The late great Serge Gainsbourg (April 2, 1928 – March 2, 1991) was a French poet, singer-songwriter, actor and director. He was also a babe-hound while being a whisky connoisseur and swordmaster supreme! Gainsbourg’s varied style and individuality made him difficult to categorise.
Although famous in France for many years, he did not achieve his first No. 1 album until 1979, when he released Aux Armes et cetera more than twenty years after his music career had begun. Since the 1980s, his legacy has been firmly established.
Gainsbourg is probably best know for his fantastic duet with the lovely Brit Jane Birkin: “Je t’aime..” (RealPlayer)
Born Lucien Ginsburg in Paris, France, the son of Russian Jewish parents who fled to France after the 1917 Bolshevik uprising. His childhood was profoundly affected by the occupation of France by Nazi Germany, during which he and his family, as Jews, were forced to wear the yellow star and eventually flee from Paris.
Before he was 30 years old, Gainsbourg was a disillusioned painter but earned his living as a piano player in bars.
His ex wife, Jane Birkin recollects the beginning her affair with Gainsbourg , where he first took her to a nightclub, then to a transvestite club and afterwards to the Hilton, where he passed out in a drunken stupor. He confessed to Birkin that he had been scared of one time beau, and collaborator, uber hotty Brigitte Bardot’s breasts. Gainsbourg married Birkin when she was 19, he was 36 . Birkin left Gainsbourg when pregnant with her third daughter Lou, by the film director Jacques Doillon, whom she later married.
In 1969, he released what would become his most famous song in the English-speaking world, “Je t’aime… moi non plus,” which featured simulated sounds of female orgasm. The song appeared that year on an LP, Jane Birkin/Serge Gainsbourg.
Originally recorded with Brigitte Bardot, it was released with future girlfriend Birkin when Bardot backed out. While Gainsbourg declared it the “ultimate love song,” it was considered too “hot”; the song was censored in various countries, and in France even the toned-down version was suppressed. The freaks in the Vatican made a public statement citing the song as offensive. It reached no. 1 in the UK singles chart.
In the 1980s, approaching the end of his life, Gainsbourg became a regular figure on French TV. His appearances seemed devoted to his controversial sense of humour and provocation. He would show up drunk and unshaven on stage.
On Michel Drucker’s live Saturday evening show with the American singer Whitney Houston, he exclaimed to the host, “I want to fuck her!”
And here is that legendary incident from 1986 when Serge (heavily pissed-up on booze) met the then squeaky-clean (i.e. before she became a quasi crack ho!!) Houston on that French live TV-Show;
Serge vs Whitney (RealPlayer). Truly fucking Hilarious!!
In another talk show interview, Serge appeared alongside Catherine Ringer, a well known French singer who in the past had appeared in a few wonderfully nasty pornographic films. Gainsborough shouted:”You’re nothing but a filthy whore …. a filthy, fucking whore.”
Ringer scolded back, “Look at you, you’re just a bitter old alcoholic. I used to admire you but these days you’ve become a disgusting old parasite.”
Here’s a snippet from that show … again fucking hilarious!!
By December, 1988, while a judge at a film festival in Val d’Isère, he appeared drunk and in a rage at a local theatre where he was to do a presentation. While on stage he began to tell an obscene story about Brigitte Bardot and a champagne bottle (mm … I wonder what that lurid anecdote could entail!) only to stagger offstage and collapse in a nearby seat.
During this period he released Love on the Beat, a controversial electronic album with highly sexual themes in the lyrics, and his last studio album, You’re Under Arrest, (which saw him adapt his style to the hip-hop genre), as well as two live recordings.
His third and last Eurovision Song Contest entry came in 1990 with the French entry “White and Black Blues,” sung by Joëlle Ursull. It came second in a tie with Ireland.
His songs became increasingly eccentric during this period, ranging from the anti-drug “Aux Enfants de la Chance” to the duet with his rather hot daughter Charlotte named “Lemon Incest.” This translates as “Inceste de citron”, a wordplay on “un zeste de citron” (a lemon zest). The title demonstrates Gainsbourg’s love for puns (another example of which is Bowie, Beau oui comme Bowie).
Gainsbourg died on March 2, 1991 of a heart attack and was buried in Montparnasse Cemetery, in Paris. His funeral brought Paris to a standstill, and French President François Mitterrand said of him, “He was our Baudelaire, our Apollinaire… He elevated the song to the level of art.”
His home at the well-known address 5bis rue de Verneuil is still covered in graffiti and poems.
Since his death, Gainsbourg’s music has reached legendary stature in France. His lyrical brilliance in French has left an extraordinary legacy. His music, always progressive, covered many styles: jazz, ballads, mambo, lounge, reggae, pop (including adult contemporary pop, kitsch pop, yé-yé pop, ’80s pop, pop-art pop, prog pop, space-age pop, psychedelic pop, and erotic pop), disco, calypso, Africana, bossa nova, and rock and roll. He has gained a following in the English-speaking world with many non-mainstream artists finding his arrangements highly influential.
