Quick program note:  I’ll be catching up on posts shortly – been enjoying a steady stream of houseguests and time away at the beach and also overwhelmed by evil taxes and home improvement projects gone terribly awry!

In the interim, if the latest issue of Entertainment Weekly is an indicator, the Monsieur Gainsbourg Revisited English-language tribute album should be hitting US stores this upcoming Tuesday.  The effort is a bit spotty – as most projects of this sort tend to be - but worth checking out. I posted my take some time back. 

Also, after the jump, I’ve included the full text of a Gainsbourg article that the Guardian ran recently (after the jump).  They gave the compilation an unenthusiastic review by the way and pointed out that Gainsbourg’s oeuvre is better appreciated in his native French.

I also strongly urge readers to head over to Monsieur Guuzbourg’s place, Filles Sourires, for his beautifully-curated series on French actresses songbirds!

Gainsbourg, je t'aime

Death has not withered

France

's love for the libidinous chain-smoker. Angelique Chrisafis on the cult of Serge

Angelique Chrisafis

Friday April 14, 2006

Guardian

'I just want to stand here contemplating him in silence," said the Frenchwoman slowly exhaling a thick waft of cheroot smoke towards the shrine of her hero. It was an ordinary Sunday afternoon outside 5 bis Rue Verneuil on Paris's left bank, the house where French pop legend Serge Gainsbourg once lived, in rooms painted black from floor to ceiling and with no mirrors to reflect his reptilian ugliness.

It was here that in 1991, aged 62, his famous passion for Gitanes and alcohol finally killed him with a heart attack in his front room - 20 years earlier, when he was pulled out on a stretcher after his first heart attack, he demanded that paramedics fetch a cashmere rug from his bedroom, as the regulation red and orange blanket clashed and photographers might be outside.

For 15 years, the graffitied tributes and poetry scrawled on the wall by fans has been growing. The multicoloured "wall of Serge" sprawls for metres along the otherwise impeccably manicured street in one of

Paris

's most expensive neighbourhoods. It is bigger than any monument to Jim Morrison. An empty bottle of whisky has been neatly propped outside the front door in homage. "To our deceased poet," reads one message. "You did your work like an angel, sowing hope," "Thank you for the music," and "Serge, je t'aime."

In

Britain

, Gainsbourg is remembered as the libidinous Gallic chainsmoker who at 41 seduced Jane Birkin, the 21-year-old home counties girl, into performing the 1969 heavy breathing melody Je T'aime Moi Non Plus. Deemed obscene by the

Vatican

and banned by the BBC, it became the first foreign-language song to reach number one. With lines such as "Je vais, je vais et je viens/ Entre tes reins" (I come and I go between your kidneys), it stayed in the charts for 31 weeks and became a seduction classic. Rumoured to have been recorded on a tape recorder under Gainsbourg and Birkin's bed during sex, it was actually made while they stood in separate booths in a studio in Marble Arch. But that didn't stop Frankie Howerd and June Whitfield's merciless "No sex please, we're British" cover version two years later.

In

France

, Gainsbourg is held up as the nation's greatest popular musician, a punning poet and provocateur who transformed chanson in a career spanning 30 years, 25 albums, numerous soundtracks, films and hundreds of songs for other singers, from his lover Brigitte Bardot to Catherine Deneuve and Vanessa Paradis. He even won the Eurovision song contest with a track he wrote for the 16-year-old France Gall. When the teenager discovered the true meaning behind another hit he wrote for her, about sucking lollipops, she never spoke to him again.

His lyrics, on subjects from the working-class man, tributes to French poets, Frenchmen falling for underage English girls, as well as incest and farting, are published in books as poetry and studied in French universities. He ventured into jazz, disco, rap, made a rock album about Nazis (he was the son of Russian Jews made to wear the yellow star in wartime Paris) and flew to Jamaica to make a reggae album, infuriating Bob Marley, who discovered that his wife Rita had been made to sing erotic lyrics on the backing track.

President Mitterrand said Gainsbourg "elevated song to the level of art". Jack Lang, the former culture minister, said that he "personified a certain ideal of freedom". Last month, to mark the 15th anniversary of his death, the daily newspaper Libération devoted a front page to his silhouette, French TV ran hours of footage and old interviews ranging from his declarations - "I am the new wave" - to his debauched insults of later years. Record shops in

Paris

have entire walls devoted to special box sets. Soon, one French journalist observed, he will become like his old hero Jimi Hendrix, releasing more records while dead than alive.

