Come to think of it, that frog and roast beef cartoon isn’t going to do anything for cross-channel diplomatic zest.

Camille O’Sullivan, on the other hand, might just hold the key…

This cabaret singer, born in London to a French mother and Irish father as the oft-uttered story goes, is renowned for her passionate interpretations of dark songs by men who have musically lingered in the peripheral world of alcoholic depravity and misogynic sexual frustration – Tom Waits, Nick Cave and “Bettina, I’d like to introduce you to…” (she didn’t really say this, by the way) Jacques Brel.

Little-known to English speakers, Jacques Brel was a French-speaking Belgian singer-songwriter of the 1950-70s, whose works contain layer upon layer of tenderness, love, sentimentality, mockery, cynicism, insight, resentment and angst.

I had less-receptively heard some Brel before seeing Camille’s La fille du cirque show, painstakingly translated by my devoted (to Brel) boyfriend, but to see it performed live on stage, half in English to set the scene, and half in French to bring the house down.

Tears streaming down her face, it was hauntingly beautiful to hear her rendition of ‘La chanson des vieux amants’ (’Song for old lovers’):

‘From year to year, as all the seasons fall, I love you more, you know, I love you… still…’

But then, in the very next song, she emerged with PJ Harvey intensity, a heavy electric guitar riff and a military drumbeat to tear my world apart performing ‘Au suivant’ (’Next’).

A repeated call of “next!” punctuates this song about the loss of virginity in an ‘army mobile whorehouse’, with a hundred others in the same predicament. The song develops further as a reflection on how this experience and accompanying gonorrhoea forever scarred his future.

‘And ever since then every woman I’ve taken to bed
Seems to laugh in my arms, to whisper through my head…
you’re next!’

Camille took the audience along for the whole wild ride with her.

To see a woman perform this is absolutely amazing. Nothing better conveys the coarse cry of the rum-fragranced prostitute. Brel’s version seems to incorporate a technique of masking his abomination with a jaunty musical accompaniment (tango xylophones and sexy sax), and Mathieu Chedid’s (-M-) is musically experimental with angelic vocals.

I get all misty-eyed just thinking about it. A truly sensational show, and one that makes me so much happier about being in France to discover it all for myself.

Camille performing Nick Cave’s ‘God is in the house’.