Cassandra Voices

Tag: troubadour

  • The Greatest Troubadour: Jacques Brel

    In search of the my favourite troubadour all roads lead to Flanders, Belgium, then on to France and French Polynesia. There, in the obscure cemetery of Atuona Hiva Oa – alongside the impressionist Paul Gaugin – rests the mortal remains of Jacques Brel.

    Aged just forty-seven, Brel had been under a settled expectation of death for some time, as a legendary smoker, and been commuting back and forth to the French mainland to finalise his last album.

    Belgiums regularly hail Brel as their greatest fellow citizen in opinion polls. For good reason.

    I greatly admire the French chanteuse tradition from Maurice Chevalier to Edith Piaf, and on to Juliette Greco. There’s Serge Gainsbourg too, and the recently deceased Charles Aznavour. Yet I regard Jacque Brel as the culmination of that tradition.

    It is the sheer volume of great songs that is most remarkable about Brel, and, unlike Gainsbourg, they translate easily, although they are often traduced.

    Thus, Les Moribund (1961) is about the ruminations of a dying man: ‘I want them to dance when it’s time to put me in the hole.’ In the Terry Jack version, however, which sold five million copies this becomes: ‘Goodbye my friend it is time to die when all the birds singing in the sky…. We will have joy, we will have fun, we will have seasons in the sun.’ Westlife even covered it. Yet it is a Brel song translated word-for-word with an identical riff. One can only assume copyright was secured.

    David Bowie was a huge fan of Brel, and most notably covered the iconic song Amsterdam (1964), as did Scott Walker who penned an album in English called Walker Sings Brel (1981). Brel was above all a performer. Thus, with sweat dripping and emotional grotesquerie to the fore, nothing in performance art history is quite like his live version of Amsterdam at the Olympia Amsterdam 1964. Ms Abramovich eats your heart out.

    Brel did live long enough, through terrible illness, to see worldwide acclaim. Many of his songs were respectfully produced through his involvement in one of the great Broadway musicals. Jacques Brel is alive and well and living in Paris (1968). It is a brilliant and haunting introduction to his songs, and an essential purchase for any music lover.

    Brel came from Flanders and chronicles the travails of the Flemish bourgeoisie, often with a full frontal attack, as in Les Flamandes (1958) – equivalent in its power to W. B. Yeats’ great poem September 1913, but also filled with charity, tolerance, and humanism.

    The apogee of his love/hate relationship with his homeland is the track Fils de or Sons of (1967), beautifully sung in the Broadway musical by Elly Stone. It is a kind of paean to all God’s children. I consider it one of the greatest songs about human aspiration and failure, jaw-dropping in its simplicity and clarity.

    Brel migrated to Paris at the age of twenty-four to work in a cardboard box factory, but was quickly lionised for his musical gifts. There was no fall from grace, as he became the totemic figure in French performance culture, and a national icon both in Belgium and France.

    Amsterdam is his most famous, although not in my view, his best song. It’s certainly one of the most disturbing renditions of human debauchery and self-destruction ever written, set in that city of contradictions, lovely and decadent in equal measure. Home to Rembrandt’s Night Watch and The Van Gogh Museum, as well as to the drugs trade and prostitution.

    Preferably it should be listened to in tandem with a reading Albert Camus‘ novel The Fall (1956), in which the apostate lawyer confesses his sins to all and sundry in a seedy Amsterdam bar. The lyrics are incandescent. Particularly in French and the song builds to a crescendo.

    Finally they drink to the ladies
    Who give them their nice bodies
    Who give them their virtue
    For a golden piece
    And when they have well drunk
    And pin their nose to the sky
    Blowing their nose in the stars
    And they piss like I cry
    On the unfaithful women
    In Amsterdam’s port
    In Amsterdam’s port

    Many of his songs build in a similar fashion fashion. Tempo is crucial, particularly in my personal favourite La valse à mille temps (1959). Here, Brel is ruminating on a park bench about life and love’s failings beside a giant Ferris wheel. Imagine The London Eye or The Riesenrad in Vienna. As the song unfolds it mimics the rotation of the Ferris wheel and gathers pace. Incredible, or incroyable.  I defy anyone to listen to it and not consider it as beautifully a conceived a song as has ever been written! It is as great as one of Shakespeare’s Sonnets or Love Minus Zero (1964) by Bob Dylan or Dance Me to The End of Love (1984) by Leonard Cohen. Greater in in fact.

