An Old Fashioned Love Song Jacques Brel
1. Quand On N'a Que l'Amour
Jacques Brel'southward unshakable faith in his own abilities served him well when all around him were equivocal. Stuck, bored and unfulfilled at the family's paper-thin factory back in Brussels, 24-year-former Brel fled for Paris in September 1953, leaving his wife and immature family unit in Belgium, a temporary system that would remain permanent but for one bootless effort to relocate them. He signed with Philips in France, though label boss Jacques Canetti was non enamoured past Brel's physical appearance and unconvinced of his star potential, advising the toothy Belgian to write songs to club for other artists. Living out of the dilapidated Hôtel Idéal, Brel stuck information technology 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 carol Quand On Northward'a Que 50'Amour, a raw gem swathed in Canetti'south strings, which became a huge hit in France. Though information technology became an piece of cake listening classic covered in English past such oleaginous heavyweight crooners equally Engelbert Humperdinck (If We Just Have Dearest), this was a foot in the door. Juliette Gréco, who covered his early on chanson Le Diable (Ça Va) certainly thought so. "He had eyes like charcoal," she reflected on get-go 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'south time to put me in the hole" becomes "Nosotros'll take joy, nosotros'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 information technology in English. If You Go Abroad – the English championship – is conditional of some future whim from the objet de désir, whereas "practice not leave me" – a more accurate translation – is very much an expression of fear of imminent desertion. Brel's original, inspired past his mistress Zizou, is more than cloyingly intense when compared to other variants, nigh embarrassingly and then 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, drastic vocal – voyeuristic, sexual and sinister". It may take been recorded hundreds of times in different languages, it may even be Brel'due south best known vocal because of all the versions out there, but nobody sings it more than truly than the homo who wrote it.
3. Les Flamandes
Brel's human relationship status with Flemish region was complicated throughout his career. On the ane mitt he sang lovingly nigh the apartment land 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 past everyone, we speak neither pure French nor Dutch, we are goose egg," 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 sense of humour, besides equally being "Nazis during the state of war, and Catholics in betwixt". The "F" is short for flamingants, a pejorative used against Flemish nationalists, which they've since adopted as a sobriquet.
4. Les Conservative (Live Olympia 61)
Brel became synonymous with a famous quondam 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 offset 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 go". By the tertiary verse, the grown-up trio are in the pub disparaging the young punks who "montrent leur derrières". The oversupply reaction on the recording is rapturous, and the song would become a alive favourite until he gave up performing. At his final appearance at fifty'Olympia in 1966, Brel announced to his musicians that he was quitting the alive scene forever, afterward honouring his commitments into the next twelvemonth. He stayed true to his word.
v. 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 virtually how true-blue the renditions were. Rod McKuen was offset, then came Mort Shuman, who turned Brel's chansons into the musical revue Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living in Paris, with author Eric Blau. Shuman also made all of his lyrics bachelor 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 erstwhile question about which version of Proust'due south In Search of Lost Time one should read, and the reply, gallingly plenty, 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 misfile Scott Walker'southward 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 bailiwick 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 some other verse he says it has been accounted "indecent" that he's "failed to dice during the springtime, when one and then loves lilacs". Lyrically it is characteristically pithy, while musically information technology's upbeat and almost cartoonish; juxtaposed against the grim subject matter, information technology makes it all the more a blackly humorous caper.
vii. Au Suivant
The songs of Jacques Brel had such an overwhelming affect on Scott Walker – who recorded a glut of them across his first iii albums – that many believe Brel was the goad that "Europeanised" Walker. Indeed, while there were no Jacques covers on Scott 4, Brel's influences had clearly penetrated the writing past then, and the journeying from like shooting fish in a barrel listening to uneasy listening had begun. Some of Walker'southward versions, Jackie (Jacky) and My Death (La Mort), are rich texturally and in many means more enjoyable, whereas his Next/Au Suivant is more a military camp Conduct On facsimile held up next to the twitchy and sinisterly comic Brel version. There's a clip of the Belgian performing the vocal in 1964 on YouTube complete with English translation, where facially he conveys the terror of losing his virginity anile 20 at a "portable brothel" within his ground forces barracks, awaiting the education "next one". "It wasn't Waterloo," he says, "and it wasn't Arcole either / It was the hour where 1 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 showtime case of gonorrhoea!" it'south almost as visceral as the original.
8. La Chanson Des Vieux Amants
Sardonic Brel might have been, simply he was also the master of pathos. La Chanson Des Vieux Amants – or "song for former lovers" – reflects on the shared decades past with a partner with melancholic affection. "Of course we've had thunderstorms," goes the offset line. "Of class you lot took a few lovers," he says candidly in the 2nd poesy, "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 beloved you however." Featuring Jouannest's dramatic pianoforte and a subtly descending minor scale, too as sweeping orchestra in the chorus, it'due south 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 too drew a line in the sand. Jacques retired from live piece of work, and his recorded output became desultory, stuttering to a terminate until his concluding album in 1977. In that 10 years he took on a number of acting roles, learnt to wing, bought a gunkhole and travelled the earth, setting upward home on the Marquesas Islands in the southern Pacific Bounding main with some other mistress, Maddly Bamy.
9. La Quête
Brel's desire to endeavor other things saw him star in a number of films, and he too wrote, directed and starred in the less favourably received Franz and Le Far Westward in 1971 and 1973 respectively. What many don't realise is that he too 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 evidence at Carnegie Hall in 1967. L'Homme de la Mancha became a labour of love for Brel, who translated all the lyrics, directed the product and played the lead part of Don Quixote himself. Brel's version of The Incommunicable Dream (The Quest) takes the platitudinous words and stokes upwardly the intensity virtually to the point of madness, in keeping with the pb's land 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, simply the lung-busting rendition of the Mitch Leigh and Joe Darion song can now be viewed on YouTube.
ten. Voir Un Ami Pleurer
Brel's hopes that his final album Les Marquises would slip out with little fanfare were somewhat dashed when information technology shifted 600,000 copies in its commencement days. The showtime full studio album in most a decade – meliorate known simply as Brel – was the hottest ticket in the Francosphere in 1977, fired up by characterization Barclay'southward cunning marketing tactics, Brel'southward ongoing reclusivity and rumours of ill health. The final work unsurprisingly deals with themes of decease; he'd sung enough virtually it when he didn't take 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 "Half-dozen pieds sous terre tu n'es pas mort" (6 feet under but you're not dead), while Voir United nations Ami Pleurer (to encounter a friend cry) is perhaps the most moving of all. "Of course there are wars in Republic of 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 finish of each poesy, as if unable to finish the sentence himself through emotion.
0 Response to "An Old Fashioned Love Song Jacques Brel"
Post a Comment