11. Jacques BrelLes Marquises
During the 1980s, The Virgin Prunes were quite popular in France and we were being entertained by this big French journalist who ran a music magazine called Actuel and it was a big, big deal. You know the French – suddenly it’s dinner for 40 people and we’re discussing art. And they say, “We have to show you this. It’s Brel’s last ever performance in the Olympia in Paris.” I’d never seen footage of him before. We didn’t have YouTube or anything like that back then. And it was, once again, like when you first saw Bowie or when you first saw John Lydon. I saw Brel when I was 24 and I went, “I haven’t a clue what you’re saying, but I understand absolutely everything.”
It was this visceral theatricality. It was within his body. People say of me, “Oh yeah, he’s a big Bowie head” but Jacques Brel is the biggest influence on me as a performer. He’d sing about old people, politics, life in general and you could see like it was almost spitting at the audience in this sort of uncultured way, yet it’s so sophisticated. And the musicality! It just brought me into another world. I went, “This is better than punk. This is fucking better!” I was jumping into school again.
This is his last album, and the title track is such a haunting song. It’s about the islands where he died. But there’s also the tenderness. There’s a song called ‘Jojo’, which is about his best friend who died a few years earlier. And then there’s a song, which I actually covered once live, never recorded, called ‘Voir Un Ami Pleurer’, which translates as ‘To See A Friend Crying’, and it is just one of the most touching, sensitive things ever. This is the man that wrote ‘If You Go Away’, which is one of the great love songs of all time. He was just profound. He reinvented me as a solo performer.
