1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die: 78. Jacques Brel – Enregistrement Public A L’Olympia 1964 (1967)

 

Slightly cheating, I think, in that the album is a recording from three years ago, plus see my previous comments on live albums being a bit of a music snob’s excuse for a Best Of – album. (On the subject of the year, though, the list I’m using orders the albums by as detailed release date as possible, and in some version I’ve seen, this one is put in 1964, the year it was recorded. It doesn’t matter too much). 

Brel is a Belgian singer of the traditional chanson songs, lyric-driven stories. These are mixture of sad  (see Les Vieux, Les Timides, La Plat Pays which is nostalgia for a sad flat country) and a bit of (often bawdy) humour (see Amsterdam, Les Jardins des Casinos and Toro). My French isn’t good enough to passively listen to these and get the full benefit, since the point of this style is in the story/lyrics, not the music, which is pretty simple; neither is Brel’s voice what you would call smooth, so they’re not something you could listen to just for the musicality, lyrics be damned. For me it feels like more of a cultural artifact. Brel inspired David Bowie, and Neil Hannon of The Divine Comedy, but we will see the chanson style return many times on this list. A great British proponent of the art is Jake Thackerey, who I don’t think makes the list but is worth searching out.