    Brel like all troubadours, was a great romantic chronicler and penned an enormous amount of great love songs. Ne Me Quite Pas (1959) is one great hush. Although some of its power is lost in translation, that never stopped Frank Sinatra, Dusty Springfield, Barbra Streisand, Neil Diamond to name but a few recording it in English as If You Go Away.

    The English title is in fact deceptive, and conditional on some future whim from the object of desire, whereas ‘do not leave me’ is very much an expression of fear of imminent desertion.

    The other famous plaintive ballad is Quand on n’a que l’Amour (1957) which became an easy listening classic covered in English by Engelbert Humperdinck (If We Only Have Love).

    Yet, in my view his greatest song of unrequited love is Madeleine (1962). The Godotesque conceit is incredible, as the protagonist awaits Madeleine, who never arrives, outside a cinema. I believe it influenced Kaurismaki 2023 film Fallen Leaves, and is beautifully sung by Ellie Stone and Mort Shuman in the Broadway production.

    Brel’s relationship with Flanders was complicated throughout his career. On the one hand he sang lovingly of his flat country homeland, particularly in the extraordinary love ballad Marieke (1961) about a woman and indeed Flanders, but he also poured scorn on what he perceived to be the parochial nature of the Flemish, much like Flaubert’s dictionary of received ideas (1911) pouring scorn on the French bourgeoisie.

    So, consider this interview in which Brel said: ‘We have been conquered by everyone, we speak neither pure French nor Dutch, we are nothing’

    Les Flamandes, (1958) is a visceral masterpiece, a ribald and derisive music hall number about dancing Flemish women. Brel was unrepentant about its offensiveness , 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 being ‘Nazis during the war, and Catholics in between.’

    It should be said that some of Scott Walker’s versions, Jackie (Jacky) (1959) and My Death (La Mort) (1965) are richer texturally and in many ways more enjoyable than the Brel versions, but when Walker has to reach for dark humour his Next/Au Savant (1963) does not reach near the mordant and sardonic Brel heights of the version.  A song about sexual abuse is also covered by Gavin Friday.

    Brel was also an expert in pathos and compassion. Consider the wonderful La Chanson Des Vieux Amants. ‘Of course we’ve had thunderstorms,’ goes the first line. ‘Of course, you took a few lovers,’ And candidly in the second verse, ‘time had to be spent well.’  One is reminded of the great French chanteuse Maurice Chevalier and his old muse in Gigi (1958).

    We dined at nine.
    Not it was eight.
    You were on time.
    No, you were late.
    Oh yes, I remember it well.

    Brel was an incurable romantic and indeed a quixotic figure who staged a French version of the musical Man of La Mancha by Cervantes, translated all the lyrics, directed the production, and played Don Quixote himself. Brel’s version of The Impossible Dream takes the mundane words and stokes up the intensity – not unlike Amsterdam – to the point of madness.

    His hopes, as he shuffled off this mortal coil, that his final album would slip out with little fanfare were dashed when it shifted 600,000 copies in its first few days. The generally begrudging French literati welcomed him back in a similar fashion to how they had once welcomed Voltaire before the French Revolution. In both cases death followed shortly thereafter.

    Commuting between France and French Polynesia, given the perilous state of his health, was hardly ideal. His final work Brel (1977) unsurprisingly deals with themes of death; he had sung enough about it even before he developed terminal lung cancer,

    In JoJo, a reflective and tear-stained tribute to an old friend, features the line: six feet under but you are not dead.

    ‘Of course there are wars in Ireland,’ he sings in the opening line, following up with everything else that is wrong with the world, ‘but to see a friend cry…’ he offers at the end of each verse, as if unable to finish the sentence himself through emotion.

    Well know there are wars going on everywhere, but to see a friend cry, a lover depart, someone who fails to meet you outside the cinema, that is the human condition. The focus is on the particular, not the general. He is ever the humanist.

    The songs are so incredible lyrically and musically only Dylan with almost four decades more longevity or arguably Paul McCartney or Cole Porter has written as many great songs in the history of popular music. In my view, he is the greatest troubadour of the 20th century, and the Belgians know it.

    Feature Image: Jacques Brel in 1962 by Jack de Nijs for Anefo

  • The Other Great Troubadour

    Unlike Bob Dylan who is still actively making music, Leonard Cohen has not released a new song from beyond the grave. Cohen is dead. Of course he was from an older generation than Dylan.

    If Dylan represents the Baby Boomers then the Canadian national poet and songster represents the preceding Beat or Beatnik generation of Kerouac and Ginsberg, which he, and Dylan, reference frequently.

