Artist · chart history
Arno
Solo artist Oostende Belgium Belgian rock vocalist Arno Hintjens
Arno is an artist from Oostende. Arno has 6 chart appearances on 6 radio countdowns from 1 station on RockLists, spanning 1986–2025. The most successful song on radio countdowns is “Les yeux de ma mère”, which appears on 4 lists with a best position of #45. The station that charted Arno most often is Studio Brussel (Flanders, Belgium), with 6 appearances. The artist’s biggest year on year-end countdowns was 1990.
Arno, born Arnold Charles Ernest Hintjens in Oostende in 1949, was Belgium's great ragged crooner, a harmonica-wheezing bluesman with a voice like a gravel pit and a gift for making chanson sound as if it had been left out in the rain. He came up through Tjens Couter in the '70s, then spent the '80s fronting TC Matic, a band that ranked among the biggest names his country produced in that decade.
When TC Matic split in 1986 he went solo straight away, with an album simply called Arno and the growling "Forget the Cold Sweat". Ratata followed in 1990, with "Lonesome Zorro", and in 1995 came À la française, and "Les yeux de ma mère" is its centrepiece, sung with a battered tenderness that stops just short of breaking.
He also sang with Charles et les Lulus, picked up a Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres in 2002, and was made an honorary citizen of Brussels in 2017 and an Officer of the Order of the Crown in 2022, the year he died.
Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.
Songs by Arno on radio countdowns
| # | Song | Strength | Lists | Best | #1s | Peak year |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Les yeux de ma mère | 4 | #45 | – | – | |
| 2 | Lonesome Zorro | 1 | #20 | – | 1990 | |
| 3 | Forget the Cold Sweat | 1 | #21 | – | 1986 |
Albums with charting songs
Where each song was first released, from MusicBrainz.
Year-end chart timeline
Combined year-end countdown points per year. Taller bars mean more songs placing higher across more stations.
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