Next month's tribute album, by fans ranging from Franz Ferdinand to Tricky and Portishead, is not the first.

Nick

 

Cave

associate Mick Harvey produced two homage albums and was the first to translate the genius of Gainsbourg's wordplay. There have been covers from Donna Summer to Jimmy Somerville, but Monsieur Gainsbourg Revisited represents what the singer's English biographer Sylvie Simmons called the "cult of Serge": musicians have admitted worshipping him as much for his eccentrically debauched lifestyle as his music.

Born Lucien Ginsburg, Gainsbourg changed his name to sound more French and made it his life's work to enjoy as many women, cigarettes and drinks as possible while giving the finger to decorum. He bought a Rolls-Royce, but couldn't drive so used it as an "ashtray". He had an affair with Bardot, for whom he wrote Je T'aime, and joined her in their famous Bonnie and

Clyde

duet on her TV programme, Show Bardot. Un Zeste de Limon (a wordplay on "lemon incest"), the record he made with his teenage daughter Charlotte, caused far less scandal in France than his reggae cover of the French national anthem, which sparked death threats from rightwing veterans of the Algerian war of independence and a newspaper editorial saying he should have his citizenship revoked.

Desperately conscious of his ugliness, he surrounded himself with beautiful women and indulged in his alcoholism as the caricature alter-ego he called "Gainsbarre", who liked to hijack televised interviews. He made rock'n'roll TV history when, on

France

's equivalent of the Des O'Connor show, he interrupted fellow guest Whitney Houston by announcing: "I want to fuck her." "He said he wants to buy you flowers," the host told

Houston

. "Don't translate for me. I said I wanted to fuck her," he shot back.

Birkin later said that for the 13 years she lived there, she was not allowed to touch anything in his obsessively ordered house - which he called a "museum". Look Pretty and Shut Up was the title of one of his hits. He was desperate for love, and when, ageing and debauched, he appeared on a French TV show surrounded by 60 adoring children dressed as mini-Serges in jeans and white shoes and with little Gitanes in their mouths, he was said never to have been happier.

The English tribute album would probably have made him smile and crack open the whisky. A few years ago, Birkin told Le Monde that Gainsbourg got depressed when no one recognised him on the King's Road. "No one came up and asked for his autograph," she said. "So he decided to head home to

France

, saying he'd rather be a king in his own kingdom than a 'little prince' elsewhere."

· Monsieur Gainsbourg Revisited is released on May 1. Monsieur Gainsbourg Revisited Exhibition is at

Liberty

, London W1, from Monday until May 31.

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006

Comments

[Roar]

Did you give up the French mixes you had planned and partially posted? Pity, because the first one was really good. So I'm taking the liberty to remind you of its sweetness...

[torn]

21 April? Must be something happening over there ... Over here in Manila we have just had a visit from Paul Anka, so can still regard ourselves as cutting edge. Surely life must be more exciting in DC?

[Skunkeye]

Great to hear from you Torn!
Haha... yeah, actually life in DC has been a bit dull and uninspiring lately - I keep on meaning to get around to posting, I'm really way out of the blogging groove right now! I've been sort of on my own planet lately - especially since I've been working from home and not going to an office.
Film-wise, its been a rather disappointing season and I haven't bought much new music lately (Actually, i've become a download freak and that how I've been spending most of my computer time!). There have been some amazing art exhibits that I've wanted to write about but are now gone - Hiroshi Sugimoto at the Hirshhorn and Sackler, Dada at the NGA (now in NYC), and I went to the Cezanne show a million times because I've had so many out of town guests staying at Casa Skunkeye. I've been commuting to Baltimore every week for school and spending too much time and money on my alley garden (which doesn't make for very interesting posts). I've also been obsessed with teaching myself how to prepare Vietnamese cuisine.
Went to the gala opening of a Fil-am Smithsonian show the other week and wore a barong for the first time in about five years (and frighteningly had a hard time finding one that still fit!) - it was nice to touch base with my peeps.
Kitty G is making a special trip to stay with me this summer and i am looking forward to that tremendously and will try to gather together various Philippines types living in DC for a dinner party for her.
Miss you guys very much and am grateful to have you and Walk This Way keep me up-to-date on my much-missed Manila. That Souzy blog creeps the crap out of me. Give Frayed my love!
At any rate, i need to find my blog-muse again!

[carlos]

Hi there! Any new entries soon?

[tiffany jewellery]

I’ve included the full text of a Gainsbourg article that the Guardian ran recently (after the jump).