Serge gainsbourg a fist.., p.16
Serge Gainsbourg- a Fistful of Gitanes, page 16
“I realised that he was in fact asking me to sing words about his pain and the separation – that I was singing his wounded side, his feminine side, the B-side of Gainsbarre. I actually asked him whether it was all right to say that and he said, ‘Yes’, he thought that was right, and that it was unusually bright of me!”
Apart from their soul-baring aspect, the lyrics also displayed Serge’s trademark in-built rhythm and plays-on-words. ‘Haine Pour Aime’, for example, sounds like ‘N for M’ while meaning ‘hate for love’, while the syllables of ‘Con C’Est Con Ces Conséquences’ (pronounced con-say-con-say-con-say-cons) sawed like a sad old violin.
Baby Alone In Babylone went gold, as did Isabelle Adjani’s eponymous debut (which featured one of Serge’s most painful puns, ‘Beau Oui Comme Bowie’. But Jane’s also took first prize from L’Academie Charles Cros – the same prestigious award which Serge had received for Du Chant À La Une! 25 years earlier, and which he accepted, on Jane’s behalf with tears in his eyes as she went off to shoot another film.
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Jane may have been taking care of Gainsbarre’s B-side, but the A-side was still very much at large. In March 1984 it was responsible for one of the biggest scandals of Serge’s career. When it came to TV shows, Gainbourg increasingly ‘barred’ himself, handing the reins to his debauched twin; the results would be either hilariously funny, wickedly witty, provocative, pertinent or alcoholically pathetic, depending on the occasion and one’s viewpoint. Most of the time, when he stepped over the limit, people just shrugged and said it was Serge being Serge. But it was a different matter when, railing against “the whore called socialism” on prime-time TV, he set fire to a 500 franc (£50) bank note, blowing out the flames when only a quarter of the note remained – the amount he had left, he said, after paying his tax.
No big deal, you might think, even if note-burning is illegal in France, but it caused the kind of telly-smashing outrage that greeted the Pistols’ TV appearance with Bill Grundy. It wasn’t just the patriots who were upset, the ones who had objected before to the reggae ‘Marseillaise’, but normal, working-class French people with no money to burn. Serge was unapologetic. He had no regrets, he told journalists, he loved scandals, they kept his life interesting. Privately though, the vehemence of the reaction rattled him, according to Jane. “Serge paid his taxes; he didn’t have a company in Switzerland. He used to go off to the tax man himself, on foot, at the end of the Rue de L’Université and fill out a cheque and, towards the end of his life, when he didn’t see very well, he made Fulbert fill it out for him, and he said he made Fulbert cry because he couldn’t bear that Serge paid so much tax.” Fulbert was the new valet Serge took on following the passing of Mamadou.
Under the circumstances, it was probably with some relief that Serge agreed to Philippe Lerichomme’s suggestion to go off to America to make his next album. “Serge had only ever gone to England to work,” said the producer. “He adored recording in England; the sound was different and the culture among the musicians wasn’t the same as it was in France. I think that that’s changed now – in France today there are some great musicians among the young generation – but back then, the English musicians with whom he worked, although they were the same age as him, had cut their teeth on rock music, whereas in France they’d cut their teeth on the accordion. So working in England was very, very important to what he did, but although he had been to the States several times to do other things, he had never recorded an album there for himself.”
Lerichomme had been listening to a record an associate had sent him – Trash It Up by Southside Johnny & The Asbury Jukes, the band championed by Bruce Springsteen. It was co-produced, Lerichomme noted, by Nile Rodgers of Chic fame and Asbury Juke guitarist Billy Rush. Having tried, unsuccessfully, to recruit the busy Rodgers, he turned to Billy Rush, who had even less knowledge of French pop music than Sly & Robbie, claiming an ignorance even of ‘Je T’Aime, Moi Non Plus’. But after some initial awkwardness, their first endeavours at Rush’s home studio – a converted garage in New Jersey – went well. Serge and his producer played him some tapes of the songs’ basic tunes and Rush went right to work.
