Mick Hartley

Jacques Brel, mid-Sixties (he wrote the song in 1964):

A better version here, but without the subtitles.

Rod McKuen translated this as Seasons in the Sun. Here he is performing it live.  

Adieu Francoise my trusted wife
without you I'd have had a lonely life
You cheated lots of times but then
I forgave you in the end

Hmm. It is, alas, something of a descent into bathos. Where Brel is wry and impassioned, McKuen is smug and sanctimonious. It was a hit for Terry Jacks in 1974 – though, wisely, without that Francoise verse.

Jacques Brel previously – Le Port d'Amsterdam.

Alex Harvey's Next, a version of Brel's Au Suivant – a song about losing one's virginity in an army brothel: a subject which, as far as I'm aware, hasn't inspired many other songwriters.

There is of course always Ne Me Quitte Pas - a song which became something of a supper-club classic as If You Go Away. Rod McKuen, again, was the guilty man, turning a heart-broken, self-abasing, desperate plea into a distinctly more palatable affair for the urban sophisticate to appreciate.