Jacques Brel – 10 of the best

1. Quand On N’a Que l’Amour

Jacques Brel’s unshakable faith in his own abilities served him well when all around him were equivocal. Stuck, bored and unfulfilled at the family’s cardboard factory back in Brussels, 24-year-old Brel fled for Paris in September 1953, leaving his wife and young family in Belgium, a temporary arrangement that would remain permanent but for one abortive attempt to relocate them. He signed with Philips in France, though label boss Jacques Canetti was not enamoured by Brel’s physical appearance and unconvinced of his star potential, advising the toothy Belgian to write songs to order for other artists. Living out of the dilapidated Hôtel Idéal, Brel stuck it out, scratching a living playing at theatres split between Montmartre and Montparnasse for the next four years. He finally broke through into the mainstream in 1957 with the plaintive ballad Quand On N’a Que l’Amour, a raw gem swathed in Canetti’s strings, which became a huge hit in France. Though it became an easy listening classic covered in English by such oleaginous heavyweight crooners as Engelbert Humperdinck (If We Only Have Love), this was a foot in the door. Juliette Gréco, who covered his early chanson Le Diable (Ça Va) certainly thought so. “He had eyes like charcoal,” she reflected on first witnessing him at Les Trois Baudets in Pigalle. “He began to sing and I was bedazzled.”

2. Ne Me Quitte Pas

Le Moribond was famously turned into Seasons in the Sun by lyricist Rod McKuen, and recorded to huge success by the Kingston Trio, Terry Jacks and later Westlife. Anyone who’s studied the original lyric about the confessions of a dying man and compared them with the tirelessly cheerful, sing-songy Anglophone version will know it’s less a translation than it is an abomination (“I want them to dance when it’s time to put me in the hole” becomes “We’ll have joy, we’ll have fun, we’ll have seasons in the sun”). Similarly some of the power of Ne Me Quitte Pas is lost in translation, but that never stopped Frank Sinatra, Dusty Springfield, Glen Campbell, Shirley Bassey, Emiliana Torrini, Barbra Streisand, Neil Diamond, Nana Mouskouri and so on, recording it in English. If You Go Away – the English title – is conditional of some future whim from the objet de désir, whereas “do not leave me” – a more accurate translation – is very much an expression of fear of imminent desertion. Brel’s original, inspired by his mistress Zizou, is more cloyingly intense when compared to other variants, almost embarrassingly so at times. Marc Almond, who felt the McKuen lyric wasn’t accurate enough, had it translated again when he recorded his version; he said of the original that it was “a pleading, desperate song – voyeuristic, sexual and sinister”. It may have been recorded hundreds of times in different languages, it may even be Brel’s best known song because of all the versions out there, but nobody sings it more truly than the man who wrote it.

3. Les Flamandes

Brel’s relationship status with Flanders was complicated throughout his career. On the one hand he sang lovingly about the flat country that he considered his in Le Plat Pays and again in Marieke, while on the other hand he poured scorn on the perceived parochialisms of the Flemish. “We have been conquered by everyone, we speak neither pure French nor Dutch, we are nothing,” he said in an interview during the 70s, throwing more oil on the fire. Eyebrows were raised in 1959 when he released the barnstorming Les Flamandes, a rather ribald and derisive music hall number about dancing Flemish women. Brel was unrepentant, 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 having “standoffish” stares and gormless humour, as well as being “Nazis during the war, and Catholics in between”. The “F” is short for flamingants, a pejorative used against Flemish nationalists, which they’ve since adopted as a sobriquet.

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4. Les Bourgeois (Live Olympia 61)

Brel became synonymous with a famous old music hall in Paris in the 60s. Brel played a support slot at l’Olympia in 1958, then headlined in 1961 and 1964, recording two famous albums, both called Olympia. In 1961 he premiered Les Bourgeois, a bawdy waltz written with accordionist Jean Conti, which exposes the hypocrisies of the middle aged and middle class, though he doesn’t exclude himself from the wagging finger. In the first verse, he and his friends Jojo and Pierre get drunk and show their arses as they sing, “the bourgeois are pigs, the older they get, the stupider they become”. By the third verse, the grown-up trio are in the pub disparaging the young punks who “montrent leur derrières”. The crowd reaction on the recording is rapturous, and the song would become a live favourite until he gave up performing. At his final appearance at l’Olympia in 1966, Brel announced to his musicians that he was quitting the live scene forever, after honouring his commitments into the next year. He stayed true to his word.

5. Amsterdam

Brel had two translators of his songs into English, each with their own strengths and certainly plenty of weaknesses, too. He approved of them both, and with Terry Jacks’ Seasons in the Sun selling more than 5m copies in 1974, it’s easy to see why he wasn’t too concerned about how faithful the renditions were. Rod McKuen was first, then came Mort Shuman, who turned Brel’s chansons into the musical revue Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living in Paris, with writer Eric Blau. Shuman also made all of his lyrics available to Scott Walker at Brel’s behest (the two singers never met, but formed a mutual appreciation society nevertheless). Both McKuen and Shuman took on Amsterdam, and which version one prefers is rather down to personal taste; it’s like the old question about which version of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time one should read, and the answer, gallingly enough, is surely the French version. Brel never recorded a studio take of the sordid tale of sailors drinking to the health of the whores of Amsterdam – the best known is his live recording from the Olympia in 1964. McKuen’s Amsterdam, surprisingly more gritty than the Shuman, was recorded by John Denver, while the latter’s was taken on by both Scott Walker and David Bowie. The Bowie version proliferated far and wide as the B-side of Sorrow in 1973, while there’s a theory that people who say they like Jacques Brel often confuse Scott Walker’s version of Jacques Brel with the man himself. The sheer physicality of a Brel performance, the spitting and the sweating and the total commitment, is not for the fainthearted.