“We didn’t speak,” he told Verlant. “I sensed he was unsure and measuring me up… I chose a rhythm, stuck on a bass, threw in some keyboards and guitars.” Serge took the tape back to his hotel and returned the next day and said “Great, let’s keep going.” Rush was given the job of choosing the musicians – including Peter Gabriel’s synthesiser player Larry Fast, plus Stan Harrison and Steve and George Simms from David Bowie’s band. Despite their long experience in the business, they were nevertheless dumbfounded at how much Serge drank during the recording sessions in New York’s Power Station studios. “Enough,” Rush said, “to knock out a horse. I had to move my family out and turn my house into a giant bar. He’d make incredibly strong piña coladas. And did he smoke! If I get lung cancer it’s his fault.”
Love On The Beat’s English title came with the added delight for Francophones of ‘beat’ being a homonym for ‘bite’, French for penis. The song titles were all-English too, even if the hard-edged lyrics were not. “New York music is very hard, so I have to align myself ”, explained Serge. “The kids aren’t afraid of words any more, nor of ideas. Through intellectual necessity, I have to go along.” One of the themes of the album was homosexuality – ‘Kiss Me Hardy’, for example, which namechecks the painter Francis Bacon, and takes Admiral Nelson’s dying words and turns them into a love song to his faithful assistant – which was underlined by Serge’s decision to appear on the sleeve made up as a woman (and since, aesthetic as ever, he wanted to be a beautiful woman, he claimed to have stopped drinking for a fortnight to try to lose the bags under his eyes).
He had spoken, in his interview with Bayon in Mort Ou Vices, of how older men had fancied him as a child, and claimed that most beautiful declaration of love he had ever received had been from a good-looking young man who came to see him perform every night, religiously, when he was still a nightclub pianist. An attempt at a sexual relationship, with Serge on the receiving end, had ended in abjection totale; that he had never managed to play the “chick”, he said, was one of the greatest regrets of his life.
But by far the most controversial aspect of the album was his duet with his 13-year-old daughter Charlotte. The love song, based around a Chopin Étude and fleshed out with throbbing bass and funky beat, had the title ‘Lemon Incest’. Sensing another cause celèbre, and the possibility of another Aux Armes Etcaetera-type success, Serge’s record label launched the electro-funk album in 1984 with a huge media blitz. ‘Lemon Incest’ – released as a single the following year – went to number one, while its video, featuring Serge and Charlotte side by side on a circular bed, hit another ten on the scandalometer.
“How could people have imagined that he would have been a father that could have abused his children in any way!” protested the girl’s mother. “Charlotte, whom he loved so, he who always found it so difficult to actually say that he loved someone. It was a love song to Charlotte, to show her off, and to have play on words like lemon zest and put it to classical music, was something Serge couldn’t resist. Of course he knew he was being provocative, but he was horrified that people would actually think –.” Jane, clearly horrified herself, was for a moment lost for words.
“He was the most unlikely person to touch anyone. He was easily shockable. You couldn’t get anyone that was more pudique – it makes me mad that I can’t translate that word, you will have to put it in French. The children never, ever saw him naked in his life. No-one ever saw him naked. I never saw him naked. Bambou didn’t. He always covered himself with the dressing-gown that he’d brought off the film Romance Of A Horse Thief. He was the most modest of men.”
As Serge told Bayon, he didn’t even like to see his penis in the mirror and would always hide it with his hand. When he was in hospital and the nurses came to clean him, he would cover his genitals with a towel. “I am extremely pudique,” he said, “I always have been.”1
As for incest, “I am a man subject to vertigo and I think that incest is – vertigo,” he said. “I imagine that it could be superb, but at the same an atrocity.”2 As he pointed out, the key words in the song were “The love that we will never make together”.3 As for paedophilia in general, he couldn’t understand the attraction, he said; little girls smell of piss on one side and shit on the other. He was certainly in love with Charlotte, just as Jane had been in love with her father and, as was normally the case in father-daughter relationships, Charlotte was in love with him too. But to degrade it with the sex act, he said, would be “an abomination”. As for Charlotte herself, she recalled the experience as “completely innocent and easy,” and had no memory at all of “any of the scandals that it caused”.
One more scandal before we leave 1984 (one, it must be said, that did not upset the French anywhere near as much as the note-burning incident, though it did tweak the attention of tabloid newspapers in the U.S. and U.K.): the infamous Whitney Houston incident.
