Arno: 'I'm a vampire'

What do you do when your beloved city is attacked? Fight back, but with flowers and music, believes Arno, who, in the wake of his new album, Human Incognito, is on the road, unwearied, around Europe once more. "I refuse to give in to hate and fear."

What do you do when your beloved city is attacked? Fight back, but with flowers and music, believes Arno, who, in the wake of his new album, Human Incognito, is on the road, unwearied, around Europe once more. "I refuse to give in to hate and fear."

It was mid-December and Arno was seated, sniffling, in the splendid new offices of the [PIAS] record company in the Sint-Laurensstraat/rue Saint-Laurent. "I have a drip, but don't worry: it's far away from my arse – I don't have to sit on it," he says with a laugh. Once a fine young thing, Le Plus Beau is now 66. "Je suis un old motherfucker," he sings on his new album, ready to see things in perspective, "Young too short, stupid too long". "Oh well, I was born old, I will die young," he coughs.

What had happened in Paris on 13 November still bothers him. All the more so as his beloved Brussels is being depicted as the "capital of terrorism" and a "jihadi hotbed". "After the attacks, I was zapping and on a foreign station I saw a journalist reporting live from Dansaert, almost straight across from where I live. He said that all the bars and shops were closed. Such bullshit! I went down to clobber him, but he was already gone."

Arno describes himself as a "chanteur de charme raté" (a failed crooner), but also as a voyeur. On Human Incognito, he drives home the point with stripped-down European blues. "Je veux vivre dans un monde où on ne doit pas chercher / Chercher la beauté, chercher la vérité (I want to live in a world where you don't have to search / Search for beauty, search for truth)," he muses. He takes a look back, too, at some old loves, as in "Oublie qui je suis" ("Forget Who I Am") and "Now She Likes Boys". But most of all, he takes pride in the ideals of his own generation, but he is not blind to what is going on today.

"The last few years, I have been confronted more and more with what is past. The world is changing... My father experienced the Second World War, my grandfather the First and the Second. I am the first generation to grow up without a war in Europe. We have been lucky, kid. But now look: it's as if we were living in wartime."These are chaotic times.

As Marvin Gaye once stated: what's going on?
Arno: We are back in the 1930s, son. Conservatism has an erection as high as the Eiffel Tower. It's the same in music: everything is so conformist, so clean. It's all about money, the rest is conversation. There is no anarchy any more. I miss that. It is all so puritanical too. In the 1960s, you could see tits on TV! We revolted against the system. We let our hair grow so they would stop us at the school gate. We were left-wing, anarchists. Things had to change. It was the first time in history that young people created a culture of their own. Clothes, music, art. Everything was a change of scenery.

"Change guns into flowers," you say. I thought Arno had no time for hippies.
Arno: Ah well, sometimes I find the past inspiring. [Grins] I don't like nostalgia, but I'm faced with it more and more. Woodstock, that was love and peace. We washed ourselves in the river, now you go to a festival and you can hire a bungalow and a sauna. What the fuck?

That hippy goes a bit further in "Je veux vivre", which is a plea for brotherhood: "Je veux vivre dans un monde sans jalousie, sans amants / Et où les pessimistes sont contents."
Arno: That is a utopia, son. You know, when I sing that song in France, everyone is silent. But I don't want to be a committed singer, I'm no spokesman. Things would be really bad if people like me wanted to change the world. I'm a vampire – people inspire me, not a goldfish in a bowl. Everything that happens in the world is caused by people. Without people, no Hitler, without people, no Donald Trump.

You beg God to exist. Does the atheist believe in something higher, after all?
Arno: I put myself in God's position: if he existed, he would be pissed off with what he created. In Buddhism, they say: if you meet the Buddha, kill the Buddha. That means: it is very pretentious to see Buddha. He himself must remain invisible: he must be visible in people. Look at me: I hide away, I am incognito. I want to create my own surrealism, as an excuse for talking about those things.

Is that why your body has been erased from your suit on the cover of the new album?
Arno: Yes. I'm looking at myself, but you don't see me.

And when you see yourself like that, what do you think?
Arno: On est moche, mais on s'amuse [Ugly, but having fun]. [Laughs] Needs a lot of work.

Last year, we celebrated 65 years of Arno. You were portrayed all over the place in quotes. When that happens, do you see the real Arno or the figure?
Arno: You have to live with that. I don't read what people write about me. People who come to the gigs ask my musicians whether I am on dope. Or on the drink. If I was to do all that, I would have been dead four times over by now. Fuck!

Don't you ever think: I would like not to be Arno, but someone else?
Arno: It's too late for that. My grandmother used to say: "Arno, you should never try to be someone else, because it's hard work." It's the same in music. I've come to terms with the flawed person I am. And you'd better not try acting the star in Brussels. Look at the "Archifuck", you could just find yourself at the bar there alongside Miles Davis and David Byrne.

