Songwriter Jacques Brel died 25 years ago this month. As Brussels goes Brel bonkers, Tony Clayton-Lea recalls the life and work of an unlikely star.
In one of those strange quirks of fate that seem to be a byword for longevity in the music industry, the challenging, provocative work of Belgium-born Jacques Brel has been a constant for almost 50 years. Pop and rock acts as diverse as David Bowie, Frank Sinatra, Jack L, Marc Almond, The Seekers, Sting, Scott Walker, Camille O'Sullivan, The Sensational Alex Harvey Band and Nina Simone have covered his songs. Such admiration and fascination look set to continue, although from this month - when his home city of Brussels celebrates the 25th anniversary of his death - it would appear that Brel appreciation will swell to proportions not even his most vociferous of fans would have thought possible.
Starting from March 20th, Brussels goes officially Brel bonkers. There are guides to Brel's artistic footsteps (one can discover a Brussels celebrated in song by Brel, an authentic trail on which the songwriter's bittersweet relationship with his home is outlined); a "talking trail" (concerning his sources of inspiration and his creative processes); screenings of his concerts (including his sensational performance at Paris's Olympia Theatre); more cabaret shows and café-theatre presentations than you can ever visit; a comic strip tribute, and other sundry side projects.
The biggies are the exhibition, Brel: le droit de Rêver (The Right to Dream), at the city's Fondation Internationale Jacques Brel, which guides the visitor through Brel's life, songs, unpublished documents, movie footage and more than 20 years of archived information, and a tribute concert on September 26th, a musical and symphonic event that will be attended by native and international performers and staged at the city centre's grandiose Grand-Place.
All the palaver over celebrating the 25th anniversary of his death seems far removed from Brel the man and his music, both of which were concerned with cold fact, hard reality and swooning passion. As someone who was hardly cut out for it, his ascendancy to something approximating stardom (particularly in a posthumous context) would surely be a source of amusement to him.
Born in 1929 in Schaerbeek, a suburb of Brussels, Brel was reared in quite an austere Catholic family atmosphere in which his burgeoning artistic talents were not fully comprehended. In his mid-teens, he formed his own theatre group and began to write plays, but his creative proclivities impacted on his studies to such an extent that his father - who owned a packaging factory - insisted he leave school and join him in the family business.
This didn't happen, as Brel enrolled for military service in 1948. Not taking to discipline and routine in the way that, perhaps, his parents would have liked, Brel soon left the military and started working with his father.
But this was even worse - routine without camaraderie, discipline with a sense of guilt attached, and the drudgery of bourgeois tradition were the background to his first batch of self-penned songs.
In 1952, he was performing these on the tiny Brussels cabaret circuit and at family events, and while it was quite a shock to his conservative family circle to hear him singing of his visceral anger and outrageous romanticism, for Brel it was the assertion of his right to dream. In 1953, Jacques Canetti, the artistic director of Philips record company, invited Brel to Paris and he immediately accepted, despite threats from his father to cut him off from the family inheritance.
Once in Paris (on his own; his wife and children would follow two years later), Brel doggedly set about trying to forge a career for himself, but was hardly successful. Paris- ian audiences openly mocked his unsophisticated appearance and seemed indifferent to his songs.
By the early 1960s, the tide had turned, and Brel's provincialism had been transformed into a goading sense of universality, his themes touching heightened emotions and frayed nerves in equal proportion.
The 1960s was, perhaps, his golden era, when his work had an effect on the likes of Leonard Cohen, David Bowie and, particularly, Scott Walker, the foremost Brel song interpreter, who committed pop hara-kiri by singing Brel's My Death on BBC's über-light entertainment programme, The Billy Cotton Show. Brel was so impressed by Walker's renditions of his songs that he placed all his work at his disposal.
Teaming up with New York songwriter Mort Shuman, who translated his lyrics into English, Brel quickly became as much fêted in the English-speaking world as in the Flemish and French. Relatively mainstream rock audiences in the 1970s, meanwhile, came to know of Brel vicariously through such cover versions as Bowie's rendition of Amsterdam and Alex Harvey's of Next.
Yet Brel soon tired of many aspects of his star status, especially the arduous touring and its accompanying late night/ early morning drinking bouts. In a shock announcement as early as 1966, he declared his retirement from singing. As it turned out, this was a temporary hiatus, but it paved the way for other avenues of expression, both artistic and personal (films, theatre, travelling on his own aeroplanes and yachts, fripperies he could now well afford).
By 1973, following years of heavy self-abuse through alcohol and cigarettes, Brel knew he was ill. Within five years he would be dead, his early demise finally brought about by lung cancer.
Brel's legacy is his provocative, passionate lyrics (quite a number of his melodies are, alas, less memorable). He was a man all too ready with pithy, some would say violent, poetic put-downs: in Those People, he describes a drunk "who is to be found at dawn at the church snoozing, stiff as a hard-on, pale as an Easter candle", while Next documents a youth's loss of virginity and innocence in a mobile army whorehouse and a subsequent contraction of venereal disease, the youth's "first kiss of gonorrhoea".
Brel's strength, as Scott Walker once said, was in "rarely offering solutions yet stating the confusion so beautifully".
Again, you'd wonder what Brel himself might have had to say about his current level of popularity and all the forthcoming celebrations.
"In a man's life," he once stated simply, "there are two important dates: his birth and his death. Everything we do in between is not very important."
Brel: le droit de Rêver (The Right to Dream) runs from March 22nd throughout 2003. For further information on Brel-related events, contact the Belgian Tourist Office/Brussels-Wallonia at 0044-207-5310390 or the Fondation Internationale Jacques Brel at 0032-2511 1020; or go to www.jacquesbrel.be