Remembering Lou Deprijck: The Voice Behind ‘Ça Plane Pour Moi’ and His Colorful Life

2023-09-20 16:40:49

The death of the Belgian singer was announced on Tuesday September 19. Lou Deprijck will be remembered as the voice of the hit “ça plane pour moi”, made famous by Plastic Bertrand.

He was born in 1946 in Lessines, the birthplace of René Magritte, of whom he was a fan. “He always wore a hat that reminded me of Magritte”, remembers Benjamin Maréchal, Belgian journalist. Lou Deprijck, a singer-songwriter, but above all a colorful character, died at the age of 77. The news was announced on Tuesday September 19 by his partner.

“He was completely crazy,” recalls Benjamin Maréchal who was received at his home only two months ago. “In his house, there were lots of celebrity underwear”, laughs the journalist. Lou Deprijck took over his “underpants museum”, originally opened in the center of Brussels, from Jan Bucquoy to install his collections of underwear that belonged to celebrities in his house in Lessines.

But Lou Deprijck was not (only) known for his underpants and his hats… It is to him that we owe the extremely famous song ” ça plane pour moi ” released in 1977.

Lou Deprijck returned to the forefront in the 2010s when he tried to regain the rights to this song which had become very lucrative. This punk-sounding hit has been covered numerous times, notably by the American rock groups Sonic Youth and Red Hot Chili Peppers. In 2006, the Coca-Cola brand chose it for an campaign in Southeast Asia.

Lou Deprijck claimed authorship, even indicating that it was his voice and not that of Plastic Bertrand that we heard on the tape.

An expert report on which he relied to defend himself, “reveals that with the sentence endings noted on the tapes, we can only attribute the voice to a Ch’ti or a Picard”according to Lou Deprijck.

For his part, Plastic Bertrand, whose real name is Roger Jouret, who is now 69 years old, has always opposed this in two Brussels judgments, at first instance and on appeal in 2006, designating him as the legal interpreter of the song. In its repertoire of works, Sacem (French society of authors, composers and music publishers) presents him as “performer” of the hit, Francis “Lou” Deprijck being the composer and Yves Lacomblez the author.

Although this “judicial war”as Benjamin Maréchal remembers, brought him back to the forefront of the media scene, Lou Deprijck remained “outside the spotlight” these last years. After getting a little involved in local political life and taking over a café in Lessines, he continued “his globe-trotting life” between Thailand, Belgium, France and Australia, with his partner 50 years his junior. Vanessa Vanderkimpen, also in showbiz, is known for being a female lookalike of Michael Jackson.

“My darling, my man… I accompanied you until your last breath as you wanted… You will be my one and last love”, she wrote on Facebook.

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