IN RETROSPECT it may seem obvious that John Waters would be seduced by the songs of Jacques Brel, which he sings in a show devoted to the spirit as much as the music of the man regarded as one of the great songwriters of the 20th century. The young Waters, living in south London in the early 1960s, would hop on a ferry across the Channel to discover the more romantic, more exotic and erotic offerings on the Continent. At home, Cliff Richard or Perry Como sang of sweetness and light or the delights of a cardigan, and the Beatles and Smokey Robinson trilled of love. But Brel, the Belgian-born giant of the French dramatic song form known as chanson, sang of soldiers, whores and drunkards, of grand passions cast on the rocks like crumpled ships. Advertisement: Story continues below Now that's living, as singers as disparate as Scott Walker, David Bowie, Rod McKuen, the Kingston Trio and Judy Collins knew all too well in their later English versions of Brel songs. In the port of Amsterdam, in the words of Brel, ''there's a sailor who dies/Full of beer, full of cries/In a drunken town fight'' - but, as Waters ruefully confesses, he most often travelled to the far less romantic port of Ostend in Belgium (''not exactly the most exciting town in the world'', he sighs). Luckily, a side trip to the south of France and an encounter with a busker singing Brel's Le Plat Pays, followed by a chance to hear Brel in a farewell concert in London, turned the then 17-year-old's head. ''It surprised me that I liked it but when I thought about Rosetta Stone Arabic it, it's not so strange for someone who is into rock'n'roll music as I was,'' Waters says. ''I believe that the kind of immediate passion and the basic themes of sex and life and death are very similar to rock'n'roll, although this is a uniquely European, Gallic form of song, really.'' Even as he explored the rock and soul of the late '60s, moved into acting and music theatre and migrated to Australia to appear in Hair on stage and later Rush on the ABC, Waters kept hold of Brel. He was probably the only cast member in the early '70s Sydney production of the English-language review Jacques Brel Is Alive And Well And Living In Paris who knew the songs. Definitely the only one who knew them in French. Two decades later when the success of Glass Onion, his stage show based on John Lennon, became such a success he took it around the world, Waters came back to Brel. In its second incarnation, after a brief tour 12 years ago, Brel is intense, dramatic and unapologetically French. ''In singing the Brel songs, one of the reasons I sing them in French is because I don't think you can separate a song from its sound. And that means of course its language and the use of vowel and consonant and the percussive nature of the language that Brel uses,'' says Waters, whose French is fluent. ''When I sing the songs I don't consciously think, 'Now I'm going to do a spot-on impersonation of Jacques Brel', but I like to give them the same flavour that he gives them.'' There are few things that are inconsequential in a Brel song - he trafficked in strong emotions and extremes - and it doesn't matter if you know the language; you just understand. ''In some ways I like singing these songs to an English-speaking audience because they really listen to the passion and the musicality of the songs,'' Waters says.
