When Serge Gainsbourg died in his bedroom on March 2 1991, a month short of his 63rd birthday, France went into mourning. Brigitte Bardot, who had been his lover, gave a eulogy; President Mitterrand, who wasn't, gave him one too. He was "our Baudelaire, our Apollinaire", said the head of state. "He elevated song to the level of art." Flags were flown at half-mast - a less fitting symbol for the priapic pop genius than the bottles of whisky and Pastis and packets of Gitanes cigarettes left as tributes by the crowds who descended, à la Princess Di, on the police barricades erected around his home on the Rue de Vernueil.
"Ask anyone in Paris," said Nicolas Godin of the French band Air, "and they can remember what they were doing when they heard Gainsbourg had died. It was such a shock. Because he was always there, part of our culture. He was always on the television doing something crazy. He was a poet. He was a punk. And he wanted to fuck Whitney Houston."
The man who looked like an elegant turtle cross-bred with a particularly louche, chain-smoking wolf was also a singer, a songwriter, a cutting-edge soundtrack composer, a Eurovision Song Contest winner, novelist, photographer, actor, artist, drunk, director, screenwriter, populist, provocateur, sentimentalist, clown, lover, intellectual, and the man who single-handedly liberated French pop. In spite of - or because of - a singular dedication to cigarettes, alcohol, sensuality and provocation (his infamous "I want to fuck you" offer to fellow-guest Houston on a French family TV show combined all four), his musical output over more than three decades was staggering.
It encompassed a variety of reinventions that made David Bowie look stereotyped - classical, chanson, jazz, girl-group pop, rock, reggae, disco and funk. He displayed a profound knowledge of, and respect for, tradition, while simultaneously giving it two fingers, then used all these disparate things to make something unique.
His lyrics were mind-boggling exercises in Franglais, triple entendres and rhythmic, onomatopoeic word-percussion. Literature, sexual obsession, farting, incest, philosophy, grammar, cabbages, Nazi death camps and the Torrey Canyon disaster were all considered perfectly reasonable subject matter for his songs, which were whistled in the street and printed in poetry books that were studied in universities. And yet on this side of the Channel, Gainsbourg is really known for just one song: his 1969 number one hit with Jane Birkin, Je T'Aime . . . Moi Non Plus.
"There's a trilogy in my life," said Gainsbourg, "an equilateral triangle, shall we say, of Gitanes, alcoholism and girls - and I didn't say isosceles, I said equilateral. But it all comes from the background of a man whose initiation in beauty was art." Brigitte Bardot - or BB, as the French call her - was the actress for whom the term "sex kitten" was invented. Bardot was signed by Gainsbourg's record company, Philips, in 1962, and she had already released two singles that her labelmate had written before they were both booked to appear on Sacha Distel's primetime Saturday night TV show. It was 1967, two months after the so-called Summer of Love, and Gainsbourg fell for BB mightily. She was, Distel said, "the dream of Serge's life".
It must have been a dream come true to find that Bardot was attracted to him too, and that their rendezvous should happen just as her second marriage was on the rocks. She invited him to appear on her Le Bardot Show, and what started as a working relationship soon developed into a love affair. It was a discreet one to start with: unlike Gainsbourg, Bardot had a horror of press attention. Initially they met furtively at friends' apartments, but then threw caution to the wind and allowed the paparazzi to snap them at all the top nightspots or in Bardot's convertible Triumph Spitfire (with Bardot at the wheel as Gainsbourg couldn't drive), gliding through a Paris plastered with photos of BB in thigh-high boots and black leather mini-skirt straddling a motorbike - an advertisement for her latest Gainsbourg-penned single, Harley-Davidson.
On the Le Bardot Show, the stream of Gainsbourg classics inspired by his new love (or demanded by her producers) were performed by the pair in front of outlandish sets of the cod-psychedelic variety that you only ever saw on 1960s TV shows. For Comic Strip, for instance, Bardot was made up as a black-wigged Barbarella character, surrounded by bright "comic-book" balloons bearing "Zip! Pow! Wiz!" exclamations. For Bonnie and Clyde, Gainsbourg played the part of Clyde with shoulder-holster and cigarette, while BB, in a long skirt, short wig and beret, was his loyal moll.
Bonnie and Clyde was the title track of Gainsbourg and BB's album together, released in 1968. It was one of a pair of songs Gainsbourg had written in the space of a night following a disastrous early date with Bardot. Struck dumb with either nerves or alcohol, his usual wit deserted him, the evening was a flop and he thought he had blown it. But Bardot phoned the next day and demanded as a penance that he write her "the most beautiful love song you can imagine". In fact he wrote two - Bonnie and Clyde and Je T'Aime . . . Moi Non Plus.
