“Concerts are my life… For forty years. I’m very happy to still be able to do it. » Sunday February 6, the day following the first of the five shows he has planned to give, at the rate of one per week, in Brussels and Ostend, until February 25, Arnold Charles Ernest Hintjens, known as Arno, joined us , near Place Sainte-Catherine, have a hot chocolate at Petit Chou de Bruxelles. A lair where he likes to hang out, find inspiration“watching people”. After this little parenthesis, he will return to his apartment nearby, so as not to miss Michel Drucker’s show. “I’m a fan »he whispers, smiling.
The day before, the singer returned on foot from the Old Belgium, a cult Brussels rock hall, where 800 people – imposed gauge obliges – gave him a triumph. The scene, so long a playground for his thirst for freedom, is now a shot of adrenaline that restores strength to a bruised body. If a nasty virus has weighed down the general atmosphere for the past two years, fate had a heavy hand with Arno, who, in February 2020, announced that he was battling pancreatic cancer. While the results of chemotherapy seemed encouraging, the singer left for five months in the hospital, a few days before his 72e birthday, May 21, 2021.
« 2021 has been the worst year of my life, he lets go. For the first time, I hardly played any music and all my concerts were cancelled. » As if that were not enough, the disease took away several close friends at the same time. “My friend, my brother, guitarist Paul Couter, with whom I had started music and founded my first bands [Freckleface, Tjens Couter, TC Matic]and my mentor, Hubert De Cleer. » A Dutch teacher in Ostend, the latter had introduced his 15-year-old pupil to the blues, by lending him albums by Lightnin’Hopkins or Sonny Boy Williamson. “I became addicted”, remembers Arno, who will later find the teacher, exiled in Kathmandu (Nepal), for a more esoteric learning.
The Ostend bluesman
In this context known to all his fans, it is difficult not to have a heavy heart when discovering on the stage of the “AB”, the word ” to live “ written in capital letters of red neon above the musicians. This vital injunction is also the name of the album that Arno published, in May 2021, with the northern pianist Sofiane Pamart. The first reference of a collection – “Because” – initiated by the Brussels label PIAS, asking artists to revisit their repertoire in a stripped down fashion. With the caressing piano of Pamart, the bluesman from Ostend has thus reinterpreted a selection of his most melancholic songs.
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