On a cold morning in 1981, Marvin Gaye boarded a ferry from Dover to Ostend. Like many people washed up in this scruffy Belgian beach town, the soul singer was running away from his past. Struggling with drug addiction, a broken marriage and money problems, he desperately needed a safe haven.
The Ostend club owner Freddy Cousaert came to his aid. He put him up in his seafront apartment at Albert-I promenade 77 and encouraged the singer to go for healthy runs in the dunes. ‘I’m an orphan at the moment,’ Gaye complained in an interview, ‘and Ostend is my orphanage’.
The sea cure worked, at least briefly. Gaye wrote the soul song Sexual Healing while living in Ostend. Considered one of the greatest love songs of all time, it can be tracked down on YouTube, where the original video, last time I looked, had logged 164 million views and more than 27,000 comments. ‘Chances are someone is getting laid to this tonight,’ someone recently commented.
In 2012, the tourist office hit on the inspired idea of launching a two-hour documentary walk in the footsteps of Marvin Gaye. Two years later, a memorial plaque was embedded in the paving outside the apartment building where Gaye composed the song.
The Kurzaal, where Marvin Gaye performed, has installed a bronze sculpture in the lobby showing the singer sitting at his piano. The tourist office has even discussed the idea of a Marvin Gaye museum. But these ambitious ideas tend to come and go, like the tides.
Derek Blyth’s hidden secret of the day: Derek Blyth is the author of the bestselling “The 500 Hidden Secrets of Belgium”. He picks out one of his favourite hidden secrets for The Brussels Times every day.