It was one of those live variety shows with which French TV is still infected, of a type that make the Parkinson programme look like the very apex of the avant-garde. The line-up that night was a prestigious one: Serge, Eddy Mitchell (the chunky, post-menopausal, but still gainfully-employed French rock ’n’ roller) and Whitney. The diva, following the fluff format of these shows, sang her song then sat down next to Serge, beatifically smiling, ready to indulge in the standard chat that was part oleaginous flattery, part new-product plug. Whitney spoke in English, the other guests in French, while the beaming host Michel Drucker lobbed translations back and forth like a manic tennis pro. Serge, looking like something poured out of Tom Waits’ whisky bottle and bristling at Drucker’s deliberate bland mistranslations of his various mutterings, suddenly interjected, in plain English, “I said I want to fuck her.”
“WHAT DID HE SAY?” screamed Whitney. The pale-faced presenter tried to smooth things over, offering more fake translations in English, assuring La Whitney that what Serge had really said was he found her “great” and “very pretty”. To clear up the confusion, Serge repeated his statement in French: “J’ai dit que j’ai envie de la baiser.”
Drucker, a strained rictus stretched across his face, suggested that his mother might want to switch channels. Since it was live TV and the damage had already been done, and there were still ten minutes left to fill with a Gainsbourg-Mitchell duet, Serge survived the evening without being thrown off the show.4
“I saw it live!,” said Nicolas Godin of Air, a youngster when it was broadcast. “I was watching it with all my family at my godfather’s house and all of a sudden he said that he wanted to fuck Whitney Houston! It was amazing – very shocking and very funny.” And a lot of people agreed with him. Serge had got away with saying something that no doubt a lot of people thought but would never have dared to put into words – his reputation not only intact but enhanced.
The following year Serge was back on TV, atoning for the earlier scandal of the note-burning, handing the presenter a cheque for 100,000 francs (£10,000) made out to the charity Médecins Sans Frontières. It was an expensive retribution for the destruction of 500 francs, but that was not the reason why Serge looked so sober. He was sober. Just a short time before, his mother had died. She was 90 years old, but the shock still knocked Serge sideways, to the degree that for a while he put the bottle aside. But his period of abstinence clearly seemed to be over when he appeared at the Casino De Paris that autumn, stumbling down a flight of steps before standing in front of the microphone to a standing ovation from the crowd.
When Serge decided he was going to tour with the Love On The Beat album, he asked Billy Rush to once again put together a band. They were somewhat surprised to find themselves travelling in France in a style they were unaccustomed to in America. Serge, who brought with him as many of the comforts of home as he could fit in the removal van that tagged along behind them, took the musicians to fancy restaurants and bought them gifts. “He treated them like kings,” said Jane. “He was sincerely appreciative of their talents. And, though he loved his English musicians, he felt more familiar with the Americans because he felt less intimidated talking to them; he didn’t feel like he was not speaking correctly. Serge was a proud man and he was always afraid to be less brilliant in English than he was in French.”
The show at the Casino De Paris resulted in the live album released the following year. But the tour also came with another bonus. Serge, Billy Rush recalled, was delighted to find himself mobbed by young girl fans. “Look,” he would point out to the musician, “they’re fainting over me.”
Jane: “It was the most important thing to Serge that teenagers loved him – and that only really happened after I left. He would ring me up and say, ‘Did you see me on the television last night?’ And when I would tick him off and say it was rather rude, he would say ‘I don’t care what you think, the young ones thought it was great’. I used to be so conventional. I’d say, ‘Serge, that is a horrible, horrible jacket’ – he’d had one made out of snakeskin – and he said, ‘I don’t care what you think, the kids love it.’ Good old Serge, he was right.”
Chapter 16
SUCK BABY SUCK
In January 1986, at the age of 57, Serge became a father again. Photographs show his crumpled face, smudged with stubble, smiling proudly down at the tiny baby in Bambou’s lap and offering him his first Gitane. Spurred by tradition, one imagines, rather than some ‘Boy Named Sue’-esque effort to toughen him up, Serge named his second son and fourth child Lucien and nicknamed him, naturally, Lulu. He marked the occasion by writing a song for the new baby and handing it to its mother to sing; which is how Bambou found herself in a glass booth in a recording studio making her first single, ‘Lulu’.
