Buy Me A CoffeeIn search of the my favourite troubadour all roads lead to Flanders, Belgium, then on to France and French Polynesia. There, in the obscure cemetery of Atuona Hiva Oa – alongside the impressionist Paul Gaugin – rests the mortal remains of Jacques Brel.
Aged just forty-seven, Brel had been under a settled expectation of death for some time, as a legendary smoker, and been commuting back and forth to the French mainland to finalise his last album.
Belgiums regularly hail Brel as their greatest fellow citizen in opinion polls. For good reason.
I greatly admire the French chanteuse tradition from Maurice Chevalier to Edith Piaf, and on to Juliette Greco. There’s Serge Gainsbourg too, and the recently deceased Charles Aznavour. Yet I regard Jacque Brel as the culmination of that tradition.
It is the sheer volume of great songs that is most remarkable about Brel, and, unlike Gainsbourg, they translate easily, although they are often traduced.
Thus, Les Moribund (1961) is about the ruminations of a dying man: ‘I want them to dance when it’s time to put me in the hole.’ In the Terry Jack version, however, which sold five million copies this becomes: ‘Goodbye my friend it is time to die when all the birds singing in the sky…. We will have joy, we will have fun, we will have seasons in the sun.’ Westlife even covered it. Yet it is a Brel song translated word-for-word with an identical riff. One can only assume copyright was secured.
David Bowie was a huge fan of Brel, and most notably covered the iconic song Amsterdam (1964), as did Scott Walker who penned an album in English called Walker Sings Brel (1981). Brel was above all a performer. Thus, with sweat dripping and emotional grotesquerie to the fore, nothing in performance art history is quite like his live version of Amsterdam at the Olympia Amsterdam 1964. Ms Abramovich eats your heart out.
Brel did live long enough, through terrible illness, to see worldwide acclaim. Many of his songs were respectfully produced through his involvement in one of the great Broadway musicals. Jacques Brel is alive and well and living in Paris (1968). It is a brilliant and haunting introduction to his songs, and an essential purchase for any music lover.
Brel came from Flanders and chronicles the travails of the Flemish bourgeoisie, often with a full frontal attack, as in Les Flamandes (1958) – equivalent in its power to W. B. Yeats’ great poem September 1913, but also filled with charity, tolerance, and humanism.
The apogee of his love/hate relationship with his homeland is the track Fils de or Sons of (1967), beautifully sung in the Broadway musical by Elly Stone. It is a kind of paean to all God’s children. I consider it one of the greatest songs about human aspiration and failure, jaw-dropping in its simplicity and clarity.
Brel migrated to Paris at the age of twenty-four to work in a cardboard box factory, but was quickly lionised for his musical gifts. There was no fall from grace, as he became the totemic figure in French performance culture, and a national icon both in Belgium and France.
Amsterdam is his most famous, although not in my view, his best song. It’s certainly one of the most disturbing renditions of human debauchery and self-destruction ever written, set in that city of contradictions, lovely and decadent in equal measure. Home to Rembrandt’s Night Watch and The Van Gogh Museum, as well as to the drugs trade and prostitution.
Preferably it should be listened to in tandem with a reading Albert Camus‘ novel The Fall (1956), in which the apostate lawyer confesses his sins to all and sundry in a seedy Amsterdam bar. The lyrics are incandescent. Particularly in French and the song builds to a crescendo.
Finally they drink to the ladies
Who give them their nice bodies
Who give them their virtue
For a golden piece
And when they have well drunk
And pin their nose to the sky
Blowing their nose in the stars
And they piss like I cry
On the unfaithful women
In Amsterdam’s port
In Amsterdam’s port
Many of his songs build in a similar fashion fashion. Tempo is crucial, particularly in my personal favourite La valse à mille temps (1959). Here, Brel is ruminating on a park bench about life and love’s failings beside a giant Ferris wheel. Imagine The London Eye or The Riesenrad in Vienna. As the song unfolds it mimics the rotation of the Ferris wheel and gathers pace. Incredible, or incroyable. I defy anyone to listen to it and not consider it as beautifully a conceived a song as has ever been written! It is as great as one of Shakespeare’s Sonnets or Love Minus Zero (1964) by Bob Dylan or Dance Me to The End of Love (1984) by Leonard Cohen. Greater in in fact.
