With cancer, the singer starts a poignant tour in Belgium under the seal of the vital injunction.
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“The concerts is my life … For forty years. I am very happy to be able to do it again.” Sunday, February 6, in the aftermath of the first of the five shows he has planned to give, at the rate of One a week, Brussels and Ostend, until February 25, Arnold Charles Ernest Hintjens, said Arno, joined us, near the Sainte-Catherine Square, take a hot chocolate at the small cabbage of Brussels. A den where he likes to hang out, find inspiration, “observing people”. After this little parenthesis, he will return to his nearby apartment, not to miss the show by Michel Drucker. “I’m a fan,” he whispers with a smile.
The day before, the singer has returned to the foot of the old Belgium, the worship of the Brussels rock, where 800 people – tax-imposed gauge – made him a triumph. The scene, so long playground of his thirst for freedom, is today a shot of adrenaline that gives back forces to a bruised body. If a nasty virus has held the general atmosphere in the last two years, destiny has had the heavy hand with Arno, who, in February 2020, announced that he was fighting against pancreatic cancer. While the results of chemotherapy seemed encouraging, the singer went back for five months at the hospital, a few days before his 72 e on May 21, 2021.
“2021 was the worst year of my life, he lets go. For the first time, I have almost not played music and all my concerts were canceled.” As if it were not enough, The disease took away at the same time several intimates. “My friend, my brother, the guitarist Paul Caste, with whom I started music and founded my first groups [Freckleface, Tjens Cut, TC Matic], and my mentor, Hubert de Cleer.” Dutch teacher in Ostend, The latter had initiated the Blues his 15-year-old student, lending him from Lightnin’Hopkins or Sonny Boy Williamson albums. “I became addicted,” remembers Arno, who will later find the teacher, exiled to Kathmandu (Nepal), for a more esoteric learning.
Ostend Bluesman
In this context known to all his fans, difficult not to have a tight heart by discovering on the scene of the “AB”, the word “live” writes 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” -, whose Brussels Pias label is on the initiative, asking artists to revisit their repertoire on a stripped mode. With the caressant piano of Pamart, the Ostend Bluesman thus reinterpreted a selection of his most melancholy songs.
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