    Cohen and Dylan are the two central figures of a movement in popular, or folk, music, which morphed into cultural commentary and public intellectualism. Thus, the troubadour or bardic poet jumped the tramlines from pop musician into serious art. Dylan was rewarded with a Nobel Prize, but many thought it should have gone to Cohen. While Dylan is a poet in a minor key dedicated to the craft of songwriting, Cohen was a major poet, who learned his trade, and novelist – Beautiful Losers (1965) is a hidden treasure – and that poetic sensibility is reflected in his measured songwriting.

    With Cohen a poem such as the stunning ‘Going Home,’

    I love to speak with Leonard
    He’s a sportsman and a shepherd
    He’s a lazy bastard
    Living in a suit

    Becomes ‘Old Ideas’ (2012) a song.

    This genre hopping perhaps explains why Cohen’s style is less prolix or baroque than Dylan’s, although both arrive at a point of brief severity, and a compression of language which is to be admired. There are other similarities, such as both mining the political protest genre.

    The Influence of Lorca and Spain

    As an aspiring young poet, and through much of his career, Cohen was influenced by Federico García Lorca and the sense borrowed from Lorca of Duende, a Spanish term for a heightened state of emotion, expression and authenticity, often connected with Flamenco music. In fact the famous song ‘Take This Waltz’ is a translation of a Lorca poem. As he put it in an acceptance speech for the Prince of Asturias Award in 2011:

    Now, you know of my deep association and confraternity with the poet Federico Garcia Lorca. I could say that when I was a young man, an adolescent, and I hungered for a voice, I studied the English poets and I knew their work well, and I copied their styles, but I could not find a voice. It was only when — when I read, even in translation, the works of Lorca that I understood that there was a voice. It is not that I copied his voice; I would not dare. But he gave me permission to find a voice, to locate a voice; that is, to locate a self, a self that that is not fixed, a self that struggles for its own existence.

    The speech is a beautifully crafted admixture of jokes and seriousness, reflecting an interior monologue of his love of Lorca and Spain, but acutely conscious of shall we say some of the sensitivities of his audience.

    He also reveals how a Spanish guitar teacher in the space of three lessons taught him the rudiments of Flamenco that proved crucial to his style:

    He said “Let me show you some chords.” And he took the guitar and he produced a sound from that guitar that I’d never heard. And he — he played a sequence of chords with a tremolo, and he said, “Now you do it.” I said, “It’s out of the question. I can’t possibly do it.” He said, “Let me put your fingers on the frets.” And he — he put my fingers on the frets. And he said, “Now, now play.” It — It was a mess. He said, “I’ll come back tomorrow.”

    As he put it: ‘It was those six chords — it was that guitar pattern that has been the basis of all my songs and all my music.’

    Sadly after completing this initiation Cohen discovered that his mysterious teacher had taken his own life:

    I knew nothing about the man. I — I did not know what part of Spain he came from. I did not know why he came to Montreal. I did not know why he stayed there. I did not know why he he appeared there in that tennis court. I did not know why he took his life. I — I was deeply saddened, of course.

    Early Songs

    The initial albums stemming from his poetry are a chronicle of loners, romantic love, beautiful losers – to use the title of his defining 1966 book – and are decidedly non-political. They are a kind of erotic tablet and backdrop to a very different age.

    The songs are a soundtrack to Robert Altman’s masterful revisionist Western ‘McCabe and Mrs. Miller’ (1971) in which the doomed love of the interloping property baron (played impeccably by Warren Beatty) and the hooker with a heart (played by Julie Christie).

    It is a film of stunning autumnal clarity and candour but wistful nevertheless. We meet a bygone age, though strangely redolent of our age of boom and bust. Gentleman outsider capitalists should be wary of their surroundings. Will of the wisp behaviour. As we will see Cohen saw these hard times coming.

    Those songs of romantic disappointment such as ‘So Long Marianne’ and ‘Suzanne’ are often hymns to ex-lovers. Cohen was a ladies’ man which probably brought some reputational damage. Although thankfully he was Canadian rather than Irish, otherwise this sensuality would have been crucified.

    He seems to have required muses in orbit to function creatively. The well of inspiration was often carnal or at least he needed the mother lode to function.

    In his famous comeback tours, after being liquidated by a dodgy business partner, he was surrounded on stage by a bevy of ex-lovers and chanteuses, at least when I saw him in Kilmainham in Dublin. He collaborated with some and slept with others. Surprisingly these ex-lovers did not seem to resent him. By all accounts he was a charming man and curiously self-reflexive about his predilection for the other sex, best captured in ‘Death of a Ladies Man’.

