Helin Daniel

A jack-of-all-trades, Daniel Hélin has a decidedly atypical profile. After a chequered education, this Ottignies native (born June 22, 1971) opted for a career as a social worker. Soon bored, he took on a series of odd jobs, including assembly-line work in factories, all of which left their mark on his social life. After graduating from the Conservatoire Royal de Liège in the dramatic arts section, he worked in circus arts and comedy. His musical career took off in 1999 with the album Borlon, which he composed with jazz musicians. The band's instruments accompany the diction of singer Hélin, who declaims his hallucinatory texts and plays with syllables and the meaning of words. He sees poetry as a tool for transforming the world, starting from his hometown, which he perceives as not very lively, and finds in music a means of shaping his stories. And a playground. His album Les Bulles (2001) is full of grammatical constraints, the sentences all ending with a syllable specific to each track. Hélin's zany productions were a hit at the Biennale de la Chanson Française in 1998, and at the Printemps de Bourges festival, where his show won the "discovery" award in 2000. These awards fueled his touring schedule, and echoed as far as the ears of Miossec, Zazie, Jacques Higelin, Jane Birkin, Henri Salvador and Hubert-Félix Thiéfaine, for whom he occasionally opened. However, the intensive, productivist pace of the music industry did not suit him completely. Despite two albums, Mécréant (2005) and Mallacoota (2009), Le Crépuscule des Idiots, released in 2013, failed to reach the expected audience, making it economically difficult for Daniel Hélin to continue his career. He changed direction, and learned the trade of luthier. Until 2020, when long-time companions Gil Mortio and Louis Evrard asked him to add text to their instrumentals for the album Pingouin. The purity of the sound, with the addition of electronic instruments, and the precision of the songwriting, make Pingouin a successful comeback for the Belgian singer.