For Lulu’s half-sister Charlotte, meanwhile, Serge wrote a film. The plot of Charlotte Forever revolved around an adolescent girl whose mother is killed in a car crash (a sports convertible not entirely dissimilar from the one Serge bought Jane after she left him) and who now lives alone with her father Stan, an alcoholic and suicidal screenwriter whose career, life and liver are all on the skids; his one success in life has been his daughter. Stan throws up, pisses blood and then crawls into bed to sleep next to the girl – there’s a sexual tension, but it’s unconsummated. Charlotte had the role of the daughter, while Serge played her father. Although still barely 15 years old, Charlotte, quite the pro, had already been making her name as an actress, but Serge’s film was hard-going. She was too young to appreciate her father’s sophisticated aesthetic and, with matters further complicated by the blurring of real life and make-believe and her own pudique nature, she was reduced to tears when Serge undressed her in the film. Her memory this time was that it “was not very comfortable. Because it was a bit too close”.
But “I think Serge was more frightened of Charlotte than the other way round”, said Jane. “I had no qualms whatsoever about Charlotte Forever, in fact I rather pushed Charlotte into doing it. I knew that Serge, when he loved somebody, wanted to make a record about them, write a film for them, put them in the spotlight and make them look beautiful. And, just as for me there was no question of Jacques (Doillon) saying no when Serge said he wanted to use him in a film, even though Jacques said, ‘But I’m a bad actor and I don’t want to do it’ – thank goodness, that film didn’t come about! – there was no question for me of Charlotte saying no to Charlotte Forever, even if it meant her losing her first trimester at school. It was only when Catherine Deneuve said, ‘Why is she crying?’ and I said, ‘because Serge is going to do a film in September and she wants to go on doing her school classes’ and Catherine said, ‘So she should’, and I said to Catherine, ‘We can’t do it to Serge’, and she said ‘But we can’t do it to Charlotte!’ that I went back home and phoned Serge and repeated what she’d said. And Serge said, ‘Oh, I hadn’t thought of that’, and he fixed for it all to be done a month earlier. Catherine of course had been right. She’d put up resistance in a motherly way and I’d put up none, because I somehow thought only of him.”
When the reviews appeared, several of them labelling the film “distasteful”, “unhealthy” and “sick”, Serge was the one who was in tears, Jane said. This time even some of his supporters seemed to feel he might have broken one taboo too far.
To compensate, he wrote his daughter a touching album with the same name. The title track and ‘Plus Doux Avec Moi’ (Gentler With Me) are affecting father-daughter duets, while in ‘Pour Ce Que Tu N’Étais Pas’ (For What You Were Not) Charlotte sings, “I took you for what you weren’t and left you for what you are”1 – a variation on the theme of Serge’s oft-repeated quote about taking women for what they’re not and leaving them for what they are. In the Anglo-French hybrid ‘Oh Daddy Oh’ she has him pinned down as a guy who “fucks too much, smokes too much, drinks too much” and who takes himself for “Huysmans, Hoffman, Rimbaud and Edgar Allen Poe”.2
“Charlotte seemed perfectly comfortable in the studio,” said the album’s engineer Dominique Blanc-Francard. “As did he. When Serge was singing alone and it was just him, Philippe Lerichomme and me, he always seemed a bit lost – he didn’t like to hear himself sing alone in the cabin with his headphones – and he was much harder to please. But when he was with Charlotte or the other singers he wrote for – Birkin, Adjani – he would be in there directing, making sure that everything went well. On his own he struck me as much more timid but when he worked with these women he was much more strong and forceful; there was a kind of seduction going on.”
That year a two-decade-old seduction was resurrected, in the form of the Gainsbourg-Bardot version of ‘Je T’Aime, Moi Non Plus’. B.B. – who had hung up her headphones some years before after recording around 70 songs – finally gave the go-ahead for its release to raise money for Greenpeace and her animal shelter. Also in the shops was a compilation album of Serge’s songs sung by Jane Birkin. If Bambou – who had waited three years before getting to record a Serge song, far longer than his earlier female associates, singers or otherwise – felt she was in second or third place, publicly she just said “I love him, therefore I forgive everything”. Quiet and dignified, in spite of the image ‘Bambou Et Les Poupées’ might have given, she was uncomfortable with the tabloid attention that Serge so loved. “With Jane,” she told Verlant, “they made the ideal media couple – much less so with me. It’s not the same, I’m not a public person. Without him I don’t exist – and I’m well aware of that.”3 Releasing a single had evidently been Serge’s idea, not hers.
