Florent Pagny's Nights in an Old Mercedes

Florent Pagny broke through in France in 1990 and was soon one of the country's best-known young singers. The years that followed went badly. His second album, Réaliste, released in 1992, did not meet expectations, and his relationship with the singer Vanessa Paradis had ended the previous year.

He also had a tax problem. He had not declared his taxes, and the tax authorities issued a reassessment whose consequences lasted for years. He had to give up items he had bought on credit. According to the biography reported by DH, he went through a burn-out and a hospital stay, and then ended up on the street. He slept in his customised Mercedes or in an outbuilding on the property of the designer Philippe Starck in Issy-les-Moulineaux, near Paris.

He credits two things with helping him recover: his relationship with Azucena Caamaño, an Argentine who has been his partner since, and the singer-songwriter Jean-Jacques Goldman. In 1993 Goldman invited him to join Les Enfoirés, the charity concert group, and wrote three songs for him under the pseudonym Sam Brewski, including Si tu veux m'essayer. He also introduced Pagny to the team working on his own album Rouge and advised him to soften his provocative public image. Pagny said that this put him back in the saddle.

In early 1996, after four concerts at the Cirque d'Hiver in Paris, the newspaper Libération wrote that he had been all but written off and had been reborn.

The article describes the rest of his career as a success story. He sold more than 15 million records and was a coach on the television talent show The Voice in France from 2012 to 2018.