January 2022, the singer Arno, suffering from cancer, learns that he has between three and six months left: the Belgian accelerates the tempo and throws his last strength into “Opex”, the ultimate album in his image, moving and disheveled.
These last months in the form of a last stand of the artist, who died on April 23 at the age of 72, were traced a few days ago by his closest fellow travelers, during a meeting with the press in Brussels.
The key scene takes place backstage after a concert on Flemish public radio on January 12, where Arno, eternal black suit, gray hair in battle, sang seated, already weakened, his face sunken, his voice more rocky than ever.
Once the lights are back on, at the time of debriefing, he passes on the doctor’s bad news to his professional entourage. This shrinking horizon. And the conclusion falls: “At work guys! I want to do more concerts and an album”.
In fact, frustrated with contact with his audience for two off-peak years (due to the Covid pandemic and his own illness), he returned to the stage in February. In Brussels and Ostend, his hometown.
Without forgetting to honor, in parallel, the other part of the challenge: the work in the studio on this last disc for which “he gave everything” and “thrown his last forces into the battle”, describes Damien Waselle, director of the Belgian branch of the Pias label.
From January, “an emergency process was put in place”, he adds. “This urgency gave him strength and energy”, adds Mirko Banovic, bassist and “right arm” of Arno. The singer drops the microphone on March 26 in the Brussels studio ICP, and will not return there. He dies four weeks later.
In addition to Banovic, Pias called on Arno that day to talk about his fifty-year-old friend and official cover photographer, Danny Willems, sound engineer Michel Dierickx, and the singer’s younger brother, Peter Hintjens, saxophonist. All gathered at the Archiduc, an art-deco bar in the center of Brussels where the Belgian Tom Waits was a regular.
A duet with Mireille Mathieu
With a smile, Peter Hintjens explains that he was, so to speak, summoned by his eldest to sign with him a title of the disc, their second collaboration only in half a century.
On “I’m not gonna whistle”, his saxophone responds to Arno’s harmonica, on an arrangement evoking the new wave of the 80s, composed by one of the Flemish artist’s sons.
This is the “family” track from “Opex” (an album released on Friday, named after a district of Ostend), where Arno reconnects with blues-rock guitars after the intimate “Vivre” performed in duet with the Lille pianist Sofiane Pamart. “He liked to alternate a soft record and a hard one”, they say at Pias.
But the album is above all eclectic. It conceals an ultimate voice-piano duet with Pamart, a title which had not been retained before. And an improbable reggae rhythm to accompany the duet cover with Mireille Mathieu of “La Paloma Adieu”, one of the singer’s great successes, released in 1973.
“It was a great fantasy for Arno to one day record a piece with Mireille Mathieu, he had boundless admiration for her, even if he often expressed it by making jokes”, says Damien Waselle.
Circumstances meant that the collaboration took a long time to take shape, and that their meeting ultimately never took place.
The Belgian and the Frenchwoman recorded their voices separately for this duet, and, sad coincidence, Mireille Mathieu finished her part in a studio in her native Vaucluse on the very day of Arno’s death.
“He will never have heard the final version and the mix of their two voices”, regrets the leader of Pias.
This article has been published automatically. Sources: ats / afp