Posted Sep 30, 2022, 4:20 PMUpdated on Sep 30, 2022 at 4:21 p.m.
“Opex” is Arno’s last album, released posthumously at the beginning of autumn. Feeling his strength abandoning him, he refined it until his last breath, not without asking his brother Peter (saxophonist) and his son Félix (programmer) to participate. A first, for a last.
On the cover of “La Paloma adieu”, in duet with Mireille Matthieu, he slips these few words to his audience: “My life is going away but don’t have too much trouble…”, forever sealing his farewell. The meeting seems improbable, but Arno had his surprising hobbies, slipping into his recordings, covers of Adamo (“Les Filles du bord de mer”) of Dalida (“I’m resting”) alongside tributes to Serge Gainsbourg ( “Elisa”) or the Rolling Stones (“Mother’s Little Helper”).
Mireille’s voice
A fan of Mireille for years, they will only have spoken on the phone once, the fault of successive confinements and illness, pancreatic cancer which was already weakening Arno. And when Mireille Matthieu finally puts her voice on the tape in a studio in Vaucluse, it is April 23, 2022, the weather is dark, even sinister, Arno has just died in Brussels at the age of 72.
“Opex”, the title of the album refers to a district located east of Ostend, where his parents grew up and where his grandparents ran a café. The ghost of his grandfather also appears here, in the song “Mon grand-père”, a magnificent cavernous slow in which he recounts his meeting with the daughter of his grandfather’s mistress. Nothing creepy, just tenderness for love stories under the coat, a theme that Arno has often addressed.
Of the ten titles, four are in English. The album distills a subtle dose of melancholy, if not the feeling of a general appeasement, as on “Teck Me Back” or “La Vérité”, in which he sings “I’m going to marry the wind…”. This is also the introduction of the disc. Sadness is not appropriate, rather the celebration of a well-filled existence.
Call to the almighty
“Opex” turns out to be the eighteenth studio album under his identity of Arno or Charles, a kind of double. It is obviously necessary to add the records of his group TC Matic, four in number, as well as the much more obscure recordings of the 1970s under the names of Tiens coster and Reclasse, his first essay released in 1972. This ultimate posthumous work celebrates his half -century of good and loyal service.
He covers Elvis “One Night (With You)”, and in a surge of faith appeals to the almighty in the penultimate title named, “Short-circuit in my mind”, a moment of great beauty, piano voice with Sofiane Pamart, bonus of his previous opus “Vivre” released in May 2021. It is the lifelong friend Danny Willems who signs the cover photo, the only one in his discography where the artist turns his back on the goal. Goodbye, life.
“Opex” by Arno (1 PIAS album)
