Serge Gainsbourg- a Fistful of Gitanes
Text copyright Sylvie Simmons © 2001
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Photographs copyright see picture credits page
Design by Bold; Typesetting by Caroline Walker
All Serge Gainsbourg lyrics quoted are copyright Warner-Chappell, France
They are quoted for review, study or critical purposes.
Front cover photograph by J.L. Rancruel / O. Medias
Back cover photograph by Patrick Duval, reprinted with his kind permission
For Stan, who loved music
“I highly recommend A Fistful of Gitanes by Sylvie Simmons, a highly entertaining biography of the French singer-songwriter and all-round scallywag.” - J.G. Ballard
"Wonderful! Serge would have been so happy." - Jane Birkin
“An excellent piece of writing.” - Leonard Cohen
"A marvellous book." - Mariannne Faithfull
“Gitanes is a stone masterpiece!” - Stephen Davis, Hammer Of The Gods.
“A wonderful introduction to one of the most overlooked songwriters of the 20th century.” - The Times
"Anyone interested in learning more about Gainsbourg's ravishing, Gallic, (spell-binding too) degeneracy would be well advised to check out A Fistful of Gitanes." - Mother Jones
“A riveting read.” - OK Magazine
“This dizzying biog recounts the holy-fool highs and sad-bastard lows of the French cultural icon. Converts will relish this ribald tale and newcomers will be correctly corrupted. Smoking!” - Uncut
“The most intriguing music-biz biography of the year.” - The Independent
“Sylvie, a fluent Francophone, brings him to life, guides us through the subtleties [and] perfectly evokes her subject.” - MOJO
“Impeccably researched and eminently readable.” - The Guardian
“Fascinating and superbly written, this proffers insight and constant entertainment.” - Time Out
“Exemplary, authoritative and compelling.” - Jockey Slut
“Superbly written." - The Jewish Chronicle
"Simmons's work will stand as the definitive take on a dizzying genius." - Goodreads
Contents
Foreword
Introduction
Chapter 1: Lulu
Chapter 2: Death of a Hairdresser
Chapter 3: Looking at the Sky
Chapter 4: Le Twisteur
Chapter 5: Baby Pop
Chapter 6: Initials B.B.
Chapter 7: Initials J.B.
Chapter 8: I Love You, Me Neither
Chapter 9: Spirit of Ecstasy
Chapter 10: A Fistful of Gitanes
Chapter 11: Underneath the Foam
Chapter 12: Freggae
Chapter 13: Behind the Black Door
Chapter 14: The Art of Farting
Chapter 15: Stars and Stripes
Chapter 16: Suck Baby Suck
Chapter 17: Requiem for a Twister
Chapter 18: Afterlife
Appendices
Source Notes
Discography
Filmography
About the Author
Foreword by Jane Birkin
In England you’re discovering him… Like opening a Pharaoh’s tomb, you see wonderful things… We stand outside whilst bright new faces shine lamps onto his brilliant world… Our perfumed flowers have faded in the air… You flash wild torches to light his gold sarcophagus… Hieroglyphs, treasured words, his painted throne, guarded by silent leopards… for years… And in the dark his sweet face has always smiled at you, waiting, patiently, for you to find the door.
Jane Birkin, January 2001
INTRODUCTION
“It’s disgusting!” An immaculately coiffed matron with matching mini-dog pushes past me as I stop on the narrow pavement to photograph the revolving art gallery outside number 5 Rue de Verneuil. In a display of fellow-feeling, the stunted animal cocks a tiny back leg to deposit a pipette of piss on the stubbly face that someone has lovingly painted on an empty spot at the bottom of the wall. The residents of this respectable street in the Saint-Germain area of Paris, a stone’s throw from the Seine – the kind of place where the corner shops sell old masters and scarily priced antiques – paid to have the walls whitewashed over just a matter of months ago, only for someone to sneak by in the night and spray-paint a slogan that marked the start of another round.
