French rocker Johnny Hallyday, a legend in his homeland, was being treated Monday in a Caribbean hospital after being rushed there by helicopter, his producer and reports said.

He was treated for a case of “persistent bronchitis” and will leave hospital imminently, said producer Gilbert Coullier, while a source in the hospital said the 69-year-old was being treated in the intensive care unit.

Coullier denied in a statement reports that the quiffed, leather-clad singer had suffered heart problems.

The latest incident came two and a half years after a health scare in Los Angeles that nearly killed the star, who is his country’s top rocker but who has never been taken seriously abroad.

French radio said he was holidaying on the French Caribbean island of Saint Barthelemy, a millionaires’ playground where he owns a house, when on Saturday he had a bout of tachycardia, or abnormally fast heartbeat.

The singer was taken by helicopter to Pointe-a-Pitre in Guadeloupe, a nearby French Caribbean island, the radio said, adding that his young wife Laeticia and other members of his family were with him in the hospital there.

The star’s son David Hallyday said on his Twitter account that regarding his father’s health, “the news is good and that reassures us enormously”.

Hallyday, who last year had his artificial hip replaced, had emergency surgery and was put into an induced coma in late 2009 after falling ill on a flight to Los Angeles from Paris, where he had a hernia operation days before.

He attempted suicide in 1966, collapsed on stage in 1986 and married five times, twice to the same woman. In a 1998 interview he admitted taking cocaine and suffering a difficult childhood with an alcoholic father.

Though little known and sometimes ridiculed abroad, Hallyday has sold more than 100 million albums and played 45 major tours in a career that began in the 1960s. He is currently in the middle of another major tour.

Despite being a French national icon, Hallyday moved to Switzerland in 2007, becoming a symbol of an exodus of high-earners fleeing France’s relatively high tax rates to neighbouring jurisdictions.

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