Johnny Hallyday set for Albert Hall gig

'French Elvis' rock'n'roller to play inaugural UK concert more than 50 years after his first hit single
Johnny Hallyday set to play Royal Albert Hall
Johnny Hallyday performs at the Beacon Theatre in New York this month. Photograph: Emmanuel Dunand/AFP/Getty Images

He has returned from the dead so many times in recent years that seeing him alive and breathing on stage in his trademark black leather trousers is surely akin to a religious experience. But Johnny Hallyday, the ageing French Elvis, who recently narrowly avoided yet another round of the French media's last rites when he was hospitalised for bronchitis following a back operation that went wrong and cancer rumours, is now to prove he is "fine" with a symbolic first UK gig, at the Albert Hall, next week.

Hallyday, the US-style French-language rocker who has sold more than 100m albums and played live to 28 million people, has always made a joke of his record labels not pushing him on to the US and UK markets. So it is fitting that as he at last makes it to London 52 years after his first hit single, to a gig expected to be dominated by the city's sizeable French ex-pat community, he has become more than just a pop star but both a national treasure and eternal whipping boy scrutinised for every political and tax move.

Hallyday's visit comes just as the London mayor Boris Johnson raised eyebrows in France by describing François Hollande's tax rises for the rich as "tyranny", saying he welcomed "talented French" escaping to London: "We say to the people of France, not since 1789 has there been such a terror."

Hallyday, famous for his close friendship with the former rightwing president Nicolas Sarkozy who he supported in 2007, for years symbolised the exodus of high-earners escaping the French tax system. Although London was never his choice of destination, in 2007 he based himself in Switzerland for tax purposes, but much of his earnings come from the French market and are still subject to tax there. Questioned by journalists after a Los Angeles gig over a "massive" tax bill this spring, Hallyday refused to comment. The French actor Christian Clavier, also close to Sarkozy, recently moved to London to escape "attacks" and criticism over his friendship with the ex-president although, his entourage stressed, not for tax reasons.

Hallyday, 69, has been keen to avoid all references to politics in the run-up to the tour. At Fouquet's restaurant in Paris, where Sarkozy held a much criticised party with millionaire friends after his 2007 election, Hallyday, wearing his uniform black and skulls and crucifixes, told the Guardian prior to the UK gig: "I don't do politics, it's not my job. I look at the man, I don't look at the party.

"What I want is the president who's going to do the most good for France. Right or left, I don't care. He [Sarkozy] was a friend of mine for a long time … It can't be easy to be president, even when he tried to do things, there was always a spoke in the wheel, whether from opposite parties or elsewhere. He has tried to do a lot of good things, he's an intelligent man, he's a man who loves his country."

In January, Hallyday and other singers reportedly had dinner with the-then Socialist candidate Hollande.

Hallyday, who regularly features on French celebrity magazine front pages, said he spends most of his time in Los Angeles "because it's the only place I can push a trolley round a supermarket".

He said there was a role for entertainment in times of crisis. His new album would be "full of love" because "people need love at the moment. In a crisis, they aren't happy. There's unemployment, homelessness, people with not enough to pay for food."

Hallyday briefly lived in London as a child, when his family, artists and dancers, were working there. He said he had often recorded in London. "I was very good friends with Jimi Hendrix, I knew Mick Jagger, John Lennon. Rod Stewart is a friend. We'd all record in the different studios and meet for tea."

Whatever the superlatives about the Albert Hall gigs on 15 and 16 October, Hallyday surely cannot beat Sarkozy's comment on the crowds queuing outside his own London election campaign rally in 2007: "They haven't seen the like of this since the Beatles."