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probably places I’d rather be – but this is where I think
I need to be at the moment.”
Cousaert (who died in 1998) and his wife made the
soul singer feel at home by cooking his favourite foods
– chicken and French fries – and encouraging him to
start exercising again, which he did by taking long treks
across the sand dunes and playing basketball in the
town’s sports centre.
Indeed, Gaye’s beachfront flat at 77 Residence Jane
still stands today and it can be spotted as part of the
tour, alongside the outdoor basketball court, which
looks the same as it did when he was shooting hoops
there all those years ago.
Because little has changed
here in the past three decades,
you get a sense of just how quiet
it is, the rhythm of the place
dictated by the fishing fleets
that trawl its waters. Yet this
very absence of energy seemed
to re-energise Gaye. With a
handful of his regular musicians
who had flown over from the States, along with Belgian
guitarist Danny Bossaert, he checked into a tiny studio
in the village of Ohain and began recording what would
become the last and biggest hit of his career.
“
Sexual Healing
was put together because of the
rhythm of the waves. When you hear it, you can literally
hear the rhythm of the waves in the song,” says his
publicist, Gloria Byart. Originally recorded as a funky
instrumental, it was written by one of Gaye’s long-time
songwriting collaborators, Odell Brown, while he was
staying with the singer and the Cousaerts in Ostend.
It was Brown who encouraged Gaye to leave his
apartment and sit on the beach to find inspiration for the
lyrics. It was on one of those solitary vigils that the
singer finally wrote those famous lines that speak of a
sea storm inside him, and the waves rising and rising.
Those waves still hammer the powdery sands of
Ostend today and there’s no better place to observe them
than from the seafront Café de Floride, Gaye’s old local,
which I also visit as part of the tour.
“It’s only recently that we woke up to realise that
we had a legend living here for a while,” says Anita, an
English teacher and regular in the basic yet homely café.
“Everybody in Ostend knows now that Marvin was here,
but back in the early 80s, things were different. There
were no mobile phones for people to snap pics of him on.
Only one film crew ever came to speak to him. It may
“HE CHECKED INTO
A TINY STUDIO IN THE
NEARBY VILLAGE OF
OHAIN, AND BEGAN
RECORDING WHAT
WOULD BECOME THE
LAST AND BIGGEST HIT
OF HIS CAREER”
MERCY, MERCY ME
04
Gaye in Our Lady
of the Dunes Church
in Mariakerke
05
With his son
Bubby and the
Cousaert children
06
Drinking with Prince
Charles of Belgium
04
05
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M A R V I N G A Y E
O S T E N D
