"If I were king," Brel himself once said, "I would send all the Flemings to Wallonia and all the Walloons to Flanders for six months. Like military service. They would live with a family and that would solve all our ethnic and linguistic problems very fast. Because everybody's tooth aches in the same way, everybody loves their mother, everybody loves or hates spinach. And those are the things that really count."
Legendary poet, performer, musician, actor, director.
Although it is often thought that Brel is French, his roots are in Belgium. Or, as Arno (who definitely has inherited a lot out of the legacy of Brel) once said in Humo "One thing we mustn't forget : Brel is the biggest singer-songwriter of all times. A wonderful human being : a loner, a brilliant storyteller, an excellent singer, a very good actor. And the energy on stage, and the things he was telling there ... that's pure rock'n'roll. And he was from Belgium, you know. The brightest songwriter of the whole world. We tend to forget that."
Born in the year 1929 in a well-off family in Schaarbeek, Brussels. In between his studies (Saint-Louis), his military service (in Limburg), a marriage, kids and work in a cardboard factory he confines his poetry to paper. Brel feels locked in.
In 1953 he finally takes the gamble : he records a 78-tour with two songs ("La foire" and "Il y a"). The record is discovered in Paris by Jacques Cannetti (the writer and future winner of the Nobel Prize). After a session at the studios of BRT-radio Limburg, he decides to take another gamble : he goes to Paris by train. He performs in cabarets and music-halls, records some music, but stays mostly unnoticed (his aspirations were not so much to become a performer himself, but to write songs for others to perform) until 1957 when the song "Quand on a que l'amour" is discovered.
The themes in his work include friendship (Jef), goes from idolized love to hatred for women (Les Biches), from the belief in God to anticlericalism (Ã mon dernier repas) and from a certain sweetness to a manifest anti-conformism and a horror of hypocrisy (Les Bourgeouis, Le Moribond).
At the end of his life, lung cancer is discovered. In 1974 he has an operation in Brussels. He continues to sing with one lung, one song at a time. The disease gets the upperhand in October 1978. He is buried on the cemetery of Atuone on the island of Hiva-Oa on Tahiti.
The legacy of Brel : some 100 songs, the appearances in his films, the International Brel foundation, films of his live-performances at the Olympia in Paris and the Ancienne Belgique in Brussels that send shivers down your spine.
Brel surely is one of the most covered artists around. Among the interprets of his music are the likes of Scott Walker, Alex Harvey, Neil Diamond, Ray Charles, Frank Sinatra, Petula Clark, Shirley Bassey, David Bowie, Nina Simone, Mark Almond, Arno, Leonard Cohen ...
His talent also widely surpasses the areas of the world where French is spoken : In America for example, Terry Jacks scores a n°1 hit with an adaptation of Le Moribond (Seasons in the sun) and even to this day a "libretto-less" musical tours the country : "Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris".
"Brel's language was universal and the intensity of the performance overflowed the boundary of such a limiting definition as 'singer'." -jazz performer Mike Zwerin
