You don't know Jacques

Published on Thursday 2 October 2008 15:24

Many singers have covered him, yet few have grasped that Jacques Brel's angst was shot through with a wry wit, says BRIAN MORTON

MIGHT IT BE TIME TO START PROTECTING Jacques Brel from his admirers? Thirty years after his death, the great Belgian is, along with Nick Drake, the most safely name-checkable of modern songwriters. They've all "done" him: David Bowie, Marc Almond, Scott Walker, The Divine Comedy, Barb Jungr; Camille O'Sullivan, even Alastair Campbell recently jumped on the bandwagon, with a Radio 4 documentary called, gulp, Brel et Moi.

How I sneered at that spurious, unidiomatic cap "M"; how delightedly I prepared to trump his story of hearing of Brel's death while hitch-hiking in France and having to comfort a distraught Walloon lorry driver. Thanks to an indulgent family and a mildly obsessed father, I saw Brel in one of his final performances. The problem is, I don't remember very much about it, and not much musically at all except that I'd never heard "rrr" and "zzh" sounds quite like those before.

What I remember most of all is an audience who seemed to be in a kind of rapture. I also remember that Brel, who is supposed never to have spoken during his concerts, got up at one moment and took his jacket off, muttering "Ca chauffe, hein?" into the mic as he sat down for another song. It was hot, almost unbearably so, and Brel was soaked in sweat. This, more than anything, is what made the experience seem so un-British and exotic. This was at a time when the BBC still received complaints about Louis Armstrong mopping the perspiration from his brow between songs with that big old white handkerchief.

This is the first thing that separates him from his admirers, the first aspect they get flagrantly wrong. Most of the Anglophone singers who've taken on the Brel songbook deliver those great songs with a languid world-weariness, and the kind of stillness that lets the Gauloise ash grow to three inches before falling. Brel was an artisan before he was an artist, though. Those songs were hewn from rough slabs of life-experience, not simply dashed off and dropped into their setting like Wildean throwaways.

The analogy doesn't quite chime because Brel's working life actually began with more flimsy material. His first job was in his father's cardboard factory on the fringes of Brussels. Brel was born in the Schaarbeek district – known as the "city of donkeys", and Ren Magritte is buried there – on 8 April 1929. Brel later said that birth and death were the only two things of importance. The rest he regarded as filling in time. The family was French-speaking, but of Flemish descent. The young Jacques quickly showed an interest in singing and acting and joined a liberal-Catholic youth club circle called Franche Corde where he met his future wife Thrse Michelsen. He married "Miche" when he was 21 and led her a dance for the rest of his life.

There was a markedly philosophical cast to the early songs which never entirely went away. It reflected strongly the ethos of Franche Corde, and it's just another of the things his admirers have overlooked: his commitment to rationality and interest in left-liberal politics. Though never politically active, Brel never lost interest in current affairs – and that doesn't mean the string of beautiful women who shared his bed. Once ensconced in Paris in 1954, he became nostalgic for the Flemish countryside, but poured scorn on Flemish nationalism, which seemed to him uncomfortably close to National Socialism. It's easy to forget that Jacques Brel, like his fellow Belgian Django Reinhardt, survived the Second World War, and though the circumstances of his survival were less dramatic than the gypsy guitarist (who was saved from the ovens by a jazz-loving Luftwaffe officer), it coloured his thinking profoundly.

It is now 40 years since the Mort Shuman and Eric Blau revue Jacques Brel Is Alive And Well And Living In Paris (he was, though he'd given up stage performance two years previously) was premiered on Broadway. Arguably, it brought Brel to a larger audience – most of the English versions of his songs are taken from the Shuman/Blau versions – but it also started the process of internationalising them, softening them to some degree, and also, perversely, turning Brel into a cartoon existentialist. One of the simplest examples is Les Flamandes, a wry look at his countrymen rewritten for the revue as Marathon, a much less nuanced celebration of 20th-century Americanism.

