Jacques Brel

Jacques Brel, born on 8 April 1929 in Schaerbeek (Belgium) and died on 9 October 1978 in Bobigny (France), was a Belgian singer-songwriter, poet, actor, and director.

In the early 1950s, Jacques Brel left his native Belgium to try his luck in Paris as a singer. Supported and encouraged by Jacques Canetti, he had a difficult start before achieving recognition in 1956 with his first major success Quand on n'a que l'amour. From then on, successes followed one another: Je ne sais pas, La valse à mille temps, Les Flamandes, Le moribond, Madeleine, and especially Ne me quitte pas, considered one of the greatest French songs. Brel definitively established himself as a sure value in song, both as a writer and as a performer, in the studio and on stage, where his embodied singing caused a sensation.

Performing tours and Parisian residencies at the Olympia for over a decade, Jacques Brel, at the peak of his popularity, abandoned live singing in 1966. Although he still recorded a few albums and staged L'Homme de la Mancha, he then dedicated himself to cinema, acting in about ten films, two of which he wrote and directed, Franz and Le Far West (selected for the official competition at the Cannes Film Festival in 1973).

In 1973, he left cinema, took to the sea on a sailboat, and finally settled, with his partner Maddly Bamy, in the Marquesas Islands; in a final album in 1977, he dedicated a song to the archipelago.

Affected by lung cancer, Jacques Brel died at the age of 49 in October 1978.

Along with Léo Ferré, Georges Brassens, and Jean Ferrat, Jacques Brel is considered one of the greats of French chanson, and his discography includes many songs that have become classics: Les bourgeois, Le Plat Pays, Les vieux, La Fanette, Amsterdam, Ces gens-là, La Chanson des vieux amants, Vesoul...

With over 25 million albums sold internationally, Brel represents an icon of French chanson. Although most of his songs were recorded in French, he became, in his time, a source of inspiration for many English-speaking singer-songwriters such as David Bowie, Mort Shuman, Alex Harvey, Leonard Cohen, Marc Almond, and Rod McKuen. Several of his songs were also translated into English in the United States and notably sung by Ray Charles, Judy Collins, John Denver, the Kingston Trio, Nina Simone, Frank Sinatra, Scott Walker, and Andy Williams.