Sharif Dean ‎- Do You Love Me?

The song that made Sharif Dean a star was a duet — but the woman whose voice carried it was left off the record entirely

The record that made Sharif Dean’s name was never really his alone. Do You Love Me? is a duet — a man’s voice answered by a woman’s, the two of them trading the same aching question back and forth. Yet when the single sold its hundreds of thousands of copies across Europe, her name was nowhere on it. Not the sleeve, not the label. The voice that made the song work belonged to a Belgian singer named Evelyne D’Haese, and for decades almost no one knew it.

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Dean himself had an unlikely path to a European hit. Born Cherif-Eddine Kharroubi in Casablanca, Morocco, on August 14, 1947, to a French mother and an Algerian father, he moved to Paris as a child and won a Radio Monte Carlo talent contest at seventeen. He studied in Brussels and took a university degree in philosophy and literature in 1971 before turning fully to music. His first single, “Mary-Ann,” went nowhere. The follow-up changed everything.

Released in 1972 and produced by Jean Huysmans, Do You Love Me? became a phenomenon the following year. It earned Dean a gold record in Belgium for 100,000 copies sold, reached No. 1 in the Netherlands — the first Belgian record ever to top a Dutch year-end review — and went all the way to the top in Rio de Janeiro, charting across France, West Germany, and Brazil along the way. For a philosophy graduate from Brussels singing a simple love song in English, it was a staggering reach.

The voice with no name

The strange part is what the record left out. The female vocal that answers Dean throughout the song — the part that turns a modest crooner ballad into something people remembered — was sung by Evelyne D’Haese, a Belgian studio singer who worked regularly on other artists’ records. She was credited nowhere on the release. One longtime collector, tracking her down years later, summed up the paradox neatly: her face was unknown, but her voice was completely familiar. Dean went on recording into the 2010s and died on February 14, 2019 — like his birth, a fourteenth — but the song that outlived him is the one that owes half its charm to a woman the label never bothered to name.