Late one night in the winter of 1967, Gainsbourg and Bardot went into a dimly lit studio in Paris and recorded Michel Colombier's arrangement of Je T'Aime in an intimate two-hour session. The two singers were squashed into a small, steamy glass booth; engineer William Flageollet witnessed what he described as "heavy petting". Word leaked to the press that it was an "audio vérité" recording, with the Sunday paper France-Dimanche reporting that the four minutes and 35 seconds of "groans, sighs, and Bardot's little cries of pleasure" set to almost churchlike organ music gave "the impression you're listening to two people making love".
The next thing the journalists did was call up Bardot's husband and ask him what he thought of it. His reply made the next day's headlines - "Furious Gunter Sachs Demands the Single Be Withdrawn" - something that Bardot's agent was agreeing to behind the scenes. Bardot was about to star with Sean Connery in Shalako, released in 1968, and it was not a good time for a scandal (in any case, Bardot hated scandals).
She wrote Gainsbourg a letter, pleading with him not to release the record. Gainsbourg protested: "The music is very pure. For the first time in my life, I write a love song and it's taken badly." But he had witnessed the public's love-hate relationship with Bardot, and put the tapes in a drawer. They would stay there until 1986 when she finally gave permission for their "sublime" version of Je T'Aime, as Gainsbourg described it, to come out.
"Well, we all know Bardot is an idiot," grunted Marianne Faithfull of the original decision to proscribe the song. "Of course when Gainsbourg had her, she was in peak condition, tip-top form - but always very conformist." Gainsbourg had later asked Marianne to do the song with him. "Hah! He asked everybody," she said - including the actress-singers Valérie Lagrange and Mireille Darc (Alain Delon's ex-wife).
The affair ended and Bardot went back to her husband. Gainsbourg busied himself recording and meeting film commitments. For the film Slogan, released in France in 1969, it was decided that an English actress was needed. Jane Birkin - "a young actress with that perfect 1960s Swinging London look: long, ironed hair, big eyes and coltish body shoehorned into a belt-sized mini-skirt" - got the part. Initially, the two did not get on. An evening out in Paris was planned to break the ice.
"We were at Regine's nightclub for a long time," Birkin recalled, "and I asked Gainsbourg to dance." (Gainsbourg had been waiting for " un slow " so that he could ask Jane the same thing.) "And he stepped on my feet! I was so surprised. I thought, 'So this sophisticated, arrogant, seemingly confident man doesn't know how to dance' - and I realised it was because he's in fact shy. He seemed so worldly-wise, but at the same time he was very childlike.
"From there he took me to another nightclub - to every nightclub in Paris until six in the morning. We went to Madame Arthur, where his father used to play the piano for the transvestites, who all came up kissing Gainsbourg and saying 'Ooh cheri, how are you?' And he took me to the Russian nightclubs where the Russian violin players played until we got into the taxi on the street and Gainsbourg stuffed 100 franc notes into their violins. He loved them and they loved him, and he told them ' Nous sommes des putes ' ('We're all prostitutes') and asked them to play the Valse Triste, that terribly melancholic slow waltz by Sibelius, which they played right up to the taxi, and which he afterwards always called 'Jane's song'. Then I thought he was going to take me to his parents' house [where Gainsbourg still lived], like all good boys do, but no, he took me straight to the Hilton, where they asked him if he wanted his usual room!"
Birkin was horrified. The evening had started out, quite successfully all things considered, as a quest for an entente cordiale but she was about to become another notch on his rented bedpost. "In the lift as we were going up, I was pulling faces to myself, thinking, gosh, how could I have got myself into such a mess? I had only known John Barry in all my life, and suddenly here I was with someone who had only taken me out for one night." Once in his room she said she wanted to use the bathroom, where she hid out as long as she could - "and tried to tidy myself up and try to look as if I was used to this sort of thing. By the time I got back into the bedroom, he was asleep. There he was, he'd drunk so much that he was out cold. And I was so relieved! It meant I could nip out to the drugstore and pick up a little 45 record of this song we had been listening to all evening which was 'Yummy yummy yummy I've got love in my tummy' by God knows who. I stuck it between his toes - still he didn't move - and went back to my hotel."
The pair became inseparable. Shortly after filming, Gainsbourg asked Jane to record a new version of Je T'Aime.
"I don't know how he got Jane to do it because she was such a lovely English upper-class schoolgirl," said Marianne Faithfull. "But of course, he would have got her to do it by fucking her brains out! And Je T'Aime was perfect for Jane. She was born for it."