You act in films now and then – recently, for example, with Nathalie Baye in Préjudice. Surely you are somebody different then?
Arno: Acting is therapy for me. Then I'm working for someone else. I can enjoy that occasionally, provided it doesn't last too long. [Laughs]

When I listen to your lyrics, I think: Arno isn't an actor, he's a painter.
Arno: I used to do a lot of drawing. My son paints. There are still painters and sculptors in my family. I see everything visually. A French journalist said to me last week: "You don't write lyrics the way singers do." Yeah, I am visual. Even when I'm talking.

Your album was announced as the unadorned Arno, musically austere. At times, however, it explodes. Couldn't stop yourself?
Arno: It is my manager's wet dream to do a tour with just my voice and a pianist. But I'm not ready for it yet: I would find it too boring. For me, making music is very physical. I am addicted to it, to that adrenaline. It's a fucking bitch.

They say this is your last album.
Arno: Maybe. It feels that way. Certainly today – I feel terrible. [Laughs] And yet, I'm already writing new material.

He stands up, his eyes sparkling. He fishes a piece of paper out of his jacket pocket. "See, I wrote down some lyrics yesterday: 'Kiss me once, kiss me twice, it's been a long time...' Fantastic song, performed way back by Frank Sinatra and Louis Armstrong. I would like to do that my way. [Stops to think] Here, take an orange for the road."


L'UNION FAIT LA FORCE
We talk again three and a half months later, towards the end of March. Brussels is licking its wounds after the blind terror attacks a week earlier; Arno is catching his breath in the city between his performances in France and Switzerland. His cold has turned into bronchitis.

A lot has happened. Donald Trump, the Great Visionary who wants to make America great again, has called Brussels a hellhole. Arno has written an angry open letter, in which he takes up the cudgels for his home base. And urges Trump to take a look at Christ's Entry Into Brussels in 1889, a painting by the Ostend symbolist James Ensor that can be seen in the Getty Museum in LA.

"That guy will say anything," sighs Arno. "But he still wins people over. I'm not surprised, however. Look at Flanders. I'm not naming any names, but I find that guy a dangerous dude."

As Bob Dylan once said: the times they are a-changing. Suddenly, we seem to live in a different world.
Arno: Abroad, in interviews over the last few months, I had to explain Molenbeek all the time. My answer was: hot water comes out of the taps there too, like anywhere. The media exaggerate everything. You have to watch out for that.

Where were you on 22 March?
Arno: I was asleep in the tour bus in Marseilles. Suddenly, everyone started texting me. I thought: shit, it has happened, after all. A few years ago, I went to do a gig in Beirut. Just 200 metres from our hotel, a bomb exploded. Thankfully, we don't have that in Europe, I thought. And now look. But it was to be expected. Brussels is the capital of Europe. Of course it's a target.

It is being said now that Brussels is a victim of its openness, its tolerance. Whereas we used to think that that was its strength, its beauty.
Arno: Brussels still lets everything clash with everything else – that's what makes it so interesting here. The danger is that those attacks will fuel conservatism even more. That way, you create nationalists and extremists. On the other hand, I don't like saying this, but those dark times also stimulate creativity. It was no accident that Dadaism emerged during the First World War. If the world was perfect, I would be in the shit. And so would you.

Those attackers were born and raised here. Were we blind to their frustration?
Arno: I don't know. I don't want to give an opinion on that – that's dangerous.

But these tragedies must inspire us, we must learn from it and change.
Arno: Of course. We mustn't be blind to the past. There is always a danger of forgetting our own history. When the Nazis invaded during the Second World War, my father decided in 25 minutes to put the whole family and its household effects on a fishing boat to England. Now everyone is coming to Europe, and we want to send them back. Think about what happened in Vietnam: Americans massacred whole villages there with napalm. Look at the bloody 1970s of the IRA. They have a lot of dead people on their conscience. There have always been dark times.

And now? Are you hopeful?
Arno: Yes. You have to be.

What do you feel now when you walk through the streets of Brussels?
Arno: I don't have any problem with Brussels. It's a dirty beauty. Brussels has been called the new Berlin. When you look at how much is going on here in the cultural sphere, for such a small metropolis, it's incredible.
When I moved from Ostend to Brussels in 1971, Brussels was Ostend's little sister. But that has gradually changed. It is the most fantastic city there is. I have lived in Paris, Amsterdam, and London, but I would never want to live anywhere else now. Brussels the capital of terrorism? I refuse to think that; I'm not giving in to hate and fear.

A big smile. He slips me a throat lozenge. It sticks to my teeth while I'm walking out. "L'union fait la force" (the title of an Arno song from way back, and also Belgium's national motto – "Strength lies in unity" is the translation on the federal state's website) is ringing in my head. Let's hope.

2/7, Couleur Café
13/10, 20.00, Ancienne Belgique