No more French music on the Brussels metro

There'll be no more Jacques Brel on the metro in Brussels because French music has been banned.

Instead passengers will be fed a diet of English, Italian and Spanish songs.

Brussels metro train at station Rogier (from Wikipedia, author - Platte C)

There's that rather tedious and certainly chauvinistic game among some sectors of the English-speaking world to "name 10 famous Belgians" or even just a couple come to that.

Of course there are plenty - past and present - who have made their mark on the world in one way or another: Hergé, Audrey Hepburn, Eddy Merckx, Kim Clijsters, Rubens to name just a few.

And right now the president of the European Council is a Belgian, Herman Van Rompuy - although ask anyone on the street who the heck he is and the chances are most wouldn't have a clue.

There's even a website dedicated to the country's most famous sons and daughters, Famousbelgians.net - proof that Belgium is more than just chocolate, beer, waffles, French fries and mussels (not all at the same time of course).

On the music side there are plenty of names, foremost among them probably in the French-speaking world (and also known to a fair number of English speakers) is the late Jacques Brel, arguably one of the outstanding songwriters in French of his generation.

Who doesn't know the haunting but beautiful "Ne me quitte pas" - perhaps not his original recording but others' interpretations?



Born in the suburbs of Brussels in 1929, Brel was, and probably remains, one of the city's most famous sons, even if much of his adult life was spent in Paris.

All of which surely makes the decision by the operator of the city's metro to stop playing French music at its stations something of a shame.

Granted Brel might not have appeared on the playlist of international hits piped into the metro system's 69 stops by the metro operator Société des transports intercommunaux de Bruxelles (STIB) or (for the sake of linguistic correctness) Maatschappij voor het Intercommunaal Vervoer te Brussel (MIVB), but he made the odd appearance along with other French language singers.

Unfortunately this apparently upset Dutch-speakers among the capital's travellers, as An Van Hamme, a spokesperson for STIB/MIVB spokesman explained.

"In February we decided to try playing songs from an international hit list and although that meant predominantly English-language artists there was the occasional song in French but virtually none in Dutch," said Van Hamme.

"We received dozens of complaints from Dutch-speakers asking why we weren't playing the same number of Dutch-language songs as those in French."

Ah yes, that linguistic divide in a city which is very officially bilingual.

Street sign in Brussels - in French and Dutch of course

Not a very difficult question to answer - honestly. But a tricky one to deal with.

So STIB/MIVB has done the only thing it could under the circumstances.

It has dropped French songs (and the occasional Dutch one) entirely from a playlist which will now consist of those in English (70 per cent) Spanish and Italian (both 15 per cent).

Perhaps it should have simply stuck to classical music as it does after nine o'clock in the evening.

That would have kept everyone happy - or at least not have upset anyone.