Belgian singer and composer Lou Deprijck, who claimed authorship of Plastic Bertrand’s hit “Ça plan pour moi”, has died at the age of 77, his partner said on Tuesday.
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This punk-sounding song has been covered many times, most notably by American rock groups Sonic Youth and Red Hot Chili Peppers. In 2006, the Coca-Cola brand chose it for an advertising campaign in Southeast Asia.
“My darling, my husband… I accompanied you to your last breath, as you wanted… You will be my only and last love,” wrote Vanessa Vanderkimpen, herself an artist who specializes in Michael Jackson impersonations specializes in Facebook.
Lou Deprijck, born in 1946 in Lessines (West) in French-speaking Belgium, was a figure in Brussels nightlife and parties in the 1970s and 1980s.
He was particularly a friend of Grand Jojo, who sang “On a soif,” and of the filmmaker Jan Bucquoy (“The Sexual Life of the Belgians”), artists like him who liked to provoke and present themselves as the heirs of surrealism.
Lou Deprijck took over Jan Bucquoy’s “Underpants Museum”, originally opened in the center of Brussels, to install his celebrity underwear collections in his home in Lessines.
Singer, composer, producer – he produced with Viktor Lazlo in the late 1980s – Deprijck’s name remains primarily associated with the legal saga of Ça plane pour moi, a success released at the end of 1977 that quickly became a global phenomenon.
In 2010, based on an expert report requested by a Belgian court, Lou Deprijck claimed that he himself was the performer of the song (which he had composed) and not Plastic Bertrand.
The report, Mr. Deprijck emphasized, “shows that based on the sentence endings recorded on the tapes, we can only assign the voice to a Ch’ti or a Picard.”
For his part, Plastic Bertrand, whose real name is Roger Jouret and is now 69 years old, has consistently defended himself against this in two Brussels judgments, at first instance and on appeal in 2006, calling him the legal interpreter of the song.
The Sacem (French Society of Authors, Composers and Music Publishers) presents him in its repertoire of works as an “interpreter” of the song, with Francis “Lou” Deprijck being the composer and Yves Lacomblez the author.