Jacques Brel was born on 8 April 1929 in a suburb of Brussels called Schaerbeek. Jacques played the piano a little and was part of the school theatre troupe, directed by Father Deschamps; they put on little shows. Thanks to his teacher he discovered Victor Hugo and Chateaubriand. To quell his avid need for escape, he would read novels by Jack London, Stevenson, Conrad, Kipling and Fenimore Cooper. He began writing his journal in 1942 and started writing some little short stories too. This was when he wrote ‘Le Grand Feu’, at the end of his second-time round in fourth year of High School. By the end of 1951, young Brel was already the father of a little girl born on 6 December; he banished his spleen by leading the Franche Cordée group through some rather sodden and smoke-ridden evenings where he and his friends would set the world to rights. He talked about becoming a journalist or going in for raising hens but above all, he started writing his first songs. At the time Jacques was a regular visitor to bars and jazz clubs in the Ilot Sacré, Brussels’ bohemian quarter; his favourite was La Rose Noire, where he was one of its staunchest customers. This was where he sang his own songs for the first time.

“What Brel seemed to be searching for was neither glory nor fame, but rather the prolongation of his childhood dreams so as to avoid growing old. ‘Dying, that’s nothing, dying, no big deal at all, but growing old… Oh, growing old!’ His quest was impossible, it made him seem like a kind of Don Quichotte, an idealist in life, an eternal traveller. Hence the real force and impact of all Brel’s songs, the regrets they filter into our awareness through some kind of return of what we’ve tried to suppress, so that we reach those fears inside ourselves with terrifying accuracy and feeling, which leads in turn to the renunciation and mediocrity that Brel, more than anyone else, describes with such strange pertinence.” – Rémi Raemackers