Jacques Brel — Les Marquises (Barclay, 1977)

Like David Bowie and Leonard Cohen decades later, Jacques Brel made an album knowing it would be his last. But how does an artist who at the age of 30 was already writing lines like “Death awaits me like a princess at the burial of my youth” address death as an imminent event, rather than just another topic for his morbid poetry? 

In September 1977, forced out of self-imposed exile on the Marquesas Islands in the South Pacific seeking treatment for the lung cancer that would kill him a year later, Brel was installed at Studio Hoche near the Arc de Triomphe, preparing his first set of new songs in almost a decade. He was barely able to record two per session, a sad decline for an old pro used to knocking out an album in a couple of days. This time Brel was writing his own epitaph, bringing together all the styles he had been exploring since the mid-Fifties: orchestral melodrama, sorrowful ballads and plenty of sleaze, the latter delivered with unseemly relish.

Nevertheless, despite culturally specific Belgitude and knowing references to his own back catalogue, Les Marquises is not a record made in a vacuum. Brel and arranger François Rauber were not deaf to how music had changed in the years since they put out a record. Witness ‘Les F…’, probably the funkiest song ever written about Flemish nationalists, or the echoing trumpet blasts of ‘Orly’, which sound like nothing so much as Miles Davis circa Bitches Brew. 

It’s not all high drama and bombast: Les Marquises opens with the simple accordion and vocal of ‘Jaurès’, possibly Brel’s most angst-ridden song in a career full of them. And as with so much Francophone pop, the spectre of the daytime TV variety show is never far away: listen to ‘Le lion’ and try not to think about The Fast Show’s Europop sensation Mikki Disco.

There were no public appearances, no live shows and no interviews to promote the album. By the time of its release in November 1977, barely six weeks after the artist had recorded his final vocal, Brel was safely back in French Polynesia. The scope of the songs on Les Marquises ensured that he departed as he arrived, as he sings on ‘Jaurès’, “entre l’absinthe et les grand-messes”.

Andrew Petrie