Spanish passion yesterday, today we cross the Pyrenees for a soupcon of French sleaze.
Serge Gainsbourg. The dirty old genius of Gallic pop-rock. A real life Pepe Le Pew, the French cartoon skunk with the rapacious appetite for luuurve. Also described elsewhere as Frank Sinatra, if he'd played Sodom and Gomorrah rather than Vegas!
He courted controversy with his music, poetry and love-life. Seducer of '60s bombshells Brigitte Bardot and Jane Birkin, both of whom Gainsbourg recorded the controversial 'Je t'aime... Moi Non Plus'. The Birkin version sold millions before being banned in the UK and many other countries for it's sexual content.
HISTOIRE DE MELODY NELSON is Serge's notorious magnum opus. It's a brilliant but problematic album. Musically it is nothing less than gorgeous. A rich, sumptuous score with a full orchestra, vocal chorus and freewheeling electric guitar. Gainsbourg's spoken word delivery is deep and smooth, like he's been ingesting only whisky and expensive cigars for years. He whispers so close to the microphone that it's like he's breathing right into your ear. It's intimate, warm and seductive. The occasional female vocals and playful giggles are provided by his lover Jane Birkin.
It's problematic because this is concept album about an 'encounter' between a wealthy middle-aged man a young nymphet of debatable age, the Melody Nelson of the title.
Sung entirely in the first person, Serge's protagonist prangs his Rolls Royce 'Silver Ghost' hitting a young female cyclist, Melody. He picks her up off the floor and offers her a ride home. So begins a Lolita-esque story of infatuation and seduction that starts more innocently with "piggy backs" before taking visiting to decadent hotel rooms of rococo pillars and mirrored ceilings.
Gainsbourg's protagonist admits in the opening lines of 'La Ballade...' that "apart from myself, no one, ever took (her) in their arms". Our narrator is recounting taking the virginity of a girl "of fourteen autumns and fifteen summers" in wistful terms. Hmmm. Sadly doesn't end well for Melody. Ever the fan of melodrama, Gainsbourg has his fictional muse die in an plane-crash somewhere new New Guinea.
It's impossible to imagine an album with this content being made by a major artist these days. 'Edgy' is not the word. The closest I can think would be Nick Cave's riotously depraved 'Murder Ballads'. Although these days, rightly or wrongly, murder is somewhat easier to digest than the consummation of sex with of underage girls, however consensual the relationship may be.
Despite it's subject matter, it's remained hugely popular. The likes of Beck, David Holmes, Placebo and Jarvis Cocker have either covered tracks from the album or lifted wholesale sections of it. It's influence can also obvious on the likes of Portishead, Air and in very different way, The Divine Comedy, whose Neil Hannon certainly affected a Gainsbourg-esque persona for his debauched Casanova album.
Incidentally, little bit of trivia for you. The woman on the album sleeve was the love of Gainsburg's life, Jane Birkin. On it she's holding the ragdoll that twenty years after the release of MELODY NELSON she placed in Serge's coffin.
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