When Serge Gainsbourg died in Paris on March 2 1991, at the age of 63, he was eulogised at the highest levels of government. In the UK, we may no longer dismiss him as merely that seedy French bloke whose dirty hit was banned by the BBC, but there is an argument that we still severely underestimate his brilliance. We might acknowledge the greatness of Histoire De Melody Nelson, but even if our French is decent, many of us miss the slang, the puns, the allusions, the syncopated intonation, alliteration and delivery of Gainsbourg’s poetic lyrics, as well as failing to understand his life.
Born Lucien Ginsburg to Jewish Ukranian immigrants in 1928, Gainsbourg grew up during the Nazi occupation: while living in Paris, he was forced to wear the “indelible” yellow star, with the everyday threat of deportation to the camps. He became a timid outsider. He smoked cigarettes, read books, played guitar, taught art, and started writing sad, bitter, lyrically sharp jazz-chanson, performing at Left Bank nightclubs under a new armour of arrogance.
Melodies came effortlessly, words harder. Juliette Gréco covered his songs. Others followed. Romantic, cerebral and ironic, hits didn't come easy until he wrote Poupée De Cire, Poupée De Son for France Gall and it won the 1965 Eurovision Song Contest. His popularity soared. Everyone from Petula Clark to Brigitte Bardot covered his songs. When he released the gorgeous, provocative Je T’Aime… Moi Non Plus with partner, Jane Birkin, it was banned as obscene in numerous countries and sold in the millions.
However, it’s with his 70s long-players that Gainsbourg’s true artistry comes through, the songwriter delivering his own words and concepts. There are certainly other LPs we could have included but this is a salute to Gainsbourg the cursed poet, the conceptualist, the provocateur, the Gainsbourg whose full genius will always be tantalisingly out of reach for non-French-speaking audiences.
10.
Serge Gainsbourg
Rock Around The Bunker
(PHILIPS, 1975)
Perhaps only Gainsbourg could draw a link between the early 70s rock’n’roll revival, and an increase in far-right sentiments across Europe, and turn it into an incendiary concept album. Recorded with Anglo session ace Alan Hawkshaw at Philips’ London studio, and with a returning Alan Parker on guitar, this is black comedy as art object, the son of Jewish migrants now singing about the twin invading forces of Nazi Germany and rock, and re-presenting the Night Of The Long Knives as a teenage dance craze. It also features some of his most alliteratively inventive lyrics, delivered with the proto-punk verbal aggression of a Gallic Ian Dury.
9.
Serge Gainsbourg
Live
(MERCURY FRANCE, 2015)
No, we do not condone Tony ‘Thunder’ Smith’s drumming, especially the solo he takes during Harley David Son Of A Bitch, but otherwise, this is a special 2CD and DVD package, showcasing Gainsbourg’s Casino de Paris concert from 1985. Possibly drunk, undeniably bedraggled, sporting stonewashed double-denim, the singer is not operating at his optimum, but his Gitanes-kippered delivery, combined with Billy Rush’s yacht rock guitar, John Kumnick’s fretless bass and the sweet backing vocals of George and Stevie Simms possess a debauched charm and his version of La Javanaise, delivered over chiming Fender Rhodes possesses an eerie valedictory power.
8.
Serge Gainsbourg
Aux Armes Et Caetera
(PHILIPS, 1979)
To paraphrase Serge himself, it wasn’t Marley who introduced France to reggae, it was Gainsbourg. Hipped by manager Philippe Lerichomme, who’d heard French punk DJs spinning roots 7”s, the pair recruited Sly & Robbie, The Revolutionaries and The I-Threes to quickly record this low-slung and rough-edged reggae LP at Dynamic Sounds in Kingston. Reworking old numbers (La Javanaise, Marilou Reggae), and writing new ones about his bulldog and the Ku Klux Klan, Gainsbourg also recorded a reggae version of the French national anthem which incensed the far right but generated a new young audience, sell-out tours and, amazingly, his first ever gold record.
7.
Serge Gainsbourg
Le Cinema Gainsbourg - Musiques De Films 1959-1990
(UNIVERSAL FRANCE, 2001)
From the smoky Miles jazz of 1960’s A Game For Six Lovers to the electric noir of 1990’s Stan The Flasher, Gainsbourg never stopped writing for the cinema. For him, the film score was a site of experiment and play and raw ideas in films like Les Coeurs Verts and La Horse and would later turn up, reworked, as major themes in Je T’Aime… Moi Non Plus and Histoire De Melody Nelson. The result of dedicated archive research, these three CDs are ideally complemented by the Finders Keepers label’s recent reissue of long-lost 1969 Serge score Les Chemins De Katmandou.
