Toby the Tenor

Some weeks ago I revisited a song I haven’t sung for fifteen years. I was invited to appear at an opera gala in London. Opera galas are usually hit parades of grand opera. Puccini, Verdi, a smattering of Don Giovanni and perhaps the Lakmé duet British Airways appropriated for its TV ads.

I prefer to break the mould and contribute less well-trodden songs or arias. For the gala in June I sang an aria from Mozart’s Idomeneo and Jacques Brel’s Au Suivant. “Jacques Brel’s Whaty-What?” I hear you say. You heard me right… I sang a popular French song from 1963. Well, strictly speaking it’s a Belgian song because Brel was from Brussels and sang in Flemish as well as French.

Brel is a private passion of mine. His poetry and music synthesise into art song of such taught construction and complexity that I place him in the same club as Schubert, Schumann, Ravel and Britten. He’s not a song writer, he’s a songwright in that his songs are wrought and, in the same way a shipwright’s vessels are built to be watertight, his songs withstand the scrutiny of time.

I decided to perform the song fifteen years ago before I had thought about the song’s meaning. I loved the drama in Brel’s performances of it on YouTube. Have a look for yourself. He stands there behind his microphone, picked out by a follow-spot in the pitch black, his band lost somewhere in the darkness behind him. What I saw first in his performance was the fun he had as he threw off lines in what seems like sarcasm and mockery. What lies in the character he portrays is a better-than-you intelligence that thumbs his nose to fate. It’s all self-evident, even if you, like me, don’t speak French well enough to get the subtlety of his text.

Subsequently, when I translated the song and started to think about it, I found myself brushing away layers of meaning like an archaeologist on a dig and finding a trove of such importance that I found it hard to believe all this poetic treasure could be contained within one short song. 

The song starts with a truncated staccato introduction, pointed with short, angry stabs on the xylophone and accordion. The crisp chromatic rising figure sets a mood of strength and defiance. The punctuating rhythmic phrases that close the introduction as Brel sings the words “Au Suivant’ for the first time tell us that we are dancing a tango.

A sudden silence out of which Brel tells us “Naked apart from my towel, which serves for a loincloth, I had rouge on my forehead and soap in my hand.” Where are we? In medias res is the answer, plunged into the darkest of nightmares. When the lights go up, but for a towel, we’re naked on stage. More than that we don’t know. “Au Suivant”. “Next” he instructs. “I was just twenty-one and there were a hundred and twenty of us, all of us following the person next to us who was in turn following someone else.” It’s no clearer where we are. Another command of “Next!” follows. There’s no time to think, we just follow orders and shuffle along in whatever this queue is. “I was just twenty-one and in denial at that ambulent bordello for an army at the front.” 

When I first read that last line of the first strophe, I looked at the page and could hardly believe my eyes. This was a song about a young private at a mobile knocking shop behind the French frontline during the First World War. Brel’s graphic despair in the song carries us, the listener, into the ghastly scene and we are fully exposed to the worst horrors of humanity. It’s noteworthy that Brel wrote the song the same year that Joan Littlewood devised and wrote the musical, “Oh! What a Lovely War”, a send-up of World War I.

“I would have liked a little more tenderness, or a simple smile, or even just a little more time, but onto the Next!” Now he reveals the human cost for this poor traumatised young lad who can’t perform under the pressured circumstances. “It wasn’t Waterloo, no no, but neither was it Arcole, it was the time to regret having not showed up at school.” In a moment of mock pedagogic authority, he admits his situation wasn’t a rout like Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo, but neither was it a victory like Napoleon’s triumph at the Battle of Arcola. He continues, saying it was the kind of humiliation to make him wish he had worked harder at school and gone on to be an officer instead of a private. “Next!” 

“But I swear, to hear this adjutant from my ass, these are blows that will turn us into armies of the impotent.” The command of “Next!” is coming from the officer charged with telling the foot soldiers when to jump out of the trench and advance into the enemy gunfire. Would that be same person in both the role of line monitor at the ambulant bordello and sending the same soldiers over the top to almost certain death? I doubt it. The boy is confused, perhaps he has PTSD or “shell shock” as it was known then. He can’t compute whether “Next!” is the command from his adjutant or the Madame of the brothel.

He continues in the third strophe: “I swear on the head of my first lesion that, since then, I hear this voice all the time.” This is definitely a graphic account of PTSD and now we learn that he has syphillis to boot, a death sentence at the time of the First World War. “This voice that smells of garlic and cheap booze, it’s the voice of nationhood and the voice of blood.” Whoever the voice belongs to, we are close enough to smell their bad breath, the command of “Next!” driving the adventurism and bloodshed of war. Tied up in the ambiguity here is a double truth that war is fed by a chain of command allied to humanity’s baser instincts.

“Next!” Now we learn the psychological legacy of this victim’s abuse. “And since then, every woman in my emaciated arms at the moment of succumbing seems to whisper to me… next!” All within the unyielding strut of a tango that never yields in tempo, like the unrelenting march of time. In this third strophe, Brel has turned up the heat and intensity. The whole orchestra are playing, the intimacy of a secret whisper is gone and the protagonist starts to scream his nightmare.

In the fourth and final strophe, we hear in the violins and accordion the sound of ordnance whistling overhead and raining down on the trenches. The heavy downbeat is now the rhythmic pounding of shells as they hit the ground. In his parting words of experience Brel says “All the followers of the world should join hands, that’s what I cry out in my delirium at night. Next! And when I’m no longer delirious I manage to say to myself that it is more humiliating to be followed than to be the follower. Next! One of these days I will be legless, or a nurse or hanged. Finally one of those things where I will never again be… the next!”

And as the song closes with the same tango pulsing louder and louder, you realise that your dance partner in this macabre tango is Death itself.

In the song’s three minutes we have been to Hell and back. I can think of no song that delivers more horror or delivers more catharsis than the relief we feel to be back in our seat at its conclusion and not trapped at the Verdun front in 1916. No-one has ever asked me to nominate the greatest song I know. Were they to do so, it would be “Au Suivant”.