“I wanted people to discover me outside Celine Dion”, confides Nayah, lookalike of the singer

• Nayah’s blind hearing in season 10 of The Voice was broadcast Saturday on TF1.
• Nayah, who represented France at Eurovision 1999, has had a career for twenty years as Celine Dion lookalike.
• The coaches did not look back on his performance. “I took the opportunity to tell them who I really was, that I was proud, happy to have arrived in front of them, to be able to express myself as myself”, declares the artist to 20 Minutes.

–

For once, Celine Dion was too cumbersome for Nayah. The 60-year-old artist, who has made a career for twenty years as a double of the Quebec singer, did not convince the coaches of The Voice to look back on his recovery The Hymn to Love, Saturday. She comes back, for 20 Minutes, on its stake in the TF1 telecrochet.

How did you end up in “The Voice”?

I did the casting. Today I’m a little behind on some things, I’m not 20, so I’m trying to educate myself. My daughters have been fans of this show from the start. They said to me: “You should go to The Voice ! You still do Celine Dion’s voice! ” (she laughs). So I let myself be tempted by the adventure.

You sang Edith Piaf. Did you hesitate to choose a Celine Dion song?

When I started the adventure, the first thing I said was that I wanted people to discover me outside Celine Dion, to know that I have a voice beside me. That was my motivation. Because I still did Eurovision [elle a représenté la France en 1999], self-produced CDs, I also write… I wanted the public not to see a double but a singer.

When you started singing, Amel Bent responded by saying, “Looks like Celine Dion! “. What does that mean to you?

This has been going on for a very long time… A little over thirty years ago, I did a lot of castings and radio hooks and, regularly, this resemblance was mentioned. In 1990, I participated in the final of the Swiss selection– I was living there at the time – for Eurovision. The first headline in The Geneva Tribune said that I was “in the footsteps of Celine Dion” [La chanteuse québécoise avait remporté l’Eurovision pour la Suisse en 1988]. This is where people started to situate me with her. I told myself that she was one of the most beautiful voices in the world, that we should work on and not disappoint. It started off slowly like that.

Coaches praised your vocal abilities, but said they found it difficult to project yourself. It’s frustrating ?

I took the opportunity to tell them who I really was, that I was proud, happy to have arrived in front of them, to be able to express myself as myself. I told them that I had done Eurovision and that they could therefore listen to my “real” voice, without artifice or makeup because, to be Celine Dion, I work my voice, I sing in the nose. You have to make the character. But apart from that I have my little Catalan accent and I have a personality that I like despite everything. I hope that, thanks to this meeting, people will notice me and want to see what I can do. This is also the idea, because there are chances at all levels.

You would like to detach yourself from Celine Dion to start again on a new sequence of your career by making your voice heard?

That’s exactly it: to underline 10,000 times! Even though I’m a bit of a songwriter because I like to share what I feel and the values ​​I defend, I want other people to volunteer to create songs for me, for people to perform for me and I can finally do a Parisian scene. It would be the icing on the cake to meet the Parisian public, which is said to be very difficult.