Why Ostend, the Belgian town where Marvin Gaye cleaned up, is the creative birthplace of Sexual Healing
- When Motown legend Marvin Gaye moved to Ostend in 1981, he was washed up and in debt, and dealing with a serious drug addiction problem
- He wrote Sexual Healing during his time there. To honour him, Ostend set up a self-guided Marvin Gaye tour, and has plans for a soul festival
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.