Many in the English-speaking world first heard of Jacques Brel through Scott Walker’s championing, yet when Scott launched his post-Walker Brothers solo career with his recording of Brel’s 'Mathilde' in 1967, Brel had been an enormous star in France for years. That lofty status was remarkable, given Brel’s lyrical obsessions with doomed romance, loneliness, prostitution and death. As he said in 1966, “I’m obsessed by those things that are ugly and sordid, that people don’t want to talk about, as if they were afraid of touching a wound that might soil them.”