    By all accounts, including the way he treated his children, he was in general a lovely man. Yet those earlier songs have almost become caricatures. It is the later songs, particularly those after he came back from the Buddhist retreat that gain the most traction.

    Hallelujah and Politics Protest Songs

    Perhaps the defining song of that pre-retreat period was ‘Hallelujah’ (1984), memorably covered by Jeff Buckley, the suicidal chanteuse of incompletion. The blending of the spiritual and the erotic are well captured in the opening stanza.

    I heard there was a secret chord
    that David played and it pleased the Lord
    But you don’t really care for music, do you?

    And then God and faith but faith in romance and carnality:

    Well your faith was strong but you needed proof
    You saw her bathing on the roof
    her beauty and the moonlight overthrew you

    And an intense religious ambiguity:

    Maybe there’s a God above
    but, all I’ve ever learned from love
    was how to shoot somebody who outdrew you?

    It is a spiritual odyssey and not for the last time a conversation between Cohen and God, although in the case of Cohen a belief in the divine was Buddhist, hence the ill-advised decampment to a Buddhist monastery ostensibly to see out his end of days. His work tells of a spiritual journey evoking a divine disapproval that might be traced to the Jewish tradition.

    I saw Jesus on the cross on a hill called Calvary
    “Do you hate mankind for what they done to you?”
    He said, “Talk of love not hate, things to do – it’s getting late.
    I’ve so little time and I’m only passing through.”

    I sense that Cohen believed that God, if he exists, thinks of him as a naughty boy and recalcitrant artist. It is vastly different to Dylan’s political engagement or indeed Dylan’s much more fearful and eschatological sense of God. So Cohen was spiritual, but not a defined believer. A fence sitter.

    The political songs come later and are as angry as Dylan’s. ‘Democracy’ (1992) sounds an initially optimistic note:

    It’s coming through a hole in the air
    From those nights in Tiananmen Square
    It’s coming from the feel
    That this ain’t exactly real
    Or it’s real, but it ain’t exactly there
    From the wars against disorder
    From the sirens night and day
    From the fires of the homeless
    From the ashes of the gay
    Democracy is coming to the USA

    But this move to utter despair in the apocalyptic warnings of ‘The Future’ (1992).

    Things are going to slide, slide in all directions
    Won’t be nothing
    Nothing you can measure anymore
    The blizzard, the blizzard of the world
    Has crossed the threshold
    And it has overturned
    The order of the soul
    When they said (they said) repent (repent), repent (repent)
    I wonder what they meant
    When they said (they said) repent (repent), repent (repent)
    I wonder what they meant
    When they said (they said) repent (repent), repent (repent)
    I wonder what they meant
    You don’t know me from the wind
    You never will, you never did
    I’m the little Jew
    Who wrote the Bible
    I’ve seen the nations rise and fall
    I’ve heard their stories, heard them all
    But love’s the only engine of survival
    Your servant here, he has been told
    To say it clear, to say it cold
    It’s over, it ain’t going
    Any further
    And now the wheels of heaven stop
    You feel the devil’s riding crop
    Get ready for the future
    It is murder

    It’s a dirge worth quoting in full that is redolent of doom, and a world disorder upon us. God is more readily embraced, but as in Dylan’s album Slow Train Coming (1980) we have met the God of retribution and vengeance. The God of the Old Testament.

    The only song of equivalent outrage in Dylan’s oeuvre are possibly ‘Hurricane’ (1975), and certainly the recent song about bankers ‘Early Roman Kings’ on Tempest (2012).

    Cohen’s ‘Closing Time’ (1992) also senses the end of days and that the shooting match is over.

    loved you when our love was blessed
    I love you now there’s nothing left
    But Closing Time.

    However, my favourite song and to my mind his greatest work is ‘Dance Me To The End Of Love’ (1996). I listen to it regularly and I find it most apt for our times.

    Today we seem like shadow dancers, ghosts, marionettes spinning towards oblivion. It is most relevant to our plague-driven times.

    Dance me to the children who are asking to be born
    Dance me through the curtains that our kisses have outworn
    Raise a tent of shelter now, though every thread is torn
    Dance me to the end of love

    So Cohen still has much to say from beyond the grave, and his death left popular song without one of its titans. Dylan now almost has the stage to himself as a probing popular commentator in this genre.