He is also considered to be one of the first music pop artists of the late 1960s. While artists such as Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein explored modern iconographic consumer culture through painting, Gainsbourg explored similar territory in music with songs such as “Comic Strip,” “Ford Mustang,” “Qui est In Qui est Out,” and “Teenie Weenie Boppie.”
Gainsbourg was a magnificent artist and a truly debauched genius! A man after my own heart!
trainwreck has uploaded this expansive Serge Gainsbourg discography! Thanks trainwreck !
Serge Gainsbourg – Histoire De Melody Nelson
Fantastic! This may well be Serge Gainsbourg’s greatest album ever — a whole suite based around a spare, electric bass-driven theme, with Serge muttering the lyrics in a raspy loud whisper, while funky rhythms dart in and out of washes of strings and eerie sounds. There’s a very strong soundtrack feel to the album, as washes of music envelop the lyrics, tripped out in funky beats that have become legendary over the years, thanks to some very famous samples.
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Serge Gainsbourg – Couleur Café
When not singing in the saloons and salons of the Rive Gauche or playing the bad guy in a serious of ludicrously bad Italian films, Serge Gainsbourg also found the time to dabble in the cha-chas and mambos which had swept Europe and America in the previous decade. However while most of the dance crazes were meant as one-offs, Gainsbourg took his excursions into Caribbean rhythms as seriously (and as comically) as all of his other stylistic experiments, and continued to record them sporadically up until the 1970’s.
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L’étonnant Serge Gainsbourg (1961)
Apparently, Serge finished this, his third album, in under 30 minutes. Well done Serge. Guess there was some hot piece of ass waiting languidly in the motel to whom he needed to rush off!
As early as 1961, Serge Gainsbourg was one of the most extraordinary artists of the French pop scene, and during the first part of the ’60s the crooner produced a series of outrageously brilliant albums with producer/arranger Alain Goraguer.
One of his most intoxicating amalgams of jazz and pop styles, L’Etonnant Serge Gainsbourg comes highly recommended to fans of ’60s French pop.
An utterly essential early document of Serge Gainsbourg while he was still a mildly respectable man — but that’s not say there aren’t hints of his notorious decadence in this early work.
Tracklisting
1. La Chanson De Prévert
2. En Relisant Ta Lettre
3. Le Rock De Nerval
4. Les Oubliettes
5. Chanson De Maglia
6. Viva Villa
7. Les Amours Perdues
8. Les Femmes C’est Du Chinois
9. Personne
10. Le Sonnet D’arvers
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Serge Gainsbourg – Comic Strip
Around the same time Bob Dylan went electric in Newport, several thousand miles away in France Serge Gainsbourg, hip avatar of all things French, embraced the modish Carnaby street rock & roll sweeping England and America, producing some of the most vital music of his career, not to mention the sexiest. For a man whose personal appearance had been described as a handicap, Gainsbourg managed to produce some of the best pre-Prince makeout music on either side of the Atlantic.
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Serge Gainsbourg – Aux Armes Et Caetera
This is one messed up set. Dig the fact that this is Serge Gainsbourg in dread beat and booze. Aux Armes et cætera is literally Gainsbourg on the rocksteady tip with Sly and Robbie, Flabba Holt, Michael “Mao” Chung, Ansel Collins, the I-Threes, Rita Marley, Marcia Griffiths, and Judy Mowatt, Sticky Thompson, Leroy “Horsemouth” Wallace, and a bunch of French folks playing puff-the-ganja and help the white man in Kingston. Gainsbourg knew what he wanted — a Lee Perry-styled dubber and dread outing — and he knew the cats to hire to get it.
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Serge Gainsbourg – L’Homme À Tête De Chou
One of Serge Gainsbourg’s best albums ever — and don’t pass it up! This one was recorded in the mid 70s — and it’s got a great set of orchestrations by Alan Hawkshaw that are filled with loads of cool spare moogy and electronic bits filtering in and out of the mix! Some tracks have an excellent sound that approaches Serge’s classic Melody Nelson album — and others have a uniquely spacey quality that’s unlike any of his other work!
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Serge Gainsbourg – Rock Around The Bunker
Not exactly a Mel Brooks’ vehicle, Serge Gainsbourg’s 1975 ROCK AROUND THE BUNKER features ten tongue-in-cheek Nazi pop songs.
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Serge Gainsbourg – Du Chant À La Une
The first official album originally released in 1958 which spawned two hits, ‘Le Poinconneur Des Lilas’ & ‘Du Jazz Dans Le Ravin’.
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Serge Gainsbourg – Madame Claude
A great 70s soundtrack from Serge Gainsbourg — funky, electric, and his most dynamic work ever for the screen — a set that’s almost in the territory of some of the Italian police films from the same time! A good number of tracks here rely strongly on funky drums, slinky keyboards, and bubbling basslines — strutting out with a nice cop show