Nino Ferrer was born on 15 August 1934 in Genoa, Italy, but lived the first years of his life in New Caledonia (an overseas territory of France in the southwest Pacific Ocean), where his father, an engineer, was working. Jesuit religious schooling, first in Genoa and later in Paris, left him with a lifelong aversion to the Church. In 1963, Nino Ferrer recorded his own first record, the single “Pour oublier qu’on s’est aimé” (“To forget we were in love”). His first solo success came in 1965 with the song “Mirza”. Other hits followed, unintentionally establishing Ferrer as something of a comedic singer. The stereotyping and his eventual  success made him feel unable to escape from the constant demands of audiences to hear the hits he himself despised. Always having a depressive side to his personality, he would purposely try to antagonize his audience trying repel them from his concerts for demanding to hear the hits. In Italy, he scored a major hit in 1967 with La pelle nera (the French version is “Je voudrais être un noir” [“I’d like to be a black man”]. This soul song, with its quasi-revolutionary lyrics imploring a series of Ferrer’s black music idols to gift him their black skin for the benefit of music-making, achieved long-lasting iconic status in Italy. In 1975 he started breeding horses in Quercy, France. In 1989, Ferrer obtained French citizenship, which he explained as his “celebration of the bicentenary of the French Revolution.” A couple of months after his mother died on 13 August 1998, two days before his 64th birthday, Ferrer took his hunting gun and walked to a field of recently cut wheat then laid down near some trees he had painted before on canvas and shot himself in the chest. His wife Kinou, with whom he had two sons, had already alerted the gendarmerie after finding a farewell letter in the house. Next day, there were front-page headlines in most French and Italian newspapers, such as “Adieu Nino!”, “Nino Ferrer Hung Up His Telephone”, “Our Nino Has Left for the South.” They called him the Don Quixote of French show business.- Edited from Wikipedia

Released in 1974  Nino Ferrer’s Nino & Radiah was an album which found the French artist backed by the Lafayette Afro Rock Band. This laid back funk feel was quite a departure from his jazz and campy styles that he was know for. Its in my opinion his best work. Sadly, and much to Ninos dismay, it only sold around 45,000 copies worldwide.

A couple tracks off 1972’s Métronomie