Serge gainsbourg a fist.., p.4
Serge Gainsbourg- a Fistful of Gitanes, page 4
The job of penning Du Chant À La Une!’s liner-notes was given to Marcel Aymé, Henry Miller’s French translator and the author of cool, cynical modernist books. “Serge Gainsbourg is a 25 year old piano player,” he wrote, conveniently lopping five years off the newcomer’s age, “who became a songwriter, lyricist and singer. He sings about alcohol, girls, adultery, fast cars, poverty, miserable jobs. His songs – inspired by the experiences of a youth which life did not favour – have an accent of melancholy, bitterness and, above all, the directness of a police report. They are set to spare music” – six musicians including Serge, on piano, guitar, double bass, drums, saxophone and vibes – “in which, in contemporary fashion, the concern for rhythm eclipses the melody. My wish for Gainsbourg is that fate might shine on him, especially since he deserves it, and that it brings some splashes of sunlight into his songs.”3
It was not a hit. Then no-one really thought it would be – except Serge. As biographer Gilles Verlant wrote, “you were not seduced by Gainsbourg’s songs, you felt attacked by them.” His producer Denis Bourgeois knew that the songs were not going to appeal to French radio, which – in spite of the rock ’n’ roll anarchy reigning across the Atlantic, with D.J.s vying to play the latest Elvis and Jerry Lee, Chuck Berry or Fats Domino – had stayed resolutely stagnant, dictating a strict formula to the studios of clean, heavily orchestrated, nicely sung, unchallenging material. Not only did Serge not look like the average chansonnier, he did not sing like one. And unlike the more modern French singer-songwriters like Jacques Brel and Georges Brassens, who essentially set poetry to music, Serge’s words, uniquely, were welded to the music. A part of the rhythm, with an inbuilt music of their own, while still managing to retain their intellectual content. His audience, Bourgeois figured, would be the sophisticated Left Bank club crowd who appreciated modern, cynical music. And Serge’s music, in Bourgeois’s opinion, was the most modern and cynical he’d heard. It was a sentiment shared by Bourgeois’s fellow producer at Philips, Boris Vian – the man whose own caustic, uncompromising songs had been such an inspiration to Serge at Milord’s.
Vian wrote the first major article to appear on Serge Gainsbourg. Raving about Du Chant À La Une! in the magazine Canard Enchaîné (Private Eye is the nearest British equivalent), he ordered his readers to go out and buy it – “quite understandably,” said Serge, “since I never hid the fact that I followed directly on from him. I had a fixation on Boris Vian. An hallucinatory charm. He wrote the first article about me. It ended with ‘Damn, you’re fools if you don’t buy Gainsbourg’s record.’”4 Not long afterwards, when Vian invited him to his house behind the Moulin Rouge, his host took a book of Cole Porter’s lyrics off the shelf, opened it up and told an ecstatic Serge, “You have the same patterns of stress and intonation, the same technique of pushing back and alliteration.”5
But, Vian aside, Serge did not get too much support from the music press – not that there was much of a music press in France in the late 1950s in the first place. There were a couple of reviews ranging from lukewarm to largely favourable, a couple of fluff pieces planted by the record company, and a news item that his tale of the suicidal ticket-puncher in ‘Le Poinçonneur Des Lilas’ had raised the hackles of metro station staff at what they saw as an innacurate portrayal of one of their associates. Serge replied that the song had been inspired by a true conversation he’d had with the ticket-man at Lilas station. “What do you dream about all day when you’re doing this?” Serge had asked him. His reply: “Of looking at the sky.” The song – which would be covered by three different French artists within a year – became a post-war standard.
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It was partly the lack of other means of marketing their non-conformist new signing that resulted in Serge’s appearance on another album that year. Opus 109 was a compilation of new faces, unknown talent, recorded live at the Trois Baudets, a small, 350-seater theatre in Montmartre. Philips thought the record and its accompanying French tour – featuring a big star headliner, Jacques Brel – would help raise Gainsbourg’s profile. To an extent it did, athough the first live review from the tour wouldn’t have done much to entice an already indifferent record-buying public. While acknowledging the “poetry” of his songs, the critic from Libération wondered aloud if Serge, with his “wan face and washed-out voice”6 had made the right decision to sing the songs himself. Still tormented by paralysing stage-fright, even brought on by his short, four-song slot near the bottom of the bill, you might wonder if Serge had wondered too. But when Yves Montand – the actor and seductive, velvet-voiced singer who’d covered songs by populists like Maurice Chevalier and poets like Jacques Prévert – once asked him if he wanted to be a composer, performer or writer, Serge answered “Je veux tout” – “I want it all.”
