Time for a Hallyday – finally.

It’s official. A dinosaur of the French music scene is knackered. The 64-year-old Johnny Hallyday is finally packing away his vocal chords and retiring.

But hang about – not so fast. He’s apparently not quite finished and certainly ain’t going out without a bang.

Jean-Philippe Smet – to give him his full name – announced his retirement plans on Sunday’s evening news. And what plans – a farewell tour with the kick off at Stade de France (maximum capacity 80,000 people) in May – 2009!

That should leave plenty of time for the release of yet another album (or more perhaps) to follow the success of his latest one “Le couer d’un homme”, which is currently topping the charts.

And tonight there’ll be a general love-fest as Johnny, along with buddies galore, celebrates more than 40 years of rocking the nation with a two-hour prime time special dedicated solely to his music.

So what makes this ageing crooner (whose father was Belgian) such an icon of the French music scene? Well to begin with he has a powerhouse of a voice and can still belt out a tune.

Simply put, he was from the start of his career France’s answer to Elvis and hit the big time in the early 60s as the first rock n’ roller to sing in French.

Since then the statistics speak for themselves. Over the decades he has notched up 400 tours, performing in front of 15 million people had 18 platinum albums and sold more than 100 million records.

Mind you professional success has come at a price. His personal life has rarely been out of the headlines. In the mid 60s he married Sylvie Vartan – another mainstay of the French music scene - and the two were the Golden Couple of their generation until they divorced in 1980.

His second marriage in 1981 to model Babeth Etienne lasted barely two months and then there was a highly publicised four-year affair with the actress Nathalie Baye. A two-year marriage to Adeline Blondiau in the early 90s was followed by a fourth tying of the knot at the age of 53 in 1996 to the 21-year-old Laetitia Boudou.

All those years of touring and record sales have of course boosted his coffers to an estimated princely personal annual income of than more than €6 million. But such riches are heavily taxed here in France and Hallyday caused a storm of publicity last year when he upped sticks and moved his official residence to the Swiss millionaires resort of Gstaad.

So far not even the election of his close friend Nicolas Sarkozy as president or the recent drop in the level of French wealth tax have tempted him to return.

His fiscal flight and attempts to seek Belgian nationality (now abandoned) might have disappointed his legions of fans, but there’s no denying he has maintained his popularity.

Over 40,000 tickets for the opening dates of his 2009 concerts were scooped up when they went on sale yesterday.

The tour should be a fitting climax to the career of an ageing rocker, whose concert at the foot of the Eiffel Tower in June 2000 (in front of 800,000 fans and 10 million television viewers) rated as one of the most spectacular music events ever in France,

Johnny deserves his retirement.