Rain on the Lilacs

Somewhere in the archive there is a Sunday morning from November 2006. A comedian is in the chair on Desert Island Discs, and among his eight he has chosen a Jacques Brel record. He is asked why, and he answers with complete honesty: he does not speak French, he has no idea what the man is singing about, but the song is a burst of joy and he wants it with him on the island.

Nobody said anything. Not the presenter, not the producer, not the researcher who cleared the rights, not the compliance officer, not the continuity announcer, not one of the several million people who heard it go out. The tape rolled on, the accordion came up, and the programme moved to the next disc.

I want to be clear about the scale of what I am describing. Nothing happened. No harm was done, no one was libelled, no policy was misreported, no war was justified. A man said a wrong thing about a chanson and a radio programme carried on. If you are waiting for me to produce the outrage, there isn’t one, and I would ask you to hold that thought, because the absence of consequence is the entire argument.

I did not know it at the time. But listening back, that Sunday morning is the place where my relationship with the BBC started, quietly, without any announcement to either party, to come apart.

The song is “Madeleine,” which Brel wrote with Gérard Jouannest and Jean Corti and first sang at the Olympia in 1961. It is two minutes and thirty-eight seconds of brass and accordion at a gallop, and it is one of the most cheerful sounding recordings ever made. This is not an accident and it is not a trap laid for the unwary. It is the entire architecture of the thing.

A young man is waiting at a tram stop with an armful of lilacs. They are going to take the number thirty-three tram, eat chips at Eugène’s, go to the pictures, and he is going to tell her that he loves her. Madeleine is his Christmas, she is his America. He says all this in a rush, over that ecstatic oompah, a man laying out an evening he can hardly believe his luck in having.

And in the third line of the song, before a single thing has gone wrong, sung as brightly as everything around it, he mentions that he brings her the lilacs every week.

He does not complain. He does not say she is cruel, or careless, or that she has stood him up before. Brel never gives us one word of grievance, and that restraint is the craft. He simply lets slip a small proud domestic fact, the way a man might mention the brand of tobacco he always buys, and it detonates quietly under the entire song. This is not a first date. It is a standing appointment that only one party keeps.

Then the rain comes, and the grammar begins to shift. J’attends. J’attendais. J’attendrai. I am waiting; I was waiting; tomorrow I will be waiting. It rains on the lilacs, and it rains, he observes, the way it rains every week. The tram is missed. Eugène’s will be closing. He throws the flowers away the way he throws them away every week, and is left standing in the wet holding the declarations of love he had got ready.

Twice more he repeats that she is too good for him, and each time he attributes the opinion to one of her cousins by name, and the name is different every time. Joël. Then Gaston. Then Gaspard. There is a whole family of them. An entire wet Sunday of relatives has taken this boy aside, one after another, over months, to tell him gently to stop coming. There are so many that he can no longer keep them straight, and he repeats their verdict cheerfully, as though it were a compliment to her rather than a sentence passed on him. Meanwhile the word he reaches for to describe her thins as the evening dies. She begins the song as his Christmas, becomes merely his horizon, and ends as nothing more than his hope.

And then he announces, in the same key, at the same tempo, with the same brass, that tomorrow he will bring fresh lilacs, and go on bringing them all week.

Here is the thing you do not need a word of French to hear, the thing that makes the record unbearable rather than merely clever: the song gets louder.

Not sadder. Louder. The arrangement never grants him a minor chord, never slows, never offers the listener that small mercy by which music conventionally announces that a story has turned. No cloud crosses the brass, not once, not for a bar. What happens instead is that the whole thing winds tighter. The tempo presses. The band swells at each refrain. And the voice, which began the evening chatting to you about chips and a tram, begins to climb, and goes on climbing, until by the final verse a man is standing alone in the rain at a closed tram stop, holding nothing, shouting about how much he is looking forward to tomorrow.

That is the sound of the record. Anyone with ears can hear it, and no dictionary is required. It is the sound of a man raising his voice to drown something out, of somebody insisting past the point where insistence is dignified, past the point where anybody is left to insist to. A French critic hears that same ascent as hope surging back, and he is not wrong. Hope and panic make exactly the same noise in a man who is refusing to admit what he has already understood. That is Brel’s whole method. He does not write the collapse. He writes the volume of the effort not to collapse, and lets you do the arithmetic.

So the song does not modulate from happiness into sorrow, because it was never happy. It is a portrait of a man who has decided, at some cost we are never shown, not to know what is being done to him. The joy is not packaging around the tragedy. The joy is the tragedy, sung at full throat, accelerating, for two minutes and thirty-eight seconds. The reason it is a masterpiece rather than a party trick is that Brel refuses to let you off. He gives you the brass all the way to the end. He makes you dance to a man’s humiliation, and then he makes you notice that you have been dancing.

Let me say clearly what I am not arguing.

I am not arguing that the guest was a fool. The opening of that record is pure delight and nothing else. Anyone hearing the first verse cold hears joy, because joy is what Brel put there, deliberately, and joy is what the song is for. The giveaway is cumulative. It lives in the climb, in the accumulating pressure of a voice that will not stop rising. You need the whole thing to feel it, and I will come back to that, because the whole thing is precisely what was not broadcast.

