French crooner Aznavour still singing at 90

Charles Aznavour will celebrate his 90th birthday on Thursday on stage in Berlin, singing before a packed house.

Charles Aznavour E.Sadaka

The man dubbed the “French Sinatra” was actually born in Paris to an Armenian immigrant couple and he has both French and Armenian nationality.

He’s been singing since he was nine years old and 81 years on, he makes few concessions to age - after Berlin he will take his tour to Frankfurt, London, Warsaw, Barcelona and Rome and in the autumn he’ll sing in Moscow and Antwerp.

He now uses a prompter in case he forgets any of the lyrics while performing, and has an armchair on stage for when his legs need a rest.

He says he writes every day, sometimes a song per day and is also currently working on an album of new compositions, with the probable title Nostalgie. He has written 27 songs and says he needs another 14. He’s also writing two novels and on the fourth volume of his memoirs.

“I stopped celebrating my birthdays at 50. I said to my friends: the next time will be when I’m 100, there’s plenty of time,” he told French radio station RTL.

He declared that he was fuelled “by happiness, the joy of doing a job that [he loved] and which [at the end of the day] had made [him] happy, despite the authorities and the media”.

Aznavour has clearly not forgotten his entanglements with the French tax authorities and newspaper critics, earlier in his career, who disliked his voice.

Last week he was in Yerevan, where he gave a concert for the Armenian president Serge Sarkissian and French president François Hollande, who was visiting.

He revealed the date of his planned farewell concert to Hollande: “I’ve fixed the date. It will be 22 May 2024. I will be 100. You will be there, I hope”, he said mischievously.