He had the kind of enormous appetite for fame, success, recognition and love that you don’t often find in the product of a structured and loving family; Serge could never quite fit the cliché of the pop star under the spotlight demanding the attention he never got in his childhood, or the clown making people laugh to mask a profound misery. Nor did writing songs appear to be a tortured business. Though the words might take a bit of work, the melodies, he said, came easy – a consequence of having to summon tunes out of the air in his years as a nightclub pianist. He gave birth to his songs “comme une négresse” in the bush, making a big hole in the earth, squatting down in it, watching the song just come tumbling right out. His feeling of being an outsider came from a different source. Asked to analyse it himself, he once said it was because when his parents left Russia, they had left behind his roots. They still showed in his music – “My music is Judeo-Russian; always something sad”7 – but he had no grandparents, no ancestry, no land he felt was truly his. “I would have loved to have had roots. To be a man you need roots,” he told Actuel magazine. “I am rootless.”8
If his records weren’t flying off the shelves, the recognition factor took a big step forward when, part way through the Opus 109 tour, Serge learnt that Du Chant À La Une! had won the grand prize of L’Academie Charles Cros – a kind of cultural-artistic Grammy for songwriters crossed with a more grandiose version of Britain’s Ivor Novello Award. And an even larger stride followed when, shaking so much from nerves that he dropped the glass of whisky she offered him, he found himself in Juliette Gréco’s apartment clutching a pile of his songs. Gréco had taken a couple of years off to be with her lover, Darryl F. Zanuck, the filmmaker, and she had been scouting for the best new songwriters for her comeback record. Once again Serge grabbed the grand prize. In 1959 the EP Juliette Gréco Chante Serge Gainsbourg was released. (Extended Play records, four tracks with a nice picture sleeve-cover, were the prime medium for pop releases in France at the time; singles were mainly produced for jukeboxes.) Serge was overjoyed. He gave Gréco one of his paintings as a gift – two naked children on a beach. Although he had claimed to have destroyed all his canvases in that dramatic moment when, like Joseph before him, he had decided to give up painting, he’d evidenly been shrewder than his father and kept a couple for emergencies.
Serge now had three women covering his material – Gréco, newcomer Pia Colombo, and Michèle Arnaud, who no doubt was feeling a little crowded out by her protegé’s newfound popularity, though she faithfully continued to sing his songs. But it was Serge’s friendship with Gréco that raised his fame quotient. Newspapers and magazines ran pictures of the pair on the town together, and journalists began their enduring practice of wondering what such a beauty was doing with such a “beast”. They called him “un monstre”, “un Neanderthal”. Serge might well have agreed with them; Lucien certainly would have. He’d said that he didn’t have mirrors in his room because he’d broken them all with his “ugly face”. As Robert Chalmers (a supporter) wrote in The Independent, “Gainsbourg’s self-image, in his less upbeat moods at least, resembled that of the French poet Tristan de Corbière, who for years kept a dead and flattened toad nailed to his bedroom wall: he said it saved him the trouble of looking at his reflection.” Even the descriptions Serge’s male friends gave of him painted a picture of E.T. dressed as a dandy with a cigarette. It would be quite some time before he could simply give a Gallic shrug and say, “Ugliness has more going for it than beauty does: it endures.” His face, like his music, was unorthodox, unmainstream, uninterested in rules and formalities, and utterly distinctive.
And it did come with its own advantages. The director of a daft French film starring Brigitte Bardot, Voulez-Vous Danser Avec Moi? (Would You Dance With Me), was hunting around for someone to play the sleazy photographer who blackmails Brigitte’s cheating husband – a dentist – with compromising pictures, when he spotted Serge on the sleeve of Le Poinçonneur De Lilas (one of two EPs that flanked Du Chant À La Une!). He knew at once he’d found his perfect creep. It would be the first of many such bad-guy roles that Serge would undertake in his second, simultaneous career.
