It was 20 August 1980, and on the first floor of a restaurant in the French Polynesian port of Papeete, Joe Dassin was out for lunch with friends. Suddenly, he collapsed. He’d already had three heart attacks and his body could no longer take the double dose of fast living and non-stop work. He was not yet forty-two. 

For some reason, the French media are celebrating the thirtieth anniversary of his death with infinitely more respect and affection than they announced it three decades earlier. In 1980, it was the end of a pop singer who epitomised spangled generation – a man who had never done an interview with a serious newspaper or been reviewed in Le Monde or Télérama. Now, he is regarded as one of the best representatives of a particular golden age of French music; both folk and pop, productive and sincere, very French yet deeply marked by Anglo-Saxon culture.

In he space of sixteen albums and forty-six singles released from 1965 to 1981, he seemed to have discovered the quintessence of lightweight yet elegant popular music, and was just as at home on one of Maritie and Gilbert Carpentier’s music shows as he was an heir to Georges Brassens’ highly demanding legacy.

It has to be said that the stars were in his favour from the start: Joseph Ira Dassin was born in New York on 5 November 1938 to the American film director, Jules Dassin, and Béatrice Launer, a Hungarian violinist. He had barely grown up when his father, accused of McCarthyism, left the USA for Europe with his family. After schooling in Switzerland, soaking up French culture and passing his baccalauréat, he returned to the States. There, he studied  languages and ethnology, entered his short stories in literary competitions, met Pete Seeger and Berry Gordy, enthused about Bob Dylan’s music, and busked Brassens in French on campus. On his return to France, he toyed with cinema, assisting his father on the set of Topkapi, before a chain of events led him to singing. It was probably the failure of his first two singles that spurred him to carry on. Almost two years after he started out, Bip Bip and Guantanamera were the titles that launched his career.

That was in 1966. For the next fourteen years, Joe Dassin was rarely absent from the top of the charts and radio programmes: Les Dalton in 1967, Siffler sur la colline, La Bande à Bonnot and Le Petit Pain au chocolat in 1968, Les Champs-Élysées and Le Chemin de Papa in 1969, L’Amérique and L’Équipe à Jojo in 1970, La Fleur aux dents in 1971, Taka takata, La Complainte de l’heure de pointe and Salut les Amoureux in 1972, Fais-moi de l’électricité and Le Moustique in 1973, Si tu t’appelles Mélancolie in 1974, L’Été indien, Et si tu n’existais pas, Ça va pas changer le monde and Il faut naître à Monaco in 1975, Le Jardin du Luxembourg and Le Café des Trois Colombes in 1976, A toi in 1977, Si tu penses à moi in 1978, Le Dernier Slow in 1979, Faut pas faire de la peine à John and The Guitar Don’t Lie in 1980, amongst others.

He had an impressive flair for picking out American songs that would appeal to a French audience, like Ode to Billie Joe by Bobbie Gentry, which became Marie-Jeanne, or City of New Orleans and A Boy Named Sue by Johnny Cash, which were transformed into Salut les amoureux and Un garçon nommé Suzy. It wasn’t only to the United States that he looked for his tunes: Siffler sur la colline, L’Été indien, Le Dernier Slow and Le Petit Pain au chocolat were originally Italian songs, La Complainte des heures de pointe was German and, surprisingly, L’Amérique started off as a British hit. He was also one of the first singers in France to notice Bob Marley’s talent, adapting No Woman No Cry to come up with Si tu penses à moi which, it has to be said, retains little reggae in its final version. Along with over 250 songs in French and English for the French market, he also recorded in Spanish, German, Italian, Greek and Japanese. By the time of his death, he had sold fifty million records.

Joe Dassin was a workaholic, piling up instructions and editing requests on his lyric writers (mainly Claude Lemesle, currently president of the board of directors of SACEM, which oversees songwriters’ copyright fees, and Pierre Delanoë). He listened to hundreds of demos and singles sent to him from round the world and often spent his holidays abroad giving television shows and making recordings for the local market. When he wasn’t working on his own career, he wrote for others, like France Gall (Bébé requin) and especially his friend Carlos (Big Bisou, Senor Météo, and Le Bougalou du loup-garou). Perhaps because he was so much a part of everyday life, not many people really noticed during his lifetime just what a huge amount of talent Joe Dassin actually had.