The unassuming Belgian seaside resort of Ostend has attracted many visitors over the years with its vast sandy beaches and scruffy charm. But of all those who have strolled along its concrete high-rise shoreline and gazed out at the cold North Sea, perhaps none has a more unexpectedly intimate relationship with the town than American soul legend Marvin Gaye.
The singer-songwriter, famed for hits such as Ain’t No Mountain High Enough (1967) and Inner City Blues (1971), ended up there in 1981 following a chance encounter with a Belgian concert promoter. Drug-addicted and spiritually exhausted, Gaye spent about 18 months in the town of 70,000 people, piecing himself back together away from big-city temptations.
“There are places I would probably rather be, but I probably need to be here,” the artist said wistfully in documentary footage from 1981. “I am an orphan at the moment, and Ostend is my orphanage.”
Gaye’s musings feature in the town’s digitally enhanced walking tour, part of a recent push by Ostend’s tourist office to market itself as the “creative birthplace” of the Grammy-winning smash hit Sexual Healing, from the 1982 album Midnight Love.
The self-guided tour, which launched in 2012, lets viewers watch short videos about Gaye’s time in Ostend while standing at relevant points of interest. A new accompanying app is set to be launched, according to tourism office marketing manager Pieter Hens. That should help further pique local and international interest in the story.
There are also tentative plans for a soul festival honouring Gaye in 2022, Hens says. “It’s something now that people in town are pretty proud of, that Marvin Gaye lived here.”
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So how did the musician wash up on Ostend’s shores?
By the early 1980s, the Washington-born singer had hit rock bottom. A turbulent personality by his own account, Gaye had two failed marriages plus an acrimonious split with Motown – the label where he made his first hits and the critically acclaimed protest album What’s Going On – behind him. He also owed millions of dollars to United States tax collectors.
In early 1981, a broke and drug-addled Gaye was exiled in London. Enter Freddy Cousaert, a Belgian promoter who, according to biographer David Ritz, rescued Gaye with a mixture of “concern and cunning”, and invited him to Ostend. The then 42-year-old singer moved in with the Cousaert family, eating dinner with them in the hotel they ran, as archival footage shows, before later getting his own low-key apartment with a view of the rolling waves.
Under Cousaert’s supervision, Gaye cleaned up his act, running along Ostend’s beaches, boxing in the club at the Royal Stables and playing darts with nonplussed locals in chintzy pubs. Above all, he stayed away from drugs and other bad influences. He started writing music again, and eventually signed a new record deal.
Gaye’s associates were mystified by his new choice for a home, but when Sexual Healing was released, it was clear he had crafted a huge hit.
Nowadays, Ostend is keen to stress its link to Gaye, hailing his apartment as the creative birthplace of Sexual Healing in a plaque unveiled to honour him in 2014. But when Gaye actually walked on the erstwhile fishing community’s streets, many locals had no idea who he was.
He was “quite anonymous”, Hens explains. “People left him alone, and that was one of the most important things for his recovery.”
The upbeat, funky feel of the music Gaye made in Belgium seems to reflect little of the darkness he spoke of feeling in interviews at the time. And while Ostend can stake a claim in the song’s creation, its subject matter – the redemptive power of sensuality – has its origins in Gaye’s lifelong conflict between his strict conservative religious upbringing on one hand, and his own urges as well as his uneasy identity as a sex icon on the other, according to Ritz.
Marvin Gay Snr was an austere Pentecostal preacher. While Gaye Jnr believed sex and faith could be reconciled, and saw his often provocative music as a way to move people, he could never shrug off the trauma of his broken relationship with his father.
Their discord eventually proved fatal. Following a row at the Los Angeles mansion where the musician had moved to be with his family, Marvin Gay Sr shot and killed his son in April, 1984.
But even before that, the healing powers of Ostend had worn off. After leaving Belgium for the Sexual Healing tour, the troubled artist slipped back into drug abuse, and his mental health deteriorated once again.
“Many times I look back on that, and I wish he had just stayed in Belgium,” fellow Motown artist Smokey Robinson said in an interview years after his friend’s death.
This article appeared in the South China Morning Post print edition as: Ostend celebrates being the birthplace of Sexual Healing
