10:44 p.m., April 23, 2022
Recent photos of his emaciated face raised fears for the worst. Suffering from pancreatic cancer since 2020, Arnold Charles Ernest Hintjens, known as “Arno”, died on Saturday in Brussels. The Belgian rock song, and more broadly European, loses one of its most atypical voices. A guttural, broken voice, with a rare emotional power to sing the pangs of love, battered destinies, the cynicism of politics and the absurdity of life with a poetry that is both raw and surreal.
The urgency to sing
“Damn, damn that was really good. Arno left us on April 23. He will be missed by all of us, but he will always be there thanks to the music that kept him going all the way.” wrote his Belgian agent Filip De Groote in a press release, alluding to his tube whore whore recorded in 1983 with his group TC Matic. Until the end, despite the operations and the side effects of chemotherapy, the singer-crooner-rocker with the look of a celestial tramp will have fought this damn crab in the noblest of ways, by the stage, his favorite playground since his beginnings in Ostend, his birthplace, half a century ago.
Read also – Arno at the JDD: “Rock’n’roll is my mistress”
On February 5, Arno was still performing at L’Ancienne Belgique, a legendary club in Brussels, in front of 800 people. “People who know I have cancer wonder why I’m on stage, but you have to know that it’s the stage that gives me the most energy”had declared the singer to the Monde. The disease, he looked at it with his falsely naive humor in an interview with the Parisien. “The flowers are too expensive, I told myself that I was going to wait before dying. I live day by day. Yesterday is dead, tomorrow does not exist. He even found his way back to the studios last year to revisit his repertoire with pianist Sofiane Pamart. His title : Vivre. Like a snub to the grim reaper. “He was very ill, Sofiane Pamart entrusted us with the release of this testament album. But when he landed in front of the microphone, he was carried away by the urgency to sing. » Because, behind his scruffy look, the one we nicknamed “Belgian Tom Waits”, was first of all a Stakhanovist devoted body and soul to his art. On February 21, under the gold of the royal palace in Brussels, King Philippe had greeted “an icon of the Belgian music scene”.
Harmonica player, Marvin Gaye’s cook
His passion for blues and rock, he had contracted it in Ostend, a Flemish seaside resort located opposite England. Nicknamed “the most British Belgian city”, it welcomes many English tourists who come with the latest aesthetic and musical trends of Swingin’ London. His mother worships Juliette Gréco and rock’n’roll. His father officiated as an aviator and mechanic in aeronautics. But the young Arno will be raised above all by his grandmother, a woman with a strong temperament. Introduced to the blues Lightnin’ Hopkins by his Dutch teacher, Arno took his first steps in the clubs of Ostend as a harmonica player, also officiating as the personal cook of Marvin Gaye, then addicted to coke, who came to record his classic in Ostend Midnight Love.
His fledgling career took off with the group TC Matic, which would establish itself in the early 1980s as a jewel of European rock without ever aping the Anglo-Saxons. The group toured Europe, but ended up imploding in 1985. In France, his solo career began timidly with the album Arno (1986), but he became known to the general public thanks to his participation, alongside composer Philip Glass, in the soundtrack of the film thank you life by Bertrand Blier.
With the regularity of a Swiss watchmaker, Arno will record 13 solo albums, not to mention the alternative projects dedicated to pure and hard blues. Always faithful to his passion for rock-blues, but open to piano-voice song, cabaret, electro, he signs a handful of timeless classics including the poignant In my mother’s eyes. We also meet him in the cinema. Michel Piccoli entrusts him with a role in So this is it, of which Arno writes the soundtrack. He distinguished himself alongside Alain Bashung in I always dreamed of being a gangster, by Samuel Benchetrit. In 2006, the gratin of French song celebrates his work in the album Damn damn, a tribe for Arno (2006). Last February, during one of his final concerts in Brussels, Stromae joined him on stage for a surprise duet. We no longer count the number of his collaborations, from Christophe to Brigitte Fontaine. Asked by The Parisian on his desires for artistic exchanges, he had quoted… Mireille Mathieu! “Because of this fucking corona, we haven’t done it yet. For me, France is the Eiffel Tower and Mireille Mathieu. » The iconoclastic duo will never see the light of day…
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