Ten years after Serge Gainsbourg’s death, the palimpsest of paintings and graffiti that still covers every millimetre of his small, two-storey house has taken on a life of its own; it even has its own website and coffee-table book. A tossed salad of colours, styles and languages where messages of love sit alongside puns and poetry, comic-book caricatures of the artist nudge up against Realist portraits and phallic line-drawings of the Tube-Poster School, and an ongoing metaphysical debate as to the credibility of Einstein’s proof of the existence of the soul after death concludes that Serge is not dead, he has ascended into heaven where he sits on the right hand of God The Hashish Smoker. If it weren’t already his house, Gainsbourg would feel entirely at home.
When he died here in his bedroom on 2 March 1991, a month short of his 63rd birthday, France went into mourning. Brigitte Bardot, who’d slept with him, gave a eulogy; President Mitterand, who hadn’t, gave one too. He was “our Baudelaire, our Apollinaire”, said the head of state. “He elevated the 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 the Rue de Vernueil.
“Ask anyone in Paris,” said Nicolas Godin of French group 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, songwriter, cutting-edge soundtrack composer, 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 – or because – of a singular dedication to cigarettes, alcohol, sensuality and provocation (the then rheumy-eyed 56-year-old’s infamous “I want to fuck you” offer to fellow-guest Whitney, in perfect English, on a live, prime-time French TV family-variety show, combined all four) his musical output over more than three decades was staggeringly prodigious. It encompassed a variety of reinventions that made David Bowie look stagnant – classical, chanson, jazz, girl-pop, rock, reggae, disco, rap – and displayed a profound knowledge of, and respect for, tradition while simultaneously giving it two fingers, then using them to remodel it into something entirely unique.
His lyrics were mind-boggling exercises in Franglais triple-entendres and rhythmic, onomatopoeic word-percussion. Literature, coprophagy, sexual obsession, farting, incest, philosophy, grammar, cabbages, Nazi death camps and the Torrey Canyon disaster were all considered perfectly reasonable subject-matter for songs – songs both whistled in the street by l’homme dans la rue and printed in poetry books and studied in universities. And yet on this side of the Channel, Gainsbourg has really been known for just one song. His 1969 number one with the English actress Jane Birkin, ‘Je T’Aime, Moi Non Plus’. As Robert Chalmers wrote in The Independent, “Gainsbourg has been cursed by an attribute which has proved “a more powerful hindrance to rock stardom than being blind
, tone-deaf or dead: that most fatal of adjectives, French.”
The British prejudice against French pop music – which runs every bit as deep and wide as the French prejudice against British food – stems back to the Swinging Sixites when we had The Beatles, the Stones and scampi in a basket and France had (or at least all we got to hear of what they had was) Sacha Distel, the Singing Nun and pâté de foie gras. It’s a habit, sadly, that some Anglo music writers have found hard to shake off. (Witness The Guardian’s posthumous take on Gainsbourg: “He had a typical French feel for rock: he was hopeless at it”.)
The fact that we’re notoriously bad at foreign languages of course doesn’t help, but, a bigger block is our wildly differing cultures and sense of cool. The international music business, which is dominated by the English-speaking countries, guarantees a highly honed and constantly changing sense of cooldom by its ongoing marketing assault of hip new fashions and sounds. By operating outside of those parameters, Gainsbourg may have been denied a large Anglophonic audience but as a by-product, by being able to safely ignore the orthodoxy of cool and its inbuilt rules and formalities, he was left to do whatever he wanted, and in the process produced a fascinating body of work, which music fans in Britain and the U.S are finally starting to discover.
