Watch Jacques Brel sing Ne Me Quitte Pas

Watch Jacques Brel perform Jef live in 1964

On October 9, 1978, my bagpipes, my busking assistant and I were hitching across the south of France in the final days of my “year abroad” as a languages student. I had been waiting just minutes when a Belgian lorry driver stopped to pick me up. We were barely into the journey when the music station he was listening to had a news flash. “Jacques Brel est mort.”

I was aware of Brel. I had heard his most famous songs, most famous of all Ne Me Quitte Pas, a man’s desperate plea to a lover not to leave him. I knew also some of the portraits of people in his native Belgium, with which he had a lifelong love-hate relationship.

But it was the reaction of this tattooed, chain-smoking Walloon lorry driver, and the playing of Brel songs for the entirety of the journey, that really opened my mind to a genius, to me the greatest singer-writer of the French language who ever lived.

For after the initial shock, my lorry-driving companion began to cry. And once the tears had stopped, he started to tell me the story of Brel’s life, and what his music meant to him. I therefore know what Brel’s daughter France meant when she told me recently, “My father’s songs came from real life, real loves and feelings. He spoke to people’s souls.”

Since that day, I have listened to Brel more than any other musician. Every French holiday begins with a trip to the market to see if there are any new CDs or arrangements. There usually are. So when a radio producer who had read of my interest in Brel asked if I would make a programme for Radio 4 to coincide with the 30th anniversary of his death, I leapt at it.

I already knew the outlines of his life story. Born in Brussels’ Schaerbeek district in 1929, the son of a cardboard manufacturer whose bourgeois life Brel was determined not to imitate. Married with three daughters in Brussels, but based most of his professional life in Paris, where – seemingly with his wife Miche’s blessing or understanding – he lived a series of great love affairs, one of which inspired Ne Me Quitte Pas. Early struggle – “For ages he lived on a sandwich a day,” says France – followed by enormous commercial and critical success before suddenly, almost without warning, retiring from live performing in 1966. A career acting and directing films before finally taking off to the other side of the world, the island of Hiva Oa, with his final mistress, Maddly Bamy. Return to Paris to make a farewell album, one of his best, then hiding away even from family as he neared death aged just 49, the result of decades of smoking as many cigarettes as the lachrymose lorry driver.

Since then, his legend has grown. His records sell well year after year. The DVD age has given rise to big sales of recordings of his concerts, during which he sang, never spoke. He did not need to tell stories about his songs. They are the stories. “They had a beginning, middle and end,” says impresario Jean-Michel Boris, who staged Brel’s final concert at the Olympia in Paris.

France, the singer’s middle daughter, so called because her mother was pregnant when Brel was setting up his base in Paris, now runs the Brel Foundation in Brussels. She says interest in him seems to grow with the passage of time. In the first six months of this year, she received 2,500 letters about his work. Singers as varied as Frank Sinatra, Dusty Springfield, Scott Walker, Alex Harvey and Marc Almond have tried Brel in English. Then there was the smash hit by Terry Jacks with the awful rendition of Seasons in the Sun. Brel’s Le Moribond – Je veux qu’on rie/ Je veux qu’on danse/ Quand c’est qu’on me mettra dans le trou (I want you to laugh/ I want you to dance/ As they shove me in the hole) – was somehow turned into: We had joy/ We had fun/ We had seasons in the sun. “He turned a great Brel song into a nursery rhyme,” complained Brel fan Attila the Stockbroker. Of greater artistic merit, Marlene Dietrich’s Bitte Geh Nicht Fort was a German translation of Ne Me Quitte Pas, one of 25 languages in which recordings of Brel have been made. David Bowie’s Amsterdam is a Brel tune, as is his My Death.

Comedian and producer Mel Smith, who staged a show based on translated Brel songs and handed over to me a fabulous file of research, is a fellow Brelite, despite not speaking French. “You don’t need to understand every word. You get from the force of his performance the depth of emotion and the kind of thing he is on about: love and death and the pressures of life.”

There is a view, expressed by his biographer Olivier Todd, that Brel is untranslatable and nobody but Brel can sing his songs. He has a point about translation. I explain to Mel Smith that, at the climax of Ne Me Quitte Pas, Brel is saying to his departing amour, “Let me become the shadow of your shadow, the shadow of your hand, the shadow of your dog.” In English it sounds more like something from one of Smith’s sketches with Griff Rhys Jones than one of the most beautiful love songs of all time. Yet in French his lyrics take their place in anthologies of great poets.

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