But relative to the years immediately before and after, Belgium was calmer.
Freddy Cousaert, the Ostend concert promoter who had befriended Gaye and offered him the seafront apartment, has described in interviews the Marvin Gaye who arrived in Ostend: thin, exhausted, heavily dependent on drugs, frightened. The Marvin Gaye who left, approximately twenty months later, was not the same person. He had put on weight. He exercised regularly—he boxed, he ran, he moved his body in ways that suggested a man who wanted to be in it. He went to church. He spent time walking by the sea.
The drug use did not stop entirely. He apparently used a substance described as a “temple ball”—a mixture of cannabis resin and opiates—during this period. Jan Hunter described an incident on a ferry in Brussels during which she lost consciousness after using this substance, after which Gaye stopped. The cocaine was significantly reduced from what it had been.
It was in this state—calmer, more rested, more physically present than he had been in years—that Gaye wrote “Sexual Healing.” The song is often described as a product of the creative conditions of Ostend: the sea air, the relative quiet, the distance from the pressures that had accumulated in Los Angeles. Whether this environmental explanation is fully sufficient, or whether “Sexual Healing” would have emerged wherever Gaye happened to be living in 1982, is unknowable. But the fact that one of the greatest commercial records of his career was written during his most stable period is not incidental.