Jacques Brel - immortal troubadour

Jacques Brel would have been 80 this year. To all fans and admirers of this unique singer-songwriter, this will be an extraordinarily poignant thought, following hard on last year’s even sadder anniversary, marking 30 years since his early death from lung cancer. But like James Dean, John Lennon and now Michael Jackson, Brel needed to die young (he was 49) in order to fulfil his mythic immortality – a status enhanced by his final resting place on the Polynesian island of Hiva Oa, a few yards from the grave of another South Sea exile, Paul Gauguin.

“My father would have hated to be really old,” his daughter France said when I met her in Brussels at the offices of Editions Brel, the organisation she established to manage his royalties and promote his image. “He used to sign postcards to me 'the old man’ and even then, when he was only in his forties, it wasn’t a joke.”

Brel’s extraordinary gifts will be celebrated in two nights of tributes and performances next week in London and Warwick, but to understand Brel you should visit YouTube, where you can call up grainy film of him performing Amsterdam, a hymn to the sailors and whores of the city’s waterfront. Framed by a spotlight, horse-faced yet powerfully handsome in a cool black suit, he is no smooth nightclub crooner.

There’s something frighteningly raw and unguarded about his style: his intensity makes him more like a rapper, declaiming his verse within a frame of rhythm and melody, than a singer singing a song. His delivery is razor-sharp, every syllable crisply enunciated. Like Edith Piaf, he seems to be ripping himself open with emotion: in the course of his hour-long set, he was said to sweat away two pounds of body weight.

Brel stands in a line that stretches back to the medieval troubadours through Aristide Bruant, the melancholy cabaret satirist of Toulouse-Lautrec’s Montmartre, to his older, more mellow contemporaries George Brassens and Charles Trenet. Compared to them, Brel was the arch-romantic – young and scratchy, feverish and tender, constantly hovering between laughter and tears.

In his memoir Something to Declare, Julian Barnes confesses his youthful passion for Brel’s art, vividly describing him as someone who “gleefully spanked the bourgeoisie, lobbed grenades at the military, wrangled doggedly with God and sang about death with a vibrant terror”. Brel was France’s angry young man. A lapsed Catholic, he lost his faith, but not his fierce morality. Politics disgusted him, but he was bursting with compassion. He was a rebel with a cause, and that cause was life.

Brel wrote some 150 songs, almost all in French. But he was Belgian by nationality, born to a middle-class francophone family of Flemish descent, and although his attitude to his native country was ambiguous to say the least – he thought it smug, small-minded and ugly – he has remained a Belgian icon, rivalled in national affection and pride only by Tintin and Simenon.

A childhood dominated by the Depression and German Occupation made him determined to escape. In the early Fifties, he abandoned a job in his father’s cardboard factory, along with his wife and baby daughters, to try his luck as a singer in Paris. Success came slowly, and he remained restless, returning periodically to Belgium and bringing his family to Paris and then sending them back to Brussels again.

It wasn’t an easy childhood, but France bears him no grudge. “Was he a good father? What does that mean? In those days, people did not pay that much attention to their children, and he was absent a lot of the time. He wasn’t particularly affectionate either. In a sense, 'fatherhood’ didn’t exist for him. But I always sensed he was someone exceptional, and if a good father is someone who shows you the way ahead and makes you believe that anything was possible, then he was a very good father,” she says.

“He wasn’t someone you could argue with or make demands of. All you could do was wait in silence. But I felt I knew my father very well. When I saw him on stage, I felt that I was inside him – I saw the real man behind the costume. That’s why I established Editions Brel, because I felt that I was the only one who knew the truth, and it was my duty to communicate it.”

By the early Sixties, Brel had become famous throughout Europe, topping the bill at the Olympia, Paris’s equivalent of the London Palladium, and topping the record charts. In 1967, fed up and exhausted by the pressures, he suddenly announced that he would give no more live solo concerts.

Subsequently he became something of an adventurer, learning to fly his own plane and embarking on a plan to sail a yacht around the world. When his illness slowed him down, he retreated to Hiva Oa with Maddly Bamy, the last of his many mistresses, returning to Paris in 1977 to record one last album before his death. Even his most ardent fans agree that it wasn’t one of his best.

Bamy is still alive, but has vanished from public view. France pooh-poohs her autobiography, which she thinks exaggerates the depth of her relationship with Brel. “If he hadn’t got sick and needed a nurse, I don’t think anyone would remember this lady,” she says bluntly. Brel’s wife Miche, with whom he remained on good terms, is also alive and active at 82. But it is France who is keeper of the flame.

“The myth of Brel is very powerful. People feel this great emotional intimacy with him, without quite knowing why. He’s not just an artist to his fans, he is someone who embodies moral values, too. But the real Brel wasn’t the tortured man they think he was. He was very disciplined, very focused on his work, physically active. He lived in the present. His fame never interested him and posterity didn’t interest him either.” This je m’en fous (I don’t give a damn) attitude extended to the remarkable explosion of interest in his work during the Seventies in the United States and Britain (where he performed live only once, in the Albert Hall, without great success). The ball began rolling in 1968 when “Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris”, a revue devised by Mort Shuman, became a big Broadway hit and started a vogue for Brel’s songs in English. The list of singers who went on to cover Brel numbers is staggering.

Brel was indifferent to this extension of his fame. “If someone else sang his song, it became theirs, it wasn’t his any more,” says France, who prefers not to comment on individual interpretations (though she admits she loves Scott Walker’s take). The forthcoming birthday concert at the Barbican and Warwick Arts Centre will present some of the best of the current crop, Camille O’Sullivan, Marc Almond, Arno and Diamandas Galas among them.

Jacques Brel may be long dead, but his musical poetry is indeed alive and well.

'Carousel: The Songs of Jacques Brel’, Barbican Centre, E1 (0845 120 7500), October 22 and Warwick Arts Centre (024 7652 4524), October 23. Film of Brel will be shown in a live revue 'Jacques Brel: Music Hall Master’, Wilton’s Music Hall, E1 (0845 120 7500), October 29