It's inevitable that his greatest song should have had the greatest indignities rained upon it. Ne me quitte pas was addressed to his lover, Suzanne Gabriello, who had acted as MC at the Paris Olympia and fostered his fame. In the event, it was Brel who left her, going back to Miche one more time, but the power of the song isn't diminished by the more than hypothetical hypocrisy. It has been covered by everyone from Nana Mouskouri and Nina Simone, to Rod McKuen and Sting. It was McKuen's version, ironically, which helped launch Brel's reputation in the English-speaking world, but what a deadening hand he laid on it! In Brel's version, it's impossible not to hear a man who knows he's done wrong but who's going through with the big performance anyway; its hypocrisy doesn't compromise its power – it is its power. McKuen reduces it to a mournful, half-spoken croak, and even manages to strip the lyrics of their poetry and their ambiguity. The pearls of rain from the country where rain never falls – here's a guy who promises the impossible – are no longer mentioned; "sincerity" ruins the song.

Others have fared better, but too many of Brel's British and American fans hear him only through the filter created by Bowie and Walker. Of the two, Bowie's music-hall approach to Amsterdam and Ma mort is actually the more authentic. Walker, whose own Scott 2, 3 and – particularly – 4 are deeply influenced by Brel, is largely responsible for the impression that Brel is a gloomy nihilist, suicidal, self-pitying, the kind of bedsit singer who makes Leonard Cohen sound like Cliff Richard. This is nonsense, or rather it's Walker rather than Brel, and magnificent in its own limited way. Translation, depoliticisation and steady bowdlerisation has tended to strip away one of the qualities that defines Brel and makes him unique: his sense of humour. Ironically, almost the only English-speaking artist who has recognised this side of him is comedian Mel Smith, who wrote yet another show based on Brel's work about ten years ago, despite not speaking French.

Though his musical background is unrelated, closer to Flemish and French folk forms, political and religious songs, Brel's humour is the humour of the blues. It deals with dark topics, but the performance is light and transcends despair. The bluesman's triumph is that he's able to sing about bad times. Beaten men don't sing. Nihilists generally don't bother, either.

In the most perverse way, the greatest act of vandalism ever inflicted on the Brel canon might actually take you closer to the heart of the music than the most hand-wrenchingly anguished interpretation. In 1974, four years before Brel's death, the Canadian singer Terry Jacks had a worldwide hit with Seasons In The Sun, an unbelievably anodyne interpretation of Le Moribond. It completely missed, by several astronomical units, the mordancy and bitterness of the original, but its very banality – "We had joy, we had fun / We had seasons in the sun" – was closer, surely, to Brel's here-and-now philosophy than the public throat-slitting we associate with Brel covers.

Marc Almond, bless his heart, almost gets it, because Almond is too upbeat a character and too smart a reader of a lyric to miss the point that there's a sardonic laugh in these songs. And it took a Scotsman to get the balance of savagery and pathos in Au suivant just right. Alex Harvey's interpretation of Next is, well, sensational. The mobile army whorehouse, the case of gonorrhoea, the skimpy towel, the queer lieutenant – it's Leslie Thomas with a Flemish accent (spookily, a young David Bowie appeared on screen in Virgin Soldiers). What clinches it is that pungently poignant and defiant final stanza, which ends: "Anything, I'll do anything / To get out of line, to survive / Not ever to be next / Not ever to be next".

For a dozen years, between 1954 and 1966, Brel was a major star. It's an astonishingly brief public career, given his influence. He did continue to appear in films for a time, but he seemed uninterested in posterity, indeed, almost hostile to the concept. Unless the story is a complete bas canard, he voiced one of the tin robots in the infamous Cadbury's Smash adverts. In 1973, he set off to sail round the world, but decided to settle in the Marquesas in French Polynesia. He came back to Paris, presumably already ill, to record his final album, Les Marquises, but died there in October 1978. Paris-Match ran a picture of him, shrunken in his coffin, but had to withdraw the issue. He was taken back to Hiva Oa and buried in the Cimetire Calvaire on Atuona, a stone's throw from the grave of another "Frenchman" who'd turned away from bourgeois life, Paul Gauguin. Brel's season in the sun has been unbroken ever since.