind it, there are real people who played real music. But he does not abuse the process either, and the screen, which does not take up all the space, will also be used for abstract projections or as a more neutral colored background.
The whole show is designed like this, on a thread between the pieces that he performs accompanied only by the piano, to the left of the immense stage that he inhabits with this crazy presence that he has even when he is not moving, and those who make you dance, when he returns to his platform in the center.
In the first third of the show, we still got a little bored of the more surly Eddy de Pretto that we had seen at MTelus in 2019, accompanied by his only iPhone (yes yes), winning over the audience like a boxer, song per song – despite the power of his performances, there was a little concern that he had lost his mojo.
But that was forgetting to what extent he is a complete artist who builds his shows with finesse. Eddy de Pretto raises the tension thanks to his exceptional charisma and his sheer intensity: every word is spit, every sentence is felt, every dance movement is embodied, so much so that the audience, who is already won over, ends up letting go too , less and less intimidated by the vastness of the place.
The show really changed after Kid, his song with 50 million listens, a moving call for respect for the difference which has become bigger than him. He raised a glass to Kid, proudly recalling that it is now studied in French primary schools, and that it has even been used in the French National Assembly to oppose conversion therapy. He sings it today with all the dignity and solemnity that a work deserves when it contributes to changing the world.
For the rest, the singer achieved what few achieve: transforming the Wilfrid into a dance floor. The audience spent practically the rest of the evening on their feet, but the particularity of Eddy de Pretto, like Stromae, is that reflection is never inseparable from pleasure. He thus transforms into a dance anthem a song like Being Well, which talks about mental health and which perfectly sums up the quest of every human being: “I only have one goal in life/It’s to be good to myself- even. »
He will keep us in suspense until the end, making us sing a cappella on Fête de trop, making us jump with an explosion of fire (on screen!) on Quartier de lune, making us enter a trance with him on Urgences 911.
When he sang LOVE’n’TENDRESSE again in its coated and dancing version at the end of the show, with the words displayed so that everyone could sing along with him, the emotion was at its peak and the smiles mixed with tears . Before returning one last time for Happy, he savored this moment of communion with his eyes, crossing his arms over his chest, as if he were trying to hug us all at the same time.
“Despite the sadness, we have to find how to dance together,” he said earlier. This is the whole objective of this tour during which he puts his voice and his crafted words at the service of individual and common well-being. Thursday evening at the Wilfrid-Pelletier Hall, Eddy de Pretto was as relevant and useful as he was entertaining and moving. He promised us that he would return quickly: we are counting on him, because the world needs him.