Brel like all troubadours, was a great romantic chronicler and penned an enormous amount of great love songs. Ne Me Quite Pas (1959) is one great hush. Although some of its power is lost in translation, that never stopped Frank Sinatra, Dusty Springfield, Barbra Streisand, Neil Diamond to name but a few recording it in English as If You Go Away.
The English title is in fact deceptive, and conditional on some future whim from the object of desire, whereas ‘do not leave me’ is very much an expression of fear of imminent desertion.
The other famous plaintive ballad is Quand on n’a que l’Amour (1957) which became an easy listening classic covered in English by Engelbert Humperdinck (If We Only Have Love).
Yet, in my view his greatest song of unrequited love is Madeleine (1962). The Godotesque conceit is incredible, as the protagonist awaits Madeleine, who never arrives, outside a cinema. I believe it influenced Kaurismaki 2023 film Fallen Leaves, and is beautifully sung by Ellie Stone and Mort Shuman in the Broadway production.
Brel’s relationship with Flanders was complicated throughout his career. On the one hand he sang lovingly of his flat country homeland, particularly in the extraordinary love ballad Marieke (1961) about a woman and indeed Flanders, but he also poured scorn on what he perceived to be the parochial nature of the Flemish, much like Flaubert’s dictionary of received ideas (1911) pouring scorn on the French bourgeoisie.
So, consider this interview in which Brel said: ‘We have been conquered by everyone, we speak neither pure French nor Dutch, we are nothing’
Les Flamandes, (1958) is a visceral masterpiece, a ribald and derisive music hall number about dancing Flemish women. Brel was unrepentant about its offensiveness , and on his final 1977 album – when at death’s door – he upped the ante with an even ruder song, Les F…, which accuses the Flemish of being ‘Nazis during the war, and Catholics in between.’
It should be said that some of Scott Walker’s versions, Jackie (Jacky) (1959) and My Death (La Mort) (1965) are richer texturally and in many ways more enjoyable than the Brel versions, but when Walker has to reach for dark humour his Next/Au Savant (1963) does not reach near the mordant and sardonic Brel heights of the version. A song about sexual abuse is also covered by Gavin Friday.
Brel was also an expert in pathos and compassion. Consider the wonderful La Chanson Des Vieux Amants. ‘Of course we’ve had thunderstorms,’ goes the first line. ‘Of course, you took a few lovers,’ And candidly in the second verse, ‘time had to be spent well.’ One is reminded of the great French chanteuse Maurice Chevalier and his old muse in Gigi (1958).
We dined at nine.
Not it was eight.
You were on time.
No, you were late.
Oh yes, I remember it well.
Brel was an incurable romantic and indeed a quixotic figure who staged a French version of the musical Man of La Mancha by Cervantes, translated all the lyrics, directed the production, and played Don Quixote himself. Brel’s version of The Impossible Dream takes the mundane words and stokes up the intensity – not unlike Amsterdam – to the point of madness.
His hopes, as he shuffled off this mortal coil, that his final album would slip out with little fanfare were dashed when it shifted 600,000 copies in its first few days. The generally begrudging French literati welcomed him back in a similar fashion to how they had once welcomed Voltaire before the French Revolution. In both cases death followed shortly thereafter.
Commuting between France and French Polynesia, given the perilous state of his health, was hardly ideal. His final work Brel (1977) unsurprisingly deals with themes of death; he had sung enough about it even before he developed terminal lung cancer,
In JoJo, a reflective and tear-stained tribute to an old friend, features the line: six feet under but you are not dead.
‘Of course there are wars in Ireland,’ he sings in the opening line, following up with everything else that is wrong with the world, ‘but to see a friend cry…’ he offers at the end of each verse, as if unable to finish the sentence himself through emotion.
Well know there are wars going on everywhere, but to see a friend cry, a lover depart, someone who fails to meet you outside the cinema, that is the human condition. The focus is on the particular, not the general. He is ever the humanist.
The songs are so incredible lyrically and musically only Dylan with almost four decades more longevity or arguably Paul McCartney or Cole Porter has written as many great songs in the history of popular music. In my view, he is the greatest troubadour of the 20th century, and the Belgians know it.
Feature Image: Jacques Brel in 1962 by Jack de Nijs for Anefo
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