Quick! What do you get if Oasis, Mandopop star Jay Chou, Orlando Bloom and an acoustic guitar birthed together a grown man? If you guessed Dantès aka Dailiang aka Christophe Hisquin you’d be correct! Nice test tubbing work guys!
A starry-eyed Christophe arrived from France in the year 2000 fresh off the boat and immediately fell in love with the culture while seeing the potential to grow in China. He quickly mastered the language in a matter of hours, picked up his guitar and set to work writing his special brand of acoustic Mandorock. If writing in Mandarin and French was not enough, he added in English songs to create a menage trois of tongues.
His repertoire of French pop with a Chinese (no MSG) twist gained enough momentum to cement him several appearances on televisions across the land. His knack for language learning and quips in the local dialects propelled him even further into the homes of swooning and crooning girls as a host of quite a few TV variety shows. Let’s stop right here for a minute. Is it really that easy to master a foreign tongue, write and perform songs in that language and appear on 1.3 billion television screens all while keeping that trim physique? Yes. Yes it is. Only for Christophe. Not for you. Nor for I.
His three chord song progressions are so versatile that he can don a pair of ripped jeans and a Gallagher bros t-shirt while tearing up the stage at a dive bar one minute and wear Song Dynasty anti-blackface face paint and put on a Beijing Opera version of his songs the next! The supporting musicians he surrounds himself with are just as diverse and include but are not limited to a jazz style trumpet player from Congo, Chinese zitherist, hardcore trippple bass metal drummer, Shanghainese flutist, female pop artist, and list goes on!
As of this publishing date, the trilingual French Mandopop songwriter has five full-length albums including a duo record with fellow Fête de la Musique organizer Eva and many more singles all spanning the 5+ genres of music: pop, rock, Mandopop, Mandorock, Mandopoprock, and more!
In his most recent work, the Lyon-China cultural ambassador writes songs in Mandarin to promote the beautiful city of Brittany and other fantastique locations to Chinese tourists. Legend has it that you can still find him with his loyal guitar singing away at the live houses and TV studios across the land. No amount of covid cases can keep this class-act cooped up!
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