Pierre Delanoë

The prolific French lyricist Pierre Delanoë, who has died of heart failure aged 88, wrote the words for more than 4,000 songs. He worked with Gilbert Bécaud (obituary, December 19 2001) - they produced more than 300 titles between them - Hugues Aufray, Michel Fugain, Joe Dassin, Nana Mouskouri, Dalida, Sylvie Vartan, Johnny Hallyday, Mikis Theodorakis and many others. Practically every major popular singer in France over the last 50 years turned at some point to Delanoë for a verse to be set to music. He also campaigned for the rights of lyricists, and for greater recognition for those who provided the words for popular songs.

Delanoë's real name was Pierre Leroyer, and he was born in Paris; his father worked for a large printing firm, and his mother taught la coupe, the craft of cutting patterns for dress-makers. He was educated at a school run by Oratorians - he maintained that their lessons in Greek, Latin and rhetoric gave him the foundation for his prolific versifying. He also started to visit local music-halls, and remembered that he knew many of the sketches by comics Bach and Laverne by heart.

As a teenager Delanoë joined the volunteers of the far right military veterans' Croix de Feu, and took part in at least one skirmish with communists in Paris before the organisation was banned by the government in 1936. At the outbreak of the second world war, while studying law, he joined an anti-aircraft division. Invalided out by June 1940 and the fall of France, he was trying to get back to Paris when De Gaulle broadcast his famous call to the Free French to fight on. He remained an ardent Gaullist for the rest of his life, and on the general's death in 1970 wrote the song, De Gaulle, Tu le Regretteras.

After passing his final examinations, Delanoë married a fellow student, Micheline Gérald, and was employed in local government, by the tax division at Rouen. Describing the years of the German occupation, he said: "My father was a Pétainist, my mother was a refugee in Périgord, my father-in-law was in a concentration camp, my Jewish mother-in-law was in hiding in Lyon, one brother-in-law was sent to Buchenwald - and I was a civil servant, avoiding the bombs, and, like a caged animal, listening at night to Radio London."

After the liberation of France, Delanoë made his way back to Paris with his wife and eldest son. With his brother-in-law Frank Gérald, he began to write comic duets, which they performed in bars and cabarets. One of the first songs they succeeded in selling, Je Cherche un Mari, was to a famous chanteuse, Marie Bizet. Gérald had to leave for military service, and Bizet introduced Delanoë to the young singer and composer François Silly. The rapport was immediate, and at their first meeting Delanoë provided words for a song, Mes Mains, which was taken up by Lucienne Boyer. Silly changed his name to Gilbert Bécaud, and soon became known as "Monsieur 1,000 volts", one of the top singers in France of the 1950s.

Many of the songs he composed to Delanoë's lyrics became world-famous, among them Et Maintenant (What Now My Love?), Le Jour Ou la Pluie Viendra (The Day the Rains Came), Je T'appartiens (Let it Be Me), and, above all, Nathalie, the love story of a French student and a Russian translator, which begins "La Place Rouge était vide".

After abandoning his civil service career, in 1955 Delanoë helped to launch Europe 1, the first French radio station to programme popular music in a modern way. His and Bécaud's song Salut Les Copains gave the station the title for one of its most influential programmes, and Delanoë produced or presented many others. In 1958, he arranged for Edith Piaf's Carnegie Hall concert to be recorded: the tape was flown overnight to Paris and broadcast the following evening. Piaf began her recital with Delanoë's elegy for those fallen in battle, Les Grognards; he said it was one of the proudest moments of his life.

As the gradual domination of American-style pop music began, Delanoë maintained two careers - on the one hand, he clung to the traditions of French chanson; on the other, he also joined the pop bandwagon. For Hugues Aufray, he made French versions of a number of Bob Dylan's songs, including With God On Our Side and Mr Tambourine Man - and Dylan paid him the compliment of saying he considered some of them better than the originals.

With Louis Am ade and Jacques Emmanuel, Delanoë wrote the libretto for Bécaud's Aran, the first French opera to mix classical and rock elements. It took five years to complete and find backing for the production, which opened at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées in October 1962. Triple-cast with opera singers, so that it could play every night, the production ran for two months, lost an enormous amount of money but eventually achieved a cult status. In the 1970s, Delanoë wrote the lyrics for the first French stagings of Godspell and Jesus Christ Superstar.

Although he wrote songs for a vast array of established stars - among them Maurice Chevalier, Tino Rossi, Françoise Hardy, Richard Anthony, Barbara, Milva, Petula Clark, Colette Renard and André Claveau, who won the Eurovision song contest in 1958 with Dors Mon Amour - Delanoë had a great rapport with younger singer-composers. In the late 1960s and early 70s, he worked with Joe Dassin, Gérard Lenorman, Michel Fugain and especially Michel Sardou, with whom he produced more than 600 songs, among them Les Yeux d'Animal, Vladimir Ilitch, L'Autre Femme and Le France, a lament for the 1930s trans-atlantic ocean liner. Delanoë said that, "In all the songs I have written, I tried to put something of myself, to be involved, to say what I mean, to communicate with my fellow men."

For 10 years Delanoë was head of SACEM, the French musicians', artists' and writers' association. He wrote three books about the history of the chanson and published collections of his lyrics, as well as several novels, among them Le 19ème Trou, set around the world of golf, about which he was passionate. An essentially conservative figure, he despised such terms as "rock culture", and was recently scathing about rap, which he called "a form of expression for people incapable of making music".

He belonged to the grand line of French ballad writers and is survived by his wife, three children and thousands of chansons.

· Patrick O'Connor Pierre Delanoë (Pierre Charles Marcel Napoleon Leroyer), lyricist, born December 16 1918; died December 27 2006

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