By the end of 1959 Serge had a second full album and its two satellite EPs (Le Claqueur De Doigts and L’Anthracite) in the shops. The prosaically (it probably wasn’t scatologically) titled Gainsbourg No 2 – mutant jazz-pop engaged in an unnatural act with chanson, French literature and Americana – wasn’t quite up to the extraordinary standard of its predecessor; then again, he hadn’t had much time to write it, having spent much of the year out on tour. But it had its moments. The cool, ‘Fever’-esque ‘Le Claqueur De Doigts’ (The Finger-Popper) the guy standing by le jukebox snapping his fingers is given onomatopaeic, syncopated words with their own in-built snap and pop; Serge had taken his word-music fusion to another level. ‘Mambo Miam Miam’ was a nod to the exotic dances that were all the rage at the time, in Britain as well as in France, while, at the other extreme, ‘La Nuit D’Octobre’ (The Night In October) was based on poem by Alfred De Musset – one of his worst poems, Serge said later, which is how he dared to take the liberty of adapting it.
Again it was not a hit. “Aggressive, introverted jazz” as Gilles Verlant described it, with literary language, was not what the postman wanted to whistle on his rounds. There were some fans among the critics though; the leading newspaper Le Monde wrote of his “absolute frankness of tone, his obvious concern at never going along with something that has already been said or done”, and the fearless way in which he looked at the world “through the piercing eye of a man who is not afraid of what people will say about him.”
The sleeve photo portrayed a smart, besuited Serge with a gun in one hand and roses in the other (predating the L.A. heavy rock band by almost 30 years). He said that it perfectly encapsulated his outlook – a gun for his critics, roses for his women. Though it was also, clearly, an homage to his early mentor, the supreme wearer of the sharp Italian suit Boris Vian. In June 1959, during a preview of the movie based on his novel J’irai Cracher Sur Vos Tombes (I Will Spit On Your Graves), Vian suffered a heart attack and died. A low point in what was otherwise an exhilarating year for Gainsbourg, one which ended with his first magazine cover story.
La Semaine Radiophonique wrote of their ‘Star of the Week’, “He’s a guy who’s not like anyone else and whose songs are like no-one else either. He is tall, very frail, shy, with a voice that speaks to you so softly you can scarcely hear it… But the songs he writes hit you in the heart and stomach like a punch. In them he expresses everything – nothing stops him, not useless modesty nor fear of shocking… He imitates no-one, never tries to make things pretty or sweet, likeable or commercial.” Serge would have nodded when he read that; he had always said he “detested” sentimental songs. “With him there’s nothing banal, nothing conventional. The ideas are always stunning and the words unexpected.” Although concurring that he “wasn’t much of a singer”, the writer, Germaine Ramos, concluded that what he had was “something new, bizarre, tormented, deep and ultra-modern. Love him or hate him, you’re going to have to recognise that Serge Gainsbourg is somebody.”9
Somebody, though, who, at the age of 31 – just eight years younger than Vian when he died – was still living at home with his parents, sitting at Joseph’s piano; Gitane sans filtre in hand, black coffee and a bottle by his side, reshaping the songs that would change the face of French pop music, even if the French pop music audience were only interested in hearing them sung by somebody other than Serge.
Chapter 4
LE TWISTEUR
In 1986, the singer Françoise Hardy and the broadcaster Anne-Marie Simmond – the latter a professional graphologist, the former an amateur astrologist – published their joint opus Entre Les Lignes Et Les Signes (Between The Lines And The Signs) which analysed the charts and the handwriting of various French celebrities. Mme Simmond, endorsing the Semaine Radiophonique journalist’s views, wrote that Serge’s penmanship (which Jane Birkin had said was deliberately elaborate and stylish; “He liked the writing to be just so; he’d decided at a very young age, as an aesthetic idea, that he wouldn’t bar any of the ‘t’s or use any punctuation – he thought commas and full-stops were vulgar – so it was quite difficult to read his letters”) indicated a man who knew he was somebody. It also showed a man, she averred, who was proud and vain but did not really like himself, and who was haunted by the idea of another more interesting life that he had managed to miss out on. Françoise Hardy’s study of the constellations on 2 April 1928 pointed to above-average ambivalences and contradictions, an eager, egocentric and sometimes immature nature, and a tendency towards defeatism that was fortunately balanced by an ability to boldly venture into all of life’s strange and funny possibilities.