6.
Various Artists
Vamps Et Vampire
(ACE RECORDS, 2014)
To fully understand Serge Gainsbourg’s genius, you have to appreciate how many truly great songs he gave away to others. The best discount window on this is Ace’s lovely compilation of tracks cut by female singers between 1961 and 1990, from Vicky Autier’s jaunty “song of dying” La Chanson De Prévert to the love-in-exile brilliance of Vanessa Paradis’ Tandem. Fans with deeper pockets are advised to track down Mercury France’s four disc set Mister Melody which includes the unique delight of Nico (yes, that Nico) dolorously delivering the mocking, latin Strip Tease: “Do not put your hands on me/ Every night another autumn”.
5.
Serge Gainsbourg
Comic Strip
(MERCURY FRANCE, 1996)
All Gainsbourg’s late ‘60s studio LPs contain incredible tracks, and one (Initials B.B.) nearly made it into this list. However, the best overall view of Serge’s pop-art phase is this mid-90s French compilation. Part of an original decade-spanning trilogy, with the first two (Colour Cafe and Du Jazz Dans Le Ravin) covering earlier work, this twenty-track selection was instrumental in powering the mid-90s Gainsbourg revival, hipping fans and DJs to the now familiar dislocated groove of 1968’s Requiem Pour Un Con, the looped comic-book sensuality of Bonnie And Clyde, and so many more. The tracklist’s worth running through YouTube, too.
4.
Jane Birkin and Serge Gainsbourg
Jane & Serge 1973
(MERCURY, 2014)
Disc one comprises Birkin’s first solo LP, Di Doo Dah, written by Gainsbourg and arranged by Jean-Claude Vannier. Birkin’s voice is fragile, the production tranquil, but Vannier’s strings are gorgeous, the (uncredited) West Coast-style steel guitar fittingly melancholy and Gainsbourg’s songs erotically surreal. Soon after recording, Serge had a heart attack, but checked himself out to work on Vu De L’Extérieur (CD2). Composed with Alan Hawkshaw, in the same English studio as Di Doo Dah, it is Gainsbourg’s realisation of his corporeal animal self, brilliantly rendered as a series of lush, country-funk ballads about farts, shit, and general bodily waste.
3.
Serge Gainsbourg
Gainsbourg Percussions
(PHILIPS, 1964)
Cut back-to-back with the intimate Gainsbourg Confidentiel – just jazz guitar, acoustic bass and Serge’s malcontent riffing on pop culture — and in the wake of the Algerian peace process Évian Accords, this was Serge’s love letter to the African continent (and South America), composed in the belief that moribund yé-yé pop could be awakened by tribal percussion. Heavily influenced by Babatunde Olatunji's 1959 album, Drums Of Passion, Gainsbourg and pianist/ arranger Alain Goraguer recorded with three drummers, double bass, sax and a bank of (unknown) female singers, creating a late-night basement jazz feel, every song spare and abstract, borne away on clouds of marijuana smoke.
2.
Serge Gainsbourg
L’homme à tête de chou
(PHILIPS, 1976)
Named after the Claude Lalanne sculpture situated outside Gainsbourg’s Paris domicile, of a seated naked man with a cabbage for a head, the second of Serge’s narrative concept albums concerns a tabloid journalist who falls obsessively in love with an Afro-French hairdresser, before murdering her with a hotel fire extinguisher, and landing on a psych ward, where he attempts to communicate with her dead spirit using cockroach antenna. Arranged by KPM composer Alan Hawkshaw, it’s a dark, dizzying noir mix of Brazilian percussion, country ballads, distorted guitar, taunting jaw harps, and fizzing prog synths, the romanticism of Melody Nelson replaced with a swirling villainous nihilism.
1.
Serge Gainsbourg
Histoire De Melody Nelson
(PHILIPS, 1971)
Inspired by his first meeting with Jane Birkin (middle name, Mallory) and Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, this 28-minute concept album about a middle-aged man’s love affair with a teenage Sunderland girl finds Gainsbourg at his 70s peak of arch symbolism and allusive self-mockery. An elegiac tale of seduction and tragedy, it’s transformed into something simultaneously romantic and sinister by Jean-Claude Vannier’s idyllic string arrangements and 70-piece choir, plus Jean Luc Ponty’s eerie electric violin, the conspiratorial electric chug of Alan Parker and Big Jim Sullivan’s guitars and, crucially, the prowling elastic bass of Dave Richmond, lending every track an ominous downward drag.