He was asked what a piece of music did to him and he answered truthfully, which is more than most people manage on the radio. He was also, as it happens, a comedian who had spent years writing characters magnificently deluded about their own standing, including a man insisting he is the only one of his kind in a village conspicuously full of them. The narrator of “Madeleine” is that character with lilacs in his arms. He had reached, blind, for the song that describes his own working method, and it would have been the finest moment in the episode.

That is the part that hurts. The programme’s one job, its only job, for eighty years, is to draw the line between the disc and the life. It had a gift sitting in the studio and it wrote down joy and went to the next track.

How does that happen? Not through stupidity. That is the thing I have had to give up believing, and giving it up was worse than keeping it.

It happens because every person in that chain was doing their job correctly. The researcher’s job is clearances, durations, availability, the spelling of Jouannest. The producer’s job is a shapely thirty-five minutes. The presenter’s job is to follow the record back into the guest’s childhood and never, ever to break the intimacy the programme runs on. Inside that format, you have misunderstood this song is not a difficult thing to say. It is an unsayable thing, a category error, the sound of a pedant crashing through a confession.

The compliance officer’s job is to comb that tape for anything that might offend, defame, or embarrass. And here is the sentence I would carve over the door of Broadcasting House: there is no post anywhere in that building whose remit is whether the thing just said was true. Not true in the legal sense, or the balanced sense, or the not actionable sense. True. The corporation employs whole cadres to ensure that nobody swears, and precisely nobody to notice that a song about erotic humiliation has been introduced to the nation as a burst of happiness. Being wrong about art is not classified as a risk, so no process exists to catch it, so it is never caught.

And the tracks are played for about a minute. Two minutes thirty-eight, clipped, and clipped almost always from the front. Which means the fade came down somewhere around the first rainfall, and the thing that gives the song away, the long climb, the voice going up and up until it cracks the evening open, was cut before it ever reached a transmitter. The corporation excised the evidence, broadcast the first verse of a man’s happiness, and then had no occasion to wonder why nobody in the audience objected. It had, without meaning to, produced the sincerest possible tribute to the song. It heard the joy, stopped listening before the desperation, and went cheerfully on to the next thing.

None of that would matter if it were one song. It is not one song. It is the house style now.

I don’t know what it means, but it makes me feel… Listen for that sentence and you will hear it every hour of every day, across every network, in the mouths of guests and presenters alike, and you will notice that it is unanswerable. Nobody can contradict a report of your own sensation. It cannot be checked, cannot be argued with, cannot embarrass anybody, cannot generate a complaint, cannot end a career. It is the safest utterance in broadcasting, and an institution under twenty years of siege has quietly reorganised itself around safe utterances the way a body reorganises itself around a wound.

So criticism became autobiography. The question what is this about was retired, gently, without an announcement, and replaced by what did this do to you, a question to which every answer is correct. What is lost is not accuracy. What is lost is the whole proposition that a work of art is about something, that it makes a claim, that it can be got right and got wrong, that a stranger dead half a century can tell you something you did not already feel. Against a culture that asks only how things make us feel, Brel is defenceless. He wrote a song that feels like happiness in order to say something terrible about hope, and we have built a machine that registers the feeling and is constitutionally unable to receive the something.

People assume the BBC lost me over politics. It did not. It was a chanson on a Sunday morning. And it was not even the error. It was the silence around the error, the smooth unbroken thirty-five minutes, the fact that a mistake of that size could pass through so many careful, decent, well trained hands and not one of them was the hand whose job it was to catch it.

This is what a canary is for. The canary does not die of anything important. It dies of the ordinary air, in a place where nothing has happened yet, and it tells you what the air is.

Nothing was at stake in that studio. No minister was being protected, no lawyer consulted, no election pending, no complaint anticipated, no lobby watching. The truth was free. It cost nobody anything, it embarrassed nobody, it was one dictionary away, and a first year student of French could have supplied it in the time it takes to boil a kettle. And the machine could not reach it. Not would not. Could not, because it has no organ for reaching such things.

That is the question I have never been able to put down. If an institution cannot get right the thing that costs nothing, on what basis am I to trust it with the thing that costs everything? When the truth is expensive. When somebody powerful would rather it were not told, when the lawyers are in the room, when a government is leaning on the building and the story is difficult and the safe version is right there, gleaming, ready made. On that day, I am asked to believe, the same people, running the same processes, inside the same culture, will suddenly become rigorous.

I would love to believe it. I find I have no argument for it, only a memory of an accordion.

It ended the way these things actually end, which is to say it did not end that morning at all. I went on listening for years. You do not leave over one Sunday. You simply notice, once, that the thing you loved is not doing what you had always assumed it was doing, and after that you cannot stop noticing, and each time it costs a little more to explain away, until one day you realise you have been making excuses on someone else’s behalf for two decades and that they never once asked you to.

I have not listened in years. And I know exactly what I sound like. I sound like a man who has stood at a tram stop for twenty years with an armful of flowers nobody asked him to bring.

But then that is the shape of the whole thing, isn’t it. The corporation still turns up every morning with the same lilacs and the same bright tune, and the tense has quietly changed to the future. We will do better, we will rebuild trust, we will be there tomorrow. Same key. Same tempo. Getting louder. And nothing whatever in the arrangement to suggest that anybody has gone.

It is a magnificent record. I simply stopped being able to hear it as a happy one.