6. Le Tango Funèbre

1964 was a good year for Brel: he wrote many of his classics, including Amsterdam, Au Suivant, Matilde and Les Bonbons. Lesser known but no less fantastic is Le Tango Funèbre, another macabre deathbed chanson written with pianist Gérard Jouannest, where the dying subject regards the excitement his impending passing is generating among his prospective heirs and assigns. “They open my closets,” he sings. “They fondle my earthenwares / They go through my drawers / Delighted in advance by my love letters…” In another verse he says it has been deemed “indecent” that he’s “failed to die during the springtime, when one so loves lilacs”. Lyrically it is characteristically pithy, while musically it’s upbeat and almost cartoonish; juxtaposed against the grim subject matter, it makes it all the more a blackly humorous caper.

7. Au Suivant

The songs of Jacques Brel had such an overwhelming impact on Scott Walker – who recorded a glut of them across his first three albums – that many believe Brel was the catalyst that “Europeanised” Walker. Indeed, while there were no Jacques covers on Scott 4, Brel’s influences had clearly penetrated the writing by then, and the journey from easy listening to uneasy listening had begun. Some of Walker’s versions, Jackie (Jacky) and My Death (La Mort), are rich texturally and in many ways more enjoyable, whereas his Next/Au Suivant is more a camp Carry On facsimile held up next to the twitchy and sinisterly comic Brel version. There’s a clip of the Belgian performing the song in 1964 on YouTube complete with English translation, where facially he conveys the terror of losing his virginity aged 20 at a “portable brothel” within his army barracks, awaiting the instruction “next one”. “It wasn’t Waterloo,” he says, “and it wasn’t Arcole either / It was the hour where one regrets having missed school.” The Sensational Alex Harvey Band recorded a version in 1973 that reclaimed the squalor of the sordid scenario. When Harvey cries out “I swear on the wet head of my first case of gonorrhoea!” it’s almost as visceral as the original.

8. La Chanson Des Vieux Amants

Sardonic Brel might have been, but he was also the master of pathos. La Chanson Des Vieux Amants – or “song for old lovers” – reflects on the shared decades past with a partner with melancholic affection. “Of course we’ve had thunderstorms,” goes the first line. “Of course you took a few lovers,” he says candidly in the second verse, “time had to be spent well.” If it all sounds like a very modern, continental kind of arrangement, then the chorus is old-fashioned and touchingly romantic: “But my love, my sweet, my tender, my marvellous love / In the clear light of dawn until the end of the day, I love you still.” Featuring Jouannest’s dramatic piano and a subtly descending minor scale, as well as sweeping orchestra in the chorus, it’s a genuine heartbreaker, whatever language you’re listening to it in. Some of his finest songs were written and recorded for the album 67, and his ninth studio outing also drew a line in the sand. Jacques retired from live work, and his recorded output became sporadic, stuttering to a stop until his final album in 1977. In that 10 years he took on a number of acting roles, learnt to fly, bought a boat and travelled the world, setting up home on the Marquesas Islands in the southern Pacific Ocean with another mistress, Maddly Bamy.

9. La Quête

Brel’s desire to try other things saw him star in a number of films, and he also wrote, directed and starred in the less favourably received Franz and Le Far West in 1971 and 1973 respectively. What many don’t realise is that he also staged a French version of the musical Man of La Mancha, which he’d seen on Broadway while in New York to play a final show at Carnegie Hall in 1967. L’Homme de la Mancha became a labour of love for Brel, who translated all the lyrics, directed the production and played the lead role of Don Quixote himself. Brel’s version of The Impossible Dream (The Quest) takes the platitudinous words and stokes up the intensity virtually to the point of madness, in keeping with the lead’s state of being. In Brel’s hands, a song that borders on trite becomes a frantic, rasping plea of desperation. Much of the footage of a special that went out on French television on Christmas Eve 1968 has been lost, but the lung-busting rendition of the Mitch Leigh and Joe Darion song can now be viewed on YouTube.

10. Voir Un Ami Pleurer

Brel’s hopes that his final album Les Marquises would slip out with little fanfare were somewhat dashed when it shifted 600,000 copies in its first days. The first full studio album in almost a decade – better known simply as Brel – was the hottest ticket in the Francosphere in 1977, fired up by label Barclay’s cunning marketing tactics, Brel’s ongoing reclusivity and rumours of ill health. The final work unsurprisingly deals with themes of death; he’d sung enough about it when he didn’t have terminal lung cancer, so it was surely a given he’d revisit a trusty leitmotif. Jojo, a reflective and tearstained tribute to his old pal, features the line “Six pieds sous terre tu n’es pas mort” (six feet under but you’re not dead), while Voir Un Ami Pleurer (to see a friend cry) is perhaps the most moving of all. “Of course there are wars in Ireland,” he sings in the opening line, following up with everything else that’s 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.