Certainly Je T'Aime's languid, almost over-pretty, chocolate-box melody contained some surreal images for a love song - " je vais et je viens, entre tes reins " translates as "I come and go between your kidneys". But then, this was a love song that denied it was a love song, or was too cynical or insecure to own up to it. The lyrical subtleties were lost on late-1960s Brits. What they heard was an expertly stroked organ, orgasmic groans and a soft-focus melody, the musical equivalent of a Vaseline-smeared Emmanuelle movie. It was confirmation that life across the Channel was one of unchecked lubriciousness, and Je T'Aime became as essential a part of any successful seduction as a chilled bottle of Blue Nun.
The press, of course, speculated - as they had with the Bardot version - that Gainsbourg and Birkin had simply recorded a live sex session. To which Gainsbourg said, according to Birkin, "'Thank goodness it wasn't, otherwise I hope it would have been a long-playing record'. We made it, very boringly, in the studio in Marble Arch, both of us in sort of telephone cabins."
As soon as they had finished recording the song, Gainsbourg and Birkin rushed back with it to Paris. "The hotel where we were living at the time, where Oscar Wilde had died - Gainsbourg liked it because of that anecdote - had a restaurant in the wine-cellar where people could sit in the little compartments and have dinner, and there was a man who used to play rather slow and discreet records for background music. Gainsbourg couldn't resist popping on Je T'Aime . . . Moi Non Plus," Birkin recalls. As they sat back and watched, "Everybody's knives and forks were in the air, suspended. Nobody went on eating. Gainsbourg said 'I think we've got a hit.' "
Gainsbourg claimed that his hymn to sexual liberation was, in fact, an "anti-fuck" song, about the desperation and innate impossibility of physical love. Whatever the truth, at the age of 41 and after 11 years in the business, Gainsbourg finally had an international success.
With their success assured, Gainsbourg, with Birkin, decided to record France's first concept album.
L'Histoire de Melody Nelson (released in 1971) is Gainsbourg's beautifully strange and brooding concept album about the love affair between a middle-aged Frenchman and an underage English girl set to music that sounds like a late-1960s jukebox landed on an orchestra accompanying a reading by Samuel Coleridge. Staccato electric guitar, piano rolls, a quasi-psychedelic rock combo, strings, a 70-piece choir and an omnipresent thick, rubbery, doom-laden bass that rumbles through the 28-minute, seven-track album like the wheels of a big old car propelling the story to its fateful conclusion.
Muttering close to the microphone, Gainsbourg tells his story of sex, aesthetics, death, obsession and the impossible ideal of purity in a haunted, deadpan voice, like a French Ancient Mariner compelled to prop up another bar and recount the tale over again to yet another indifferent stranger.
The opening track, Melody, finds Gainsbourg behind the wheel of his 1910 Rolls-Royce, suddenly aware that the Spirit of Ecstasy has led him to a dangerous, isolated spot in an unsalubrious Paris suburb. Losing control of the car and himself, he runs into a girl on a bicycle, watches her tumble into the road like a doll, her skirt flying over her head to reveal her innocent white knickers. Her name is Melody, an English girl, barely 15 years old, with red hair - "her natural colour", he adds, with a mix of poignancy and regret . The stage is set for danger and sex. But first the music glides into an innocent, acoustic Ballade de Melody Nelson, as the driver finds out more about the " deliceuse enfant ". Only after the lush, old-time-romantic Valse de Melody and the trumpet-laden declaration of love, Ah! Melody, does he take us off to the funky Hotel Particulier where, reflected in the mirror above the rococo bed, we watch him deflower her. (Unlike Je T'Aime, Birkin says, there was a tape recorder under the bed - the horsey laugh on this track is the sound of her being tickled in a hotel room).
Young Melody gets homesick (for Sunderland!) and catches a flight back home, but the plane crashes, leaving a tormented, broken, middle-aged man face-to-face with his own solitude, and with "nothing to lose and no God to believe in". The tragedy, of course, was inevitable. Once she had lost her virginity, the underage redhead had to die in order to keep the ideal of beauty, youth and purity alive in his imagination. The inspiration for this love story - somewhat pessimistically perhaps - was obvious. "Melody is Jane," he said. "Without Jane there wouldn't have been any record."
Always looking for a new direction, Gainsbourg then headed for Jamaica to record a reggae album with Sly and Robbie, at the time the leading reggae rhythm section.
"Reggae had only just started to get going in France when Gainsbourg made Aux Armes Et Caetera [To Arms Etc, released in 1979]," said Philippe Lerichomme, Gainsbourg's artistic director.
