Tracks: Amsterdam // Les Timides // Le Dernier Repas //Les Jardins du Casino //Les Vieux //Les Toros //Le Tango Funebre// Le Plat Pays // Les Bonbons //Mathilde //Les Bigotes // Les Bourgeois // Jef // Au Suivant // Madeleine
Morbid, sarcastic socio-political show tunes from Belgium, you say? And with theramins? Sign me up! Who knew Lee Marvin was such a talent?
I’d previously only been familiar with Brel’s work in translation, but thankfully this list has forced me to finally face-up to my ignorance and give the original versions a chance. Unfortunately, this resulted in my being a stubborn idiot and deciding that, yes, I know enough French to understand the philosophical paronomasia of an acerbic Belgian. Well, in actual fact I only know enough French to understand one word in five when sung, which resulted in my following along to each song with the lyric sheet in front of me since for some reason my written French is much better than my spoken. And yes, I know that, having gone to all the trouble of looking-up the lyrics in French, I could have just looked-up the English translations, but damn it man it’s the principle of the thing! And if that means that I’m only vaguely aware of what most of “Les Timides” was actually about, then so be it!
(Actually, I did look-up a fair few of the translations, but that’s neither here nor there. I'm actually rather bitter about my bad French - I mean, we had a bunch of Parisian students visit once when I was in year 11, and they all spoke near-perfect English. Most of the people in my French class could barely make it through the play we had to write about trying to order lunch. Although there were those two guys who staged a dazzling rap battle about trying to find a bus station).
So. Jacques Brel. I used to be of the opinion that I vastly preferred covers of the man’s work to the originals, but after seeing Brel give these tunes the live treatment I’ve changed my mind. You see, the emphasis with these songs is quite heavily on the lyrics, and the lyrical trend is for each song to launch the kernel of an idea in the first stanza and then, through each succeeding stanza, work the notion up in greater detail until the whole things reaches a big climax – or anti-climax, depending on the song. So in effect Brel has written a bunch of show-tunes, and he acts them out as you’d expect any cabaret star to do. He works himself into a fervour over the whoring, fatalistic sailors in “Amsterdam”, and he hams it up gloriously as the cretinous suitor in the exquisitely creepy “Les Bonbons”. Then you can almost hear him crying as he sings of “Les Plats Pays” – which is an absolutely astonishing portrait of his home country – and then he minces like a twit in the role of one of “Les Timides”. It’s all brilliantly done, and gave me the sensation of an original cast recording that was far more successful than any such thing could be, given that I wasn’t missing-out (I assume) on the various silly dances.
In any case, my point is that the lyrics on this album are great. “Amsterdam” is a wonderful glimpse into this sort of hellish, beautiful vision of life amongst the mariners, while “Les Toros” is a great song about bullfighting in which the toreadors dream that they’re Garcia Lorca, while the bulls “dream of a hell where deceased men and toreadors will burn”. Anyway it sounds better in French. Then you have not one, but two! ruminations on death in “Le Dernier Repas” and “Le Tango Funebre”, and “Au Suivant”, which is a damned disturbing song about losing ones virginity in the assembly-line of a military bordello (it is a metaphor). Oh, and “Les Vieux”, which is a very sad song about getting old, and “Les Bigotes”, in which the conservatives get their reward “dans le ciel qui n’existe pas”, and then, well, really the whole album is a winner.. The only songs I don’t really like are “Les Jardins du Casino” and “Les Bourgeois”, but then that’s just me. And really it has more to do with their merely being quite good songs on an album jammed full of masterpieces. Allez au diable, vous maudits jardins! Baisez mon ane, vous bourgeois!
Really, this is just a great album. Jacques Brel is often held-up as a pinnacle of Francophone song-writing, and I can certainly see why. You have a man writing truly beautiful poetry, setting it to a great tune, and then performing it all with a vigour and gusto to set your head turning. It’s really excellent. It may be a cliche, but French when used properly is a truly wonderful language, and it’s things like this that make me wish I spoke it better. Well, this and Stephane Mallarme, but I suspect I wouldn’t understand him very well in any case.
Aargh this review is shit but the music is wonderful.Except - Who the hell is Frida the Blonde?
9/10
Look at him go!
He just can't stop!
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