Ne me quitte pas, Jacques Brel
While "The Beatles" were making girls faint with their rebellious bangs and cheeky, youthful smiles, a different and profoundly darker artist was already enchanting the European audience.
The figure on stage wore sober clothes and screamed like a Delta bluesman from the early twentieth century.
This is, of course, Jacques Romain Georges Brel, a Belgian musician from the 1960s, but also a poet and director. He was nicknamed "the master of modern chanson" and influenced artists like Leonard Norman Eliezer Cohen, David Robert Jones aka David Bowie, Noel Scott Engel aka Scott Walker, Francis Albert "Frank" Sinatra, and Nicholas Edward "Nick" Cave, among many others—without forgetting the Italians Bruno Lauzi, Fabrizio De André, Francesco Guccini, Gino Paoli, Giorgio Gaber, Luigi Tenco, Roberto Vecchioni, Sergio Endrigo, and countless more.
He died before reaching fifty as a result of lung cancer, which had begun ten years earlier.
While still young, he decided to abandon his singing career to retire and live in French Polynesia, in the Marquesas Islands, where he was buried.
His songs have been interpreted in 95 languages.
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