Many think of him as grandma-friendly, but Aznavour’s chansons are intimate sketches of despair and domestic strife
In the UK at least, Charles Aznavour, who has died aged 94, is largely embedded in the popular imagination as a light entertainment phenomenon. It’s the context in which he appeared on British TV in the late 60s and 70s: BBC specials called things like Love from A to Z, or spots on variety shows. His two big British hits, the syrupy The Old Fashioned Way and the impassioned She, seemed reactionary and wilfully old-fashioned: like Perry Como’s And I Love You So, or Peters and Lee’s Welcome Home, they were part of a wave of grandma-friendly MOR that crashed awkwardly around the glam and Philly soul records in the early 70s charts, a reminder that a lot of Britain’s record buyers were old enough to remember a halcyon world where rock’n’roll didn’t exist.
Related: Charles Aznavour, the 'Frank Sinatra of France', dies aged 94
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