The eggs factor: Belgian pop star finds fame again from rural Irish exile

Something odd occurred to Philippe Robrecht whereas hunkered down in lockdown on Inishbofin, a tiny island with simply 170 inhabitants off Ireland’s Atlantic coast: he turned, again, a pop star.

The 55-year-old musician and singer had not made an album in nearly a decade and was all however forgotten in his native Belgium when the Covid-19 pandemic reached Ireland final yr.

He and his spouse supplemented their revenue on the island, their residence since 2017, by promoting eggs and fish to neighbours.

Then Robrecht rediscovered his muse and wrote and recorded two double albums in his residence studio. And a TV expertise present in Belgium featured certainly one of his outdated hits and catapulted it to primary within the charts.

“It’s quite unusual. It never happened before,” he stated this week.

The present, referred to as Love for Music, featured one other artist’s cowl model of Robrecht’s 1992 track Magie, or magic, in February. The cover version went to quantity three within the charts – solely to be eclipsed by Robrecht’s original, which went to primary.

“People liked the new version but they turned out to be more excited about the original. There was a lot of feedback, press, radio, a storm of people sending things through social media.”

The rekindling of fame coincided with a burst of creativity that resulted in Robrecht producing two double albums, titled 2020 and 2021.

2020, a mixture of 20 new and outdated songs in Dutch, obtained broad airplay in Belgium and the Netherlands. Robrecht plans to launch 2021, a mixture of 21 new and outdated tracks in English, this week. It has pop and conventional Irish influences, notably within the track No Craic, concerning the loneliness and hardship of lockdown.

Robrecht is happy and a bit puzzled by his revival, since even in his Nineties heyday, when he made 9 albums and toured along with his band, he didn’t chase publicity. “I never squeezed the lemon when it came to popularity. I pushed it a bit away from me. There was nothing else that I wanted to do except play with my band.”

Magie – which he recorded with the London Symphony Orchestra – made him a radio favorite however after the Nineties Robrecht drifted to fame’s margins.

“I kept my focus on music. I wrote songs for musicals, campaigns, tributes. Music is an art, a passion. The showbusiness around it wasn’t really my thing. As a person I was a bit low-profile and not very reachable.”

Regular guests to Ireland, in 2017 he and his spouse, Leen moved to Inishbofin, a bucolic, windswept island that derives its identify from Inis Bó Finne, Irish for Island of the White Cow. Seven miles off the coast of Connemara, it’s a haven for seals and hikers and over the a long time has attracted writers comparable to Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, Cecil Day Lewis and Seamus Heaney.

The couple promote surplus eggs from their hens. “Some people on the island pass by for a box. It’s not a business but a typical island thing. You do all different things to keep costs down and make ends meet.”

Robrecht, who additionally labored as a trainer on the native college, has a recording studio and earlier than the pandemic did gigs in pubs. “What the lockdown did was push me into a lot of time and devotion to writing songs.” On the albums Robrecht performed the guitar, bass, banjo and keyboard and invited Irish and Belgian musicians to play flute, violin and different devices.

He is philosophical about whether or not inspiration strikes again. “I’m just a writer. Either the songs come or they don’t.”