Their Own Names Back

Who haunts “Brussels Is Haunted”

Echo & The Bunnymen’s first single in twelve years was filed under nostalgia within a day. In Brussels it reads as a roll call.

The song landed on 16 July and the verdict landed with it. Wistful, said the British press. A fond glance over the shoulder. The old grandeur, back in working order. All of it true, and all of it deaf.

Because “Brussels Is Haunted” is not vague about its ghosts. It names them. The song is thick with names — bars, streets, people — and some of them land instantly for anyone who moved through this city’s underground, while others stay locked. This piece does not pretend to have picked every lock. It only notes that the two people named in the song are dead, and that both are remembered, when they are remembered at all, for something other than the work they did.

The man whose name was taken

The opening line puts Plastic beside Bert Bertrand, and anyone outside Belgium hears a rhyme. Inside Belgium it is a wound reopened with a fingernail.

Bert Bertrand — Bertrand Delporte, son of the comics writer Yvan Delporte — was the flamboyant ambassador of Belgian punk from late 1976 onward. He wrote for More! and En attendant, ran the “Pop Hot” pages of Télémoustique, and sang in the joke pop outfit The Bowling Balls. He was the scene, more or less, in the way that one person occasionally is a scene.

He was so completely the scene that in 1977 the producer Lou Deprijck, building a synthetic punk to sell to the francophone market, simply took his name — welded it to the plastic that punks were fond of — and Plastic Bertrand was born. Bertrand had dared him to make the first French-language punk record. The demo of “Ça plane pour moi” was cut the following day. The dare worked. The record went around the world. The name went with it, and the man stayed behind.

Bertrand killed himself in New York on 6 February 1983. He was twenty-seven. The photographer Philippe Carly, who had published in the same magazines and knew him, keeps the date on his site under the heading in memoriam, with three words after the name: friend, journalist, the Bowling Balls.

So the first line of the song puts the man and his counterfeit side by side, in that order, in a piece of music about things that will not leave. Whether McCulloch weighed that or simply liked the sound of it is not knowable and not the point. The line does the work regardless.

The woman who asked

Later the song raises a glass to Annik. There is no surname. There does not need to be.

Annik Honoré was born in Mons on 12 October 1957. In 1979 she took a secretarial job at the Belgian embassy in London, which is where she met Ian Curtis, which is the only sentence about her most people have ever read.

Here are the others. On 16 October 1979, with Michel Duval, she opened the Plan K in a disused refinery on rue de Manchester. The bill that night was Joy Division — playing outside Britain for the first time in their lives — Cabaret Voltaire, and William Burroughs. In 1980 she co-founded Les Disques du Crépuscule; in April of that year, Factory Benelux. She had come to both from a fanzine called Plein Soleil. In 1981 she gave Front 242 their first show. She was twenty-three years old for most of this.

And she said so. Speaking to Le Vif, she asked — plainly, and while alive to ask — that people take an interest in the pioneering work she had done at the Plan K between 1979 and 1984, and at Crépuscule, rather than in her private life. She rejected the words that had been fixed to her. She pointed out that the character in Control is not her. The day after the interview she sent a text message asking that nothing too personal be printed.

She died on 3 July 2014, aged fifty-six, and the obituaries led with Ian Curtis.

A city that keeps the receipts

Around these two, the song stacks the wars — Waterloo, then the first, then the second, then a third that has not happened yet — with the flat patience of a clerk. Brussels has been the floor of Europe’s abattoir for two centuries and the song treats this as ordinary, which it is.

What is less ordinary is the levelling. A vodka kept too cold, an art deco bar on rue Antoine Dansaert, a club, a friend, a lover, a world war: all named at the same height, in the same breath, with the same small ceremony. Hieronymus is invoked as a judge and declines to speak. The effect is not grand. It is a man reading out a list, and the list does not distinguish between the century’s dead and the people he drank with, because from far enough away nothing does.

What the song gives back

The British press heard a band being fond about a city. Fair enough.

But from here it sounds like something narrower and better. Bert Bertrand is a punchline in a discography he did not want. Annik Honoré is a footnote in someone else’s suicide. Neither is what they were. And a song that could have said any of that, with the full apparatus of tragedy available and free, instead says: here comes Bert, here’s to Annik, we drank, we danced, the city is thick with them now.

It gives them back their own names, in the only place a name survives — the middle of a sentence, said by someone who was there.

Apples For Isaac is out on 18 September.

Text © 2026 Ian Joy / Catastrophe Ballet, licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.