"I had been asked to go to a club one Sunday night to listen to a punk group, who were due on stage at midnight. So I was in this half-empty club, nothing I heard had interested me, it was midnight and the group didn't come on. The disc jockey, who was very good, was playing some very hot things in the meantime - punk, and some reggae. And it came to me in a flash. It was two o'clock in the morning, so I waited a few hours and then phoned Gainsbourg and said, 'We must go to Jamaica and make a reggae album'. And Gainsbourg said 'Good idea!' He did not need any persuasion."
A week had been booked at Island's Dynamic Sounds studio, a place Gainsbourg would describe to Birkin on his return (with a touch of artistic licence) as the most primitive place imaginable, with chickens clucking about on top of the mixing board. At the outset, it looked like it might turn out to be seven days too long.
"When we arrived," said Lerichomme, "the engineer wasn't there and we couldn't really communicate because Jamaicans speak a special kind of English we found difficult to understand, and for a while Robbie didn't know which one of us was the singer and kept talking to me - because Gainsbourg was older than me and he was wearing a suit." Not that they gave the impression of caring either way. "It was quite tense, no one smiling - it was a case of take the money and run. Gainsbourg, to try to ease the atmosphere, tried to talk to them and said, 'Do you know any French music?' and they started to take the piss out of us, 'French music? We're Jamaican.'
"Gainsbourg and I looked at each other, crestfallen. This wasn't good. Then Sly said, 'We know just one piece of French music, a song called Je T'Aime . . . Moi Non Plus, which has a girl groaning in it.' And Gainsbourg said in English, 'It's me'. That changed the whole mood. We recorded very, very fast, and when it was done they didn't want to leave. They hung around the studio to hear the playbacks, smoking their enormous spliffs, saying, 'Great! Brilliant!' "
Drummer Sly Dunbar remembered getting a call from Chris Blackwell, the head of Island Records. "He said this French guy wants to work with us, but he didn't realise he was the guy who did Je T'Aime - it was very popular in Jamaica. We couldn't believe it. He didn't say why he wanted to do a reggae album. So when we met him here in Kingston we said, 'So, we're going to make it polished?' And he said no, no, no, he wants it raw. It took less than a week to do everything. He just sang and said he wanted us to play reggae, so we just played reggae, and he didn't say anything - he was into the music, but he was also having a good time. He was constantly smoking and drinking but he never looked drunk. I didn't see him smoke ganja, it was just his French cigarettes in the blue pack.
"He was singing in French. We didn't know what he was singing about, but his singing was good and the melodies were great." Perhaps it was for the best that they didn't know. Relax Baby Be Cool - one of the album's perkier tracks, a mix of reggae, 1960s R&B and comic-strip "bing-boong" noises - is a chat-up routine taking place against a backdrop of hooded Klansmen, morgues and blood running through the streets. The minimalist lyrics of Eau et Gaz à Tous les Etages (Water and Gas on Every Floor) has a man taking his dick out and pissing and farting his way upstairs. The slinky singalong Lola Rastaquouère is an ode to an underage rasta girl whose breasts are "two spheres that I would give up two months' pay for, just to get to roll my poor joint between them".
But the song that made Gainsbourg notorious, the song that had the album flying out of the shops back home in France, was the second track, Aux Armes et Caetera, released in 1979. Over a swaying backdrop of laid-back reggae with a patter of percussion and slinky support vocals from the I Threes, an understated Gainsbourg talk-sings the words familiar to every Frenchman: " Allons enfants de la patrie/ Le jour de gloire est arrivé " - the opening lines of the French national anthem. It was a masterstroke. Hearing a bunch of Jamaicans messing with La Marseillaise was, for the French, the equivalent of the Sex Pistols' God Save the Queen and Jimi Hendrix's Star-Spangled Banner rolled into one.
The outcry over the "freggae" national anthem made the scandal caused by Je T'Aime pale into insignificance. The national daily paper Le Figaro condemned it as an outrage. An editorial suggested Gainsbourg should be excommunicated and have his French citizenship removed.
"The journalist called him a walking pollutoid," said Birkin. "He said how someone - and let's not neglect the fact that the name Gainsbourg was hardly French - could dare to do the national anthem with a lot of rastas was poison. Gainsbourg, I remember, was so shocked. He was nearly crying. But then he found it was great fun that he was no longer on the entertainment page, he was on the news page."
© Sylvie Simmons. Extracted from Serge Gainsbourg: A Fistful of Gitanes, published by Helter Skelter in April at £12.99.
