Eddy de Pretto is now 27, and these days he sings on some of the largest stages in France — or he did, when the stages were open.
When he was 21, he performed for a smaller audience: the tourists on the bateaux-mouches, the Paris sightseeing cruises that ply millions of people up and down the Seine. “It was a pretty crazy job.
I was on the singing cruises, the ones where they serve you dinner,” de Pretto said in a recent video interview from Paris. From the little stage in the boat’s dining room, he recalled, he’d serenade tourists with syrupy Charles Trenet standards, to total indifference. “They were eating, looking out at the Eiffel Tower.