Gainsbourg’s renown and reconstruction has grown in the past ten or fifteen years via Jimmy Sommerville, Mick Harvey, St Etienne, Stereolab, Momus, Black Grape, Sonic Youth, Luscious Jackson and Divine Comedy, through to the kitsch young Easy Listening audience. And even on to commercially successful acts like Pulp, Suede and Beck, who passed the baton onto contemporary hit/hip artists from the dance culture (where French lyrics aren’t a problem, but just another texture and sound to sample) like David Holmes, Mirwais and Air – those last two French acts that have been lionised in Britain; things are changing. And in a recent article in Q magazine on ‘The 100 Greatest Stars Of The 20th Century’, Serge – the sole French entry – made it to number 88, topping Damon Albarn of Blur. “Serge Gainsbourg is a French national institution,” wrote David Quantick. “A fact that fills us with immense respect for the French.” My sentiments exactly.
While writing this book, stumbling blindly around Paris through a blue fog of Gitane smoke, trying to find my way through the minefield of French pop and culture, I was fortunate to receive enormous assistance from a number of French writers, musicians, producers and Sergeologists who did their damnedest to guide me in the right direction. Special thanks to Jane Birkin, the actress, singer, playwright and Serge’s former partner, who, in spite of a 30-year relationship with the British press in which “all I got was, ‘What dirty records have you made, Jane?’”, invited me to her home, made me the best cup of tea I’ve had in Paris, and spent hours providing detailed insights into his life and his work.
Thanks also to Philippe Lerichomme, Serge’s celebrated record producer, the notoriously modest ‘Man In The Shadows’, as Gainsbourg dubbed him in one of his songs, who agreed to a very rare interview about his old friend. “I am always being asked by French journalists to talk about Serge and I always say no,” he said. “But if it helps him get the respect he deserved in England, d’accord.” Serge’s former studio engineer Dominique Blanc-Francard shed important light on Gainsbourg’s recording practices; François Ravard, Serge’s friend and producer of his last film Stan The Flasher, had some fine stories to tell about Gainsbourg the film-maker, artist, and Homo Aestheticus; and Nicolas Godin of Air and Françoise Hardy helped contextualise Serge’s influence on two generations of French pop musicians.
Meanwhile, answers to what must have seemed an endless bombardment of questions about the strange (to a Londoner) names and places I encountered during my research were generously provided by vinyl collector Daniel Vandel; TV presenter and journalist Laurence Romance; Serge collector and expert Daniel Vanderdonckt; writer-producer Jean-William Thoury; Philippe Thieyre, from the fine Paris bookshop Parallèle; and Serge Vincendet, from record shop Monster Melodies around the corner. Very special thanks to journalist/broadcaster Christian Eudeline for his positively valiant, ongoing explanations and insights into everything from the history of French pop music and culture to the history of France. And to Gilles Verlant, author of the 760-page definitive French-language biography Gainsbourg (published by Albin Michel; highly recommended if your French is up to it) for his painstaking efforts in ensuring that this book contains the minimum of errors, “parce que Gainsbourg le mérite, et le public anglo-saxon aussi !”.
A number of English-speaking musicians who knew, worked with, sampled, covered or were influenced by Serge, were also kind enough to grant me interviews. A big hand, then, to Marianne Faithfull, Sly Dunbar, Robbie Shakespeare, Beck, Mick Harvey, Alan Hawkshaw, Nick Currie (Momus), Bob Stanley (St Etienne), Sean O’Hagan (High Llamas), Steve Wynn and David Holmes. And a final thanks to MOJO magazine for starting la boule rolling, to Sean Body and Helter Skelter for picking it up and running with it, and to Nick Kent, Fred Dellar, Sue Smith, Martin Cobb, Peter Silverton and Neil Adams for their invaluable help and support.
As for Serge, I’m only sorry I arrived too late to add him to my list of interviews. A biographer could not ask for a more fascinating subject – a shy extrovert, a surreal realist, an iconoclast who craved being an icon, a man who would hang out drinking with policemen one day, frequent porn films with Dali another, make love with some of the world’s most beautiful actresses (without ever letting them see him naked) and die alone in his own bed after a lifetime of positively heroic, or at least indisputably artistic, self-abuse. To quote his epitaph in French newspaper Libération, Serge had “bu trop de cigarettes” – drank too many cigarettes.
