Jacques Brel's covers: why (and how)
Over the past 30 years I have listened to a lot of music, above all with passion and a certain amount of judgeement which is meant to be aesthetic, since I do not play a musical instrument. After nearly 30 years’ exploration of the world of music, I can now state that Jacques Brel is my reference point, my pole star. It is he, more than any other, who can speak to my heart, my brain and my innermost self, although, for many people, he may seem out-of-date and old-fashioned. Basically, I speak of music which was released at least 30 years ago (Brel’s last record came out in 1977, while his first recordings were made in 1953).
Indeed, it is very difficult today, in Italy at least, to find opportunities to listen to Jacques Brel, either on the radio or on television. I consider myself lucky to have borrowed two CDs of Brel songs from the Sala Borsa library in Bologna: it was these CD’s, heard in 2002, which were my first introduction to Brel’s music. I did not immediately fall in love with this music, because my ears had to get accustomed to a style of music they were not used to hearing, and which, on top of that, was sung in French. But there were four or five objectively beautiful songs that got me hooked, and then, every time I listened, I went a little deeper into the artistic world created by “Grand Jacques”.
In fact, Brel’s music touches my heart because it expresses strong and contrasting feelings: passion and tenderness, rage and gentleness, invective and understanding, always shown with an open heart, without compromise or flattery. Besides that, of course, there is the complete beauty of his musical works, of which some, to use an overused term, have now become immortal.
The outstanding trait behind Brel’s personal and artistic career is his complete freedom of thought and action. This freedom led him first of all, in 1952, to move from Bruxelles to Paris, leaving his family and a steady job in his father’s firm behind, to start a slow and tough climbing of the ladder in the world of chanson. Then, in 1966, at the height of his success, it led him to give up live performances, to concentrate on other artistic commitments including not only music, but also theatre and cinema, as an actor and a director. Finallly, in 1974, he retired to the Marquises Islands, to escape at last from the show-business world and to turn to a much more simple existence devoted to serving other people.
From a musical point of view, the result of all this is more than 150 songs, available both in studio and live versions (the latter often better, because Brel was able to give the best of himself when on stage), but also in versions by other artists who continually remake these songs all over the world. Above all, listening to these cover-versions makes us understand how widespread Brel’s influence has been on musicians who were his contemporaries, and is still nowadays on present artists. We just need to think of household names such as Giorgio Gaber in Italy, or Scott Walker, David Bowie, and Marc Almond in the English-speaking world, or Noir Désir in France. We also realise how popular Brel’s songs are by knowing how many languages they were translated into. Among these, you find many vernacular languages: Milanese, Genoese, Bolognese, Alsatian, Frisian and Corsican…. Besides, hearing a song arranged and sung in dozens of different ways allows us to discover, through such various styles of performance, the song’s real musical and lyrical character. And when the song is particularly beautiful, this can only be beneficial for whoever listens to it.
Having discovered the vitality and relevance of Brel’s repertoire, I decided that, once I had bought all his original albums, I would try to collect all the “cover-versions”, or at least to list them, given that certain records are very difficult to find these days. Luckily, we have Internet nowadays, which is an extraordinary resource for carrying out this kind of research. All that is needed is to have enough time to commit oneself as long as necessary to such an enormous task. During many months, a great deal of time has been available for me. I have used a large proportion of this time to construct a very comprehensive database of the cover-versions of Brel’s songs available on the web. With no equivalent to this day, this database in the beginning was partly derived from information collected from other databases, especially Wikipedia in Dutch, Gracenote and freeDB.org. and then regularly updated with news coming from various sources on the web (especially from sales and auctions sites like ebay) and from my Brelian friends scattered all around the world.
For a better understanding of Brel’s life and work, due the complete nonexistence of italian books (the monography from Arcana editor has disappeared years ago) I advise Italian-speaking Internet users to visit the following links:
There is also an intervista immaginaria a Brel (an imaginary Brel interview) by Michele Manzotti, which has recently appeared on the web, published in February 2007 with the title “Il popolo del Blues” (The people of the Blues). This “interview” also contains interesting advice about what to listen to, and a review of some cover-version albums.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This database of Brel cover-versions has also become so vast thanks to the help I have received from a few friends whom I have met on the web. We got to know each other through the work needed to put my site online. My research work was therefore no longer done on my own: this task is now accomplished collectively, with absolutely no rivalry between us. On the contrary, this work is inspired by a friendly and joint spirit of sharing.
First of all, I want to thank Rodolphe Guillo for his very profound and “disenchanted” knowledge of Brel’s life and work, with which I “fed” myself during long nocturnal discussions on the Internet. Rodolphe is conducting since 1998 his personal research on Brel covers, as meticulous and passionate as mine. In his site Jacques Brel - Autrement dit you can see his particular attention to the different languages in which Brel’s original songs have been sung by others. His site has been one of the chief sources of information for my database.
I wish to include other friends in these acknowledgements, whom I have also got to know through the site: the tireless Omar El Maizi, José Fernandes, Meray, Xirkus, and the specialist on Ne me quitte pas, Bibi Frikotin. It is largely thanks to them that I have been able to collect such a large number of different versions of Jacques Brel songs.
Finally, I must not forget several artists who have, very kindly, personally supplied me with information and audio material: Denis Berezhnoy, Srðjan Depolo, Anton Montagne, Peter Ostrowski and the staff of Aalborg Teater.
Of course, I realise that there are still plenty of versions of Brel songs which I do not know yet, as well as it is possible that there are mistakes in the information I have collected. For this reason, I invite anybody who is interested in this subject to give me a hand with improving the database. The quest continues!
ABOUT THE DIFFERENT COVER-VERSIONS
First of all, I should explain the statistical method I have used: for me, cover-versions are all the different performances of a piece of music made for a commercial use and regardless of its physical support of sale (EP, LP, CD, DVD, digital, etc.). Which means, for example, that, if 
there are 15 “official“ live recordings of Amsterdam by David Bowie, these would be considered as 15 individual cover-versions; but if I find on the web an amateur or a bootleg live recording, I will not consider it as a cover. Analogously, the recordings from such programmes as “Music Farm”, “Star Academy”, and similar broadcasts where the performances are destined for use only on television and not for the production of a record are not to be included in the database.
Obviously, I have also excluded different “appearances” of a cover-version on compilations. Each time it has been possible for me to do so, I have mentioned the title of the record on which the cover-version appeared for the first time. However, my research has often been too convoluted for me to be sure of guaranteeing an exact result. Therefore, if I find difficulties in getting information about the very first appearance of a song, I use to mention the most recent compilation-album in which the cover-version has been released on, that is the one which is most likely to still be available in the shops.
Translation by Clare Page
page updated on 02.04.2011
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