This could be one of the reasons why the finest pop writer France has produced found himself starting the ’60s, the Golden Age of pop and rock, dressed as an unmusical first century A.D. official of Ancient Rome in dreadful Franco-Italian sword-and-sandal epics like La Révolte Des Esclaves (Revolt Of The Slaves), Hercule Se Déchaine (Hercules Unchained) and Samson Contre Hercule (Samson v Hercules). Nasty characters, all of them. “No-one knew how to employ me as an actor,” he said. “They always gave me bad-guy roles because of my ugly face.”1
The first acting job his new agent had found him was as Corvino, the man who sent the Christians to the lions, in 1961’s La Révolte Des Esclaves. After killing Sebastian (the future Saint), Serge’s character ended up being ripped apart by his dogs (a canine acting feat aided by the insertion of a piece of raw meat down his breastplate). Years later, when Jane went with Serge to see Des Esclaves at a cinema in Barbès – the quartier he had once scoured in search of a prostitute, and which now had a large immigrant population – the audience cheered mightily when Corvino/Serge was savaged. As Jane turned to tell him what a great acting job he had done to have got such a strong crowd reaction, she saw that he had shrunk down into his jacket like a turtle into its shell and suggested they sneak out before the credits in case the audience attacked him too.
His first release of the new decade, in January 1960, was likewise a film-related project. The EP L’Eau À La Bouche (Mouth-Watering) came from Serge’s first film soundtrack; it also brought him his first real commercial semi-success. The popularity of the comedy by Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, one of the new wave of French directors, about two sisters, their boyfriends, a dead grandmother and an inherited manor, pushed sales of the EP (on which he worked with arranger Alain Goraguer) to the 100,000 mark. Serge released a second soundtrack EP – from another film that year, Les Loups Dans La Bergerie (Wolves In The Sheep-fold) – before his real ’60s debut, Romantique 60, appeared. Surprisingly not an album but another EP. Between them, the three 1960 EPs displayed what would become something of a Serge Gainsbourg trademark: the creative recycling, reshaping and collageing of his own titles, words and songs. L’Eau À La Bouche’s instrumental ‘Judith’ reappeared as a vocal ballad on Romantique 60, while ‘Cha Cha Cha Du Loup’ was a title that had made its initial appearance on Les Loups Dans La Bergerie.
Serge’s third album, L’Étonnant Serge Gainsbourg (The Astonishing Serge Gainsbourg), finally came out the following year, in 1961. The information on the album sleeve that it was “bon pour la danse” (good for dancing) wasn’t what was astonishing about it; working on the theory that music was to dance, not listen to, French records at the time were tagged with whatever movement of arms, legs and body some anonymous music business star-chamber had deemed appropriate. ‘Judith’, for instance, on Romantique 60, had been designated ‘un slow’. (It was a custom that continued well into the mid ’60s, if this writer’s French vinyl compilations of British and American acts is anything to go by; Dylan’s ‘Just Like A Woman’, for example, is another ‘slow’, while The Troggs’ ‘Wild Thing’ and The Walker Brothers’ ‘Living Above Your Head’ are each allocated the ‘jerk’).
Why anyone would choose this album to dance to, though, is rather hard to say. And if musically it wasn’t as immediately astonishing as Du Chant À La Une!, lyrically it most certainly was. Less hard-edged and scathing, his words this time were either cynically cerebral – ‘En Relisant Ta Lettre’ (On Re-reading Your Letter), where the protagonist reads his lover’s suicide note and comments on her grammatical errors – or romantic and literary. French literature students will have observed references in the songs ‘Le Rock De Nerval’, ‘La Chanson De Prévert’ and ‘La Chanson De Maglia’ (after Victor Hugo).
