It’s not our custom to just agree with Americans, but as far as Stromae is concerned, we agree: this was world class.
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At a festival you don’t really hope for nice and good performances: there has to be at least one that makes everyone think ‘how good that we got to experience this.’ At Werchter Boutique that was the performance of Stromae. Both Rolling Stone if Billboard had named it one of the 210 Coachella concerts you had to see in April. ‘The young electro-rocker’s performance had everything Drake’s performance didn’t have,’ he said Billboard: ‘honesty, emotion, effectiveness and humor, self-confidence and ambition. He is a full-fledged superstar in the body of an emerging talent.’
It was indeed that emotion that did it. Stromae’s performance scored the maximum on many points. The sound was great. The way his four musicians mixed ‘exotic’ elements into their electro—a harpsichord in “Fils de joie,” a Peruvian charango guitar in “Santé”—sounded completely natural and mature, not like a producer’s clever invention. The variety in the performance, and the ease with which Stromae switched from one atmosphere to another, is astonishing: the thin vocals in ‘Quand c’est’ even silenced the chatter of this aperitif audience, the audacity to his burnout and putting depression into a catchy song like ‘L’enfer’, which he will have to sing until the end of his days, deserves respect.
– Photo: Koen Bauters
But it was mainly his talent to pack emotion that grabs your throat in songs that are impossible to stand still, such as ‘Papaoutai’: 45,000 people danced their souls out – and how good it was to have that to see. He alternated the tough moments with gentle humor: the robot dog that brought him a towel, his comment that his supervisor Yoshuo Moshudo understood ‘really nothing’ about his Dutch binding texts, because of Japan-French – the other three were Belgians.
Stromae has un-Belgian star appeal, whether he’s strolling around the stage in slow motion or drumming along during ‘Ta fête’. Had he not performed in a Spanish-style shirt with a flowing mantilla, but in an old jogging track from Slagerij Van Kampen, his presence would still have been overwhelming. And yet he remained the modest Belgian who extensively praised his four musicians – rightly so, by the way – but also his roadies, the security, even the Belgian film studio that had made an animation Stromae that showed us on the big screen, among other things, a dance for ‘Santé’.
No matter how hard the others tried, they were all the support act for Stromae here. And that would also have been the case if he had performed at Rock Werchter after Metallica or Pearl Jam, in front of 60,000 people. ‘Comrades: thank you very much,’ he said after a savage version of ‘Alors on danse’. The fun was entirely on our side.
Stromae, seen at Werchter Boutique on June 19, 2022
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