Songfacts®:

• "Brussels Is Haunted" is the lead single from Apples For Isaac, Echo and the Bunnymen's 13th album. Ian McCulloch wrote the song about Brussels, a Belgian city where the ghosts are plentiful and the past has apparently declined to move out.
• Echo & the Bunnymen's first trip abroad was to Brussels, and the song draws on people McCulloch encountered there, along with the city's long and often troubled history. Waterloo, the two World Wars, Plastic Bertrand, Bert Bertrand, dancing at the Classic, rum and cassis, and bière blonde all drift through the lyrics. It is a musical tour of Brussels in which the sightseeing comes with a distinctly spectral atmosphere.
  
  "That started years ago," McCulloch told Mojo magazine in 2026. "Brussels was a magical place, the first place the band played abroad in 1980. We got invited over by the hip set."
  
  Brussels, he added, is also the center of European politics. "All of this stuff is packed into that one song, and it's weird the way it all ties together."
• Here comes Plastic and Bert Bertrand
  
  Bert Bertrand was a flamboyant figure in the Belgian punk scene from 1976, writing for magazines and singing with The Bowling Balls. Bertrand was so closely identified with the scene that Belgian musician Roger Jouret borrowed his name for the creation of Plastic Bertrand, who had an international hit in 1977 with "Ca Plane Pour Moi."
  
  "A friend of ours, Bert Bertrand, he's in the opening line," McCulloch told Mojo magazine. "He used to follow us around, him and Annik Honoré. He ended up committing suicide in New York. That still haunts me."
• Here's to beauty and melancholy, here's to Annik and Pascal
  
  Ian Curtis' affair with Belgian journalist Annik Honoré put a huge strain on his marriage to Deborah Woodruff. The Joy Division singer reportedly struggled with guilt over the relationship, which may have contributed to his suicide.
  
  Annik Honoré also had a significant role in the alternative music scene. She co-opened the Plan K arts venue in Brussels in 1979, where Joy Division played their first show outside Britain, on a bill that also featured Cabaret Voltaire and a reading by William S. Burroughs. In 1980, Honoré co-founded the independent labels Les Disques du Crépuscule and Factory Benelux. The following year, she helped give Belgian electronic body music pioneers Front 242 their first live show. She was part of the musical network that made Brussels such an important destination for adventurous British and European artists, including Echo & the Bunnymen's Factory Records contemporaries in Manchester.
  
  "Annik Honoré and the Ian Curtis thing... there's a sense of, like, total beauty, and an ancient kind of sadness, and impending doom, maybe," said McCulloch.
• Apples For Isaac was produced by McCulloch. Clem Burke, the Blondie drummer, played on 10 of its 11 tracks, adding his signature energy to later-career albums in a similar fashion to his work on Blondie releases like Parallel Lines. His contribution to "Brussels Is Haunted" was recorded before his death in April 2025, making it one of his final studio recordings.
• The animated video, directed by Belgian filmmaker Jef De Smet, brings the song's idea to life by populating Brussels with its monuments, famous visitors, and dead inhabitants.