Jacques Brel c'est moi

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Musical epiphany: Marc Almond was introduced to Brel at 16 when he heard Bowie’s cover of the Belgian’s Amsterdam on the B-side of Sorrow

Inspiration: Brel in concert

Marc Almond experienced his musical epiphany in 1973, at the age of 16. He bought a copy of the single Sorrow by David Bowie and, flipping it over, discovered a song called Amsterdam on the B-side.

“Bowie was singing about rowdy sailors, fish-heads and whores, and getting drunk in the filthy port of Amsterdam,” enthuses Almond in his living room in a terraced house in Bermondsey (collages of Jean Genet are propped on a fireplace; a parrot keeps whistling).

“He was using this guttural language that I'd never heard in a song before, having been a teenager in provincial northern Britain. And I realised it wasn't a Bowie song — it was by someone called Jacques Brel.”

In the French-speaking world, Brel, who attained fame in the late Fifties and died of cancer in 1978, is one of the greats; a sort of morbid, Left Bank Sinatra. His melodies are as familiar as Yellow Submarine, his words published as poetry.

By contrast, in Britain, where French, let alone Belgian singers (as Brel proudly was), are a hard sell, he remains a cult artist, still bracingly strange on first listen. Many of the translations of his songs that have become standards excise this strangeness, which can lead to them ending up in some pretty odd places (such as the vile musical Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living in Paris).

However, for musicians alive to their depths, the songs strike with the force of a revelation. Almond is at the forefront of admirers who will perform a tribute concert at the Barbican later this month, attempting to convey that uniqueness to a new audience.

After Almond suffered a near-fatal motorcycle accident in 2004, he made a rapturously received comeback with a set of charismatically, humanely realised torch songs, drawing largely on Brel's repetoire. In his recent career, he has devoted his energies to promoting little-known European songwriters to English audiences — his most recent project is a wonderful album, Orpheus in Exile, devoted to the gay Soviet singer, Vadim Kozin — but it is Brel who has always formed the primary inspiration.

With Soft Cell, the band that made Almond famous, he says he was attempting to write “chanson with an electro beat”. As a solo artist, he has been performing Brel's songs live since 1982 and cut a whole album of his covers in 1989.

“As I get older I sing them better as I have more life to bring to them,” he says. Certainly his accident adds a fresh chill to his version of My Death, another Brel song that Bowie covered, which contains the line: “My death waits like a bible truth/At the funeral of my youth”. “You so rarely hear people singing about death in such a romantic way,” Almond beams.

Trying to pin down what makes the songs unique, Almond says: “He's lyrical without being whimsical and emotive without being camp or theatrical. His songs are celebrations of life and love and bitterness and the gutter and death — he brings all these emotions together without being cloying.

“If you're a singer who refers to songbooks and the work of other composers, while there's something very cosy and nostalgic about, say, Cole Porter's songs, Brel always manages to remain relevant and fresh.”

Of Almond's fellow interpreters, he most admires those who use Brel's theatrical mask to convey their own life experience. He raves about Camille O'Sullivan, a young cabaret artist who will share the Barbican stage and does a delightful version of Marieke, Brel's Flemish love song. In general, he prefers his Brelians female.

“He does seem to be the darling of the old broads,” he smiles. “They instinctively understand the intensity of his emotion. Liza Minnelli did an amazing version of Carousel [La Valse à Mille Temps] — a study in how to deliver a song. And the best version of If You Go Away [Ne Me Quitte Pas, Brel's most famous song] I ever saw was done by Juliette Gréco, who sings it in a very fast, pleading, desperate way and gets it all done in two minutes.”

He is amused by the prospect of Barbra Streisand singing Brel — for her new single, she too has recorded a version of Ne Me Quitte Pas.

“I'm sure she won't be singing I want to hide in your room, be the shadow of your shadow, the shadow of your dog',” he says — for this is how the original French words run. Her reading in fact opts for Rod McKuen's standard mistranslation, If You Go Away, which sweetens the original's despair. (When Almond performs the song, he does so in a more faithful translation, turning it into a “three-act opera, ending up all creepy and desperate”.)

For the Barbican concert, Almond plans to sing I'm Coming [J'Arrive], another death song, which he'll naturally play up for double-entendres, and Carousel: “I'm really nervous that I don't veer into West End-iness while I'm doing it!”

It is to Brel's own performances that he returns for inspiration. There are many captured on YouTube — Brel typically stands in an unforgiving spotlight on a bare stage with his orchestra concealed behind a curtain, dressed in a black suit, drenched in sweat and possessed by the characters he portrays.

“His whole persona is very modern,” says Almond. “Those pencil-sharp suits, the quiff, the goofy smile, that attractiveness that he has, it's all so very fresh and contemporary. He's very pre-punk in the way he's so raw and very visceral, and emotive and intense but without being flamboyant. You don't have to have the
English translations or to know French to understand what he's singing about.”

Carousel: The Songs of Jacques Brel is at the Barbican (0845 120 7550; www.barbican.org) on 22 October. Orpheus in Exile is available now. Almond plays a solo show at the Roundhouse (0871 2200 260; www.gigsandtours.com) on 1 November.

 

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