“ Dans le port d’Amsterdam y a des marins qui chantent ...” Yes. No doubt. But the last time I looked Amsterdam was in the Netherlands. And the man who hymned it thus was a Belgian who lived in France.
Ladeez and Jennellmeng: M’sieu Jacques Brel.
“... Les rêves qui les hantent Au large d’Amsterdam”
There are lines in this marvellous singer’s oeuvre which do what all great art should do. They touch not the head, not the heart, but the base of the spine. I am just old enough to remember those days when Brel was in his pomp. I never saw him live. An English friend of mine, now a celebrated novelist and essayist, once went to watch him in Rennes. Oh, lucky man. A Bordelais friend who now lives in Belgium attended about a dozen of his performances. Luckier man.
Me, I make do with video and CDs — oh, and tape, there’s always a Brel tape in my francophone French car. Brel wrote as a maudlin poet, performed as a strenuous vaudevillian. The combination of the two modes is instructive. He kind of asked not to be taken seriously. Or maybe he was apologising for his gravity. Then again, he was agile enough to make himself populist. Ish.
Brel is at the head of the trinity of francophone singers/writers who have, in the words of New York’s greatest singer/writer “walked down life’s lonely highway” with me (Lou Reed, since you ask). I’ve listened to these French singers most of my adult life. Brel supported and championed Monique Serf, whose nom de chanteuse was Barbara. There are few days when I do not play her stuff. She was Jewish, weirdly asexual, and possessed the most beautiful voice I’ve ever heard.
My Bordelais/Belgian friend tried, the other day, to sing her song Nantes (about her father’s death) to me on the phone: this guy has perfect pitch and, indeed, used to be a professional musician. But could he sing Nantes? Regrettably, no.
The basest part of this trinity is Michel Sardou. Given my preoccupation with this man, who was born the same week as I was, I seldom write about him: one piece in this newspaper 16 years ago and asides when I ate in restaurants after his shows. Going to see him in Les Halles Garnier in Lyons a couple of years ago was a delight: every concierge in that city was there, I fell in with Middle France, with what Richard Cobb would have called les petits gens. Sardou sang in un smoking, a dinner jacket with a negligently untied tie. I have never seen a performer hold an audience (2,800 bodies) with such aplomb. But then, I’ve rarely been part of an audience which so much wanted to love the performer.
I’d imagine that Sardou’s record sales in the UK are, per year, in the low hundreds. Barbara’s are non-existent. And Brel’s? Well, no one ever got rich selling French and, on occasion, Flemish lyrics to les Angliches. Brel’s misfortune was not to have spoken the world language of popular song.
Which makes Belgium’s current initiative seem, well, rather wobbly. A brand planner or marketing guru or public relations boffin has dreamt up the wheeze of designating 2003 “The Year of Jacques Brel” in the hope that tourists will flock to Brussels and enjoy, say, the Jacques Brel Sauna Experience.
Some hope.
The converted will already have visited the museum devoted to him, will have done the sites associated with him: I’m so pathetically sad that I’ve even been to his paternal grandparents’ house. The unconverted will remain unconverted. At this juncture it’s incumbent on the writer to make a lame gag about Famous Belgians (Eddie Merckx, René Magritte, Paul Delvaux, Georges Simenon, Johnny Hallyday, Tintin) and to point out that that fissured country has so little going for it that it must clutch at any straw, even one who’s been dead for a quarter of a century.
The desperate paucity of the Brel stratagem is such that one is persuaded to wonder if Belgians have as low an opinion of their country as their neighbours have. I suspect that I should offer my services to these Plucky Little People as a propagandist, for, did they but know it, theirs is a delightfully strange country. Imagine: a place the size of Wales which produces more than 800 beers; which conjures alcool blanc from celeriac; which has a Museum of Underpants; whose cooking is the best in Northern Europe. Etc. It’s also the butt of jokes told by both the French and the Dutch, the very same jokes in two languages. How does a Belgian tie his shoelaces?
Ten years ago I made a film about the place. It was based on the obvious proposition that Magritte was not a surrealist but a reportorial realist who merely observed the quotidian oddities of his country and his compatriots. I spent days trying to think of a title. I translated Brel’s bittersweet anthems to his folk: surely, therein, was a snappy phrase which would sit handsomely...
My producer David Turnbull had a much better idea — just call it “Belgium”. The very word is guaranteed to raise a laugh. Sadly. And efficaciously. We won an audience and some tinpot trophy in France. The French seem to consider Brel as a man who came over to their side, an artist who ridiculed his own country. I’m not so sure. When I was young and very francophile I wanted him to be a satirist, indeed, convinced myself that he was. That’s what I made myself see in him. Nowadays I find him poignant, melancholy, regretful, and peculiarly celebratory of the flat land and the bourgeoisie. He’s still not going to put British bums on Belgian seats, though.
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