Though, if we’re to believe the writing on the wall at no. 5 Rue de Verneuil, “Serge is not dead. He’s in heaven, fucking”. In fact, shortly after his death, the French satirical magazine La Grosse Bertha pictured him on its cover – stubbled chin, loose-lipped smile – standing on a cloud, straddling the blessed Mother of Jesus who was down on all fours, her butt beaming beatifically up at him. “Hey, Mary,” murmured cartoon-Serge in the speech bubble, “You know, I could write you some great songs…”
Now, could you see the Brits doing that with John Lennon? I raise a glass (and in the words of the French national anthem): “Allons enfants de la patrie, le jour de gloire est arrivé!”
Author’s note. Songs, albums, films etc. appear with their original titles, be they French, English, Franglais, or a language of Gainsbourg’s imaginings. What follows in brackets is the author’s English translation, except in the rare instances where an English title already exists. Quotes, however, have been translated into English, and, to avoid a complete take-over by brackets, the original French quotations have been exiled to the source note section at the back of the book.
Chapter One
LULU
Serge Gainsbourg owed his life to dirt. It was filth that quite literally came to his rescue on the hot summer’s afternoon in 1927 when Olia Ginsburg knocked at the door of a grimy back-street building in the Pigalle, the red light district of Paris. Olia, 32 years old, a Russian-Jewish immigrant, wife of a musician, mother of a baby girl and pregnant once again, was led inside the makeshift abortion clinic. Her eyes quickly took in the room – the sink, the stool, the table in the middle of the room with the instruments all lined up on it – before coming to rest on the small metal bowl glinting in the sunlight, still wet and crudded with something unspeakable from the woman who had been there last. Serge’s mother took one look and turned tail and ran. “He always said that his one good fortune in life,” Jane Birkin recalled, “had been a dirty kidney bowl.”
Nearly ten years had passed since Olia Besman and Joseph Ginsburg were married in the Ukraine. The dapper and talented young pianist – first-prize winner at the Conservatory of Music – had been employed and housed by Olia’s parents to give music lessons to their eight children. Joseph was emotional and romantic, a fusion of Slav sentimentality and dramatic Jewish
melancholia; Olia was caustically funny, practical and a fine mezzo-soprano. He fell immediately in love, courting her while the Bolshevik uprising raged around them. After one too many close calls – he’d had to hide from the troops, à la Tin Drum, under a peasant woman’s voluminous skirts – they decided to escape. Using false papers, they made their way to Georgia, where they took a ship across the Black Sea to Constantinople, then via the Mediterranean to Marseille, stopping only when they reached Paris. Olia’s older brother had already moved there, as had a growing population of Russian refugees. Joseph found work as a jobbing musician, and after a series of moves the family – as they became when Olia gave birth to a son, Marcel, in 1922 – installed themselves in a small apartment at 35 Rue de Chine.
Still one of the least well-to-do areas in the capital, the 20th arondissement in the 1920s was a run-down if almost villagey neighbourhood, with children playing in the streets and barrow-boys hawking their wares. What it wasn’t was a Jewish neighbourhood. Jews driven out of Russia more by the pogroms than the communist revolution, had mostly congregated in the quartiers near Republique, Porte de Saint-Cloud and Hôtel de Ville. But Joseph was a liberal Jew, a free-thinker and, having been officially naturalised as citizens, he resolved that the Ginsburgs would be wholeheartedly and unreservedly French.
And so life went on – except for the unfortunate little Marcel, who died of bronchitis at age 16 months. A second child was born, a daughter, Jacqueline, who was a healthy 18-month-old when on 2 April 1928 Olia went into labour in the Hôtel Dieu hospital by the Seine to give birth to what she already knew would be twins. “When the first one came out – Liliane – she started to cry,” said Jane, “because she thought she was going to be the mother of three girls. And who should pop out a minute or two afterwards but Serge – who, of course, their mother doted on immediately.” They named him – “to be very French and integré” – Lucien. And nicknamed him, to his great chagrin, Lulu.