In any list of famous Belgians – a category that wags of other nationalities delight in mocking – Jacques Brel must be short odds for the top five. That is assuming it is remembered that he was not French, because the chansonnier-poet, who would have been 80 this year had lung cancer not claimed him in 1978, was as Gallic as a packet of Gauloises. As novelist Julian Barnes has put it, Brel “gleefully spanked the bourgeoisie, lobbed grenades at the military, wrangled doggedly with God and sang about death with a vibrant terror”. And he could write a mean love song, too.

Impassioned vamp: Camille O’Sullivan

Aficionados say the nuances of Brel’s lyrics are untranslatable, yet this intriguing and involving concert, the first of two Barbican tributes, went a long way towards erasing the memory of Terry Jacks’ “Seasons in the Sun”, the saccharine 1974 rip-off of Brel’s scathing “Le moribond”. A superb 16-piece band – under David Coulter and featuring such instrumental luminaries as Seb Rochford (drums) and Terry Edwards (brass) – gave orchestral support to six singers who vividly demonstrated Brel’s stylistic sweep. The contrasts between the tone of the music – utterly indifferent to the Anglo-American pop tradition, in spite of Brel’s influence on the likes of David Bowie, Leonard Cohen and Jarvis Cocker – and the tenor of the storytelling were often exquisite.

Scottish oddball Momus opened with “Don’t Leave Me”, his version of “Ne Me Quitte Pas”. His eye-patch only emphasised the needy voyeurism he reinstated in a song that has been more blandly covered as “If You Go Away”. The updating of “Bourgeois Pigs”, with its swipes at Richard Dawkins, Robbie Williams and gastropubs, also seemed thoroughly in keeping with the spirit of the original.

Arthur H, a star across the Channel, sang like a Francophone Ian McCulloch in a voice of steak and tar. To English ears, the seaside ribaldry of the tune on “Madeleine” mercilessly mocked at his amorous intentions. He was followed by Diamanda Gallas, the Greek-American who is the Morticia Addams of avant-garde vocalists. If there was no place for humour during her set, it was hard to suppress a giggle at her gothic grandeur. But self-importance was excusable if it produced the fado-like intensity of her performance.

After the interval impassioned vamp Camille O’Sullivan – whose cabaret act has been the toast of London and the Edinburgh Festival – stole the show with her a cappella “Marieke”, then proved her range by barking the tragicomic “Next” over a hysterical maelstrom of sound. Arno, the veteran Belgian rocker, was always going to struggle to follow, but his bierkeller growl was as stultifying as O’Sullivan had been stunning.

Marc Almond, on paper the night’s biggest draw, sang with the wit and panache of Cabaret’s emcee, playfully posing after “The Devil OK” with a tambourine behind his head that made it appear as if he had horns. His breathlessness after that track’s elbowing rhythm suited the crazed yet sobering theme of the material: that humanity is running to stand still on Fortune’s wheel.

He veered splendidly from incredulity to defiance on “J’Arrive”, translated as “I’m Coming” by Paul Buck. It was, Almond explained, a song about sex and death, and how you increasingly “say goodbye to one and get ready for the other” as time passes – Brel, and Almond, never being afraid to suggest that we are all just Fate’s clowns.

O’Sullivan and Momus joined Almond for the exuberant finale, “Jacky”, the rakish fantasist’s anthem, popularised in the English-speaking world by Scott Walker in 1968 and revived by Almond in 1991. Posterity, apparently, did not bother Brel, whose views on the hereafter lapsed from Catholicism to something more akin to Albert Camus’s outlook, but this was a birthday party he would surely have enjoyed.

‘Jacques Brel: Music Hall Master’, an evening of film and cabaret, is on Thursday at Wilton’s Music Hall, London