The Best Of

Description

All the songs on this compilation were either written or co-written by Brel, between the mid-1950s and the mid-1960s. Featuring many of his best known songs, it probably makes this a very good place to begin exploring Brel’s work. Several songs here (‘Les Bourgeois’ and ‘Les Singes’) seem to concern the class system, but in hindsight they’re probably just as much about the generation gap; others are simple love songs, or else hymns to nature and the beauties of Belgium. Brel’s songs were regularly covered by artists as diverse as Frank Sinatra, Ray Charles, David Bowie, Barbra Streisand, Neil Diamond and Marlene Dietrich, to name but a few.