Brel

The one cool thing I do is liking Brel. The recordings, the performances, the songs. Although I will no doubt be accused of a nostalgic longing for the better days I never knew, I genuinely know of no-one who is comparable. Of singers who write songs and then perform them – and I mean really perform them – we have, who? George Michael? His voice is too pretty and subject matter too various in quality. Elton John? But he doesn’t write his lyrics. Jamie Cullum? Who? But he’s not the same thing at all!

Scott Walker is really the only figure who comes close to Brel in the Land of the Living. But even Scott belongs to a different time: either in a silky voiced past or in a desolate future, always singing back to us. Walker tackles us in the way Brel maybe would now, though Jacques may have kept a sense of humour longer, or at least one less grim.

There is such a thing as music that causes a physical effect, a psychosomatic element. Though it makes me sound terribly old and Telegraph, I recall a startling physical sensation of pleasure and shock at the climax of ‘Nimrod’ from the Enigma Variations when I first heard them live played by the RSNO. In defence of this tweediness, similar effects are not always occasioned by Edwardian England. Other than Elgar, Scott Walker is the composer who has most often caused physical sensation in me. Jumping with terror at ‘The Escape’; the quickening of breath occasioned by ‘Clara’; these things are unusual in the Pop World. And Brel is surely no exception. Would Brel be capable of a track – there are no songs anymore – like ‘The Electrician’? a piece so disturbing as to make me nauseous.

Brel is the chief poet of the chanson for me precisely because of these physical effects that he causes in me. He can cause me to involuntarily thrust my chest out in an ironic self-importance (le Chanson de Jacky), have my heartbeat speeding and my muscles tense with unfelt anger (Amsterdam) and, yes, double me over with sickening pain in the pit of my stomach (Ne me quitte pas). He is a master of manipulating our bodies through his art, through his music.

And good art does this. It is my defence of ‘Modern Art’, that it can have this psychosomatic effect. In my view, it bypasses the strictly emotional functions that traditional art depends on and strikes one coldly in a primal way. It is thus that a slashed canvas can cause all the symptoms of terror in me, more than the painting of a knife or a crucifixion ever could. Brel is the Modern Pop Star, the great Chanteur of the Twentieth Century. He smoked, looked like a philosopher and wore a dark suit. His music may be the one cool thing I like, but it is much more than just ‘cool’. It is art.