The Melkweg in Amsterdam, February 2018. On stage was a singer who was a bit grayer than 35 years earlier, but had lost none of his charisma. And then that voice. Blues, soul, gospel and chanson united in a grating voice.
Yes, the Saturday at the age of 72 who died of pancreatic cancer Arno Hintjens was perhaps the best rock singer Belgium has ever known. The concerts he gave in the first half of the eighties with his band TC Matic are among the most exciting rock shows to be seen on the Dutch stages. The four albums that the band released between 1981 and 1985 still sound incomparable with the music of other rock groups of that time.
Together with guitarist Jean-Marie Aerts, Hintjens created an angular guitar sound that was more exciting and above all more physical than what we were used to here on the stages. Herman Brood was nice, but this was really orgasmic rock ‘n’ roll.
chansonnier
In the 36 years of music that Arno, the name under which he has performed since 1986, would release as a solo artist on more than twenty albums, rock ‘n’ roll was no longer the only music idiom that Hintjens indulged in. He could sing beautifully blues (and play the harmonica, the only instrument he mastered) and took to the chansonmetir as if the world hadn’t known Serge Gainsbourg or Jacques Brel.
He would only confess that love for music rooted in Europe relatively late. It suited him, the late bloomer who was born in Ostend in 1949. When he hit the Dutch stages with TC Matic, he was about ten years older than many of his colleagues. That also made TC Matic’s performances special. You were watching a new band in 1981, driven by an older man in his thirties.
Hintjens had then completed a decade of searching for form and style. Together with Paul Couter he initially played a not too exciting kind of blues rock, first in Freckleface and later as Tjens Couter. Hintjens was then still a shy, somewhat stuttering boy who played the harmonica. But rock ‘n’ roll has been his passion since he heard Elvis Presley at the age of 8 with One Night† “I’ve had my ass kicked,” he said in interviews.
Hintjens witnessed the rise of the genre and wanted nothing more than to contribute himself. He discovered in the late 1970s after a visit to America that imitating great American examples was not the right way. He didn’t want to become a white copy of James Brown and they already had enough good blues bands there.
oh la la la
With TC Matic he then made rock that is as original as it is steaming, which in oh la la la and Putain Putain produced two unrelenting cult classics. Strangely enough, there was no real great success. Record sales lagged behind live act reputation and TC Matic went down after the fourth album Yé Yé (1985) apart. It was beautiful on this record Elle Adore le Noir Pour Sortir Le Soirwhereupon Hintjens gave the first impetus to his solo oeuvre filled with European blues and modern chansons.
Albums like Charlatan (1988) and Idiots Savants became successful and are covers of Jacques Brels Le Bon Dieu and Adamos Les Filles du Bord de Mer became live favorites. Hintjens often changed bands, but would continue to perform until his death. He couldn’t live without the adrenaline that giving concerts gave him. It was his mistress, said the man whose charisma had a huge appeal to women. He gladly let that happen. “But music is my mistress, which never deceives me,” he once said.
Slowly he created a kind of Arno universe around him. A charming charlatan and charmer, without the desire for luxury that would befit a pop star of his allure. A pint with his friends in his favorite Brussels or Ostend (where he befriended Marvin Gaye while he was staying there in the early eighties) was enough for him. If only he could sing.
Doom message about pancreatic cancer did not prevent Hintjens from performing
At the end of 2019, the bad news came that it could be over soon. pancreatic cancer. Hintjens didn’t let that stop him from working. He managed to persuade his friend and director Dominique Deruddere to make a documentary about him (the three-part Charlatan, 2021). New songs were released, which will be made into an album posthumously. Last year he recorded the beautiful album with pianist Sofiane Pamart Vivre (Parce que – LA Collection) with a choice from his own repertoire.
When you put it on now, it sounds like Arno’s chronicle of the death foretold. It is music with the same expressiveness as Johnny Cash’s late work, only those songs were sung by others, while Arno just wrote his own work. vivre gives a new dimension.
Equally heartbreaking are the images of the concert that Arno gave on February 13 in the Brussels Ancienne Belgique. The guest was the Belgian pop star Stromae. The mutual admiration was immense, and this is reflected in the moving version of Putain Putain which they sing together.
Arno Hintjens enriched European pop music forty years ago, just as Stromae does now. But he is not the only musician who can call himself indebted to Arno. The entire Belgian wave of new bands such as the one that flooded the Netherlands in the 1990s, led by dEUS, would not have happened without him. The stubbornness in their music, that curious mixture of Anglo-Saxon rock with French song art: Arno Hintjens preceded them.
An earlier version of this piece stated 1945 as the year of birth, which must be 1949.
Three highlights from the oeuvre of Arno Hintjens
O La La La (1981)
Price track of TC Matic’s first album. In 1981 a somewhat longer version was included with that album. The most accessible song on the album turned out to be a dance smash hit that no DJ could ignore at the time. Now we would call it post-punk, back then it was called new wave† like the music of Killing Joke, which it reminded a bit of at the time.
Elle Adore Pour Sortit Le Soir (1985)
After three albums with increasingly abstract and harder rock that beckoned to both funk and metal, the stretch seemed a bit out for TC Matic. That Hintjens also got along well with a rustic waltz in a chanson atmosphere, he proves on what would become a key song to his later solo career: Elle Adore Pour Sortit Le Soir†
Les Yeux de ma Mere (1995)
Arno recorded it in 1995 for the album A La Francaise, which also made him a star in France. But the best versions are the live versions that he of Les Yeux de ma Mere recorded. The song about his mother gets the most poignant version on his latest album vivre with Sofiane Pamart on the electric piano. Hintjens recorded it last year, in everything you can hear the love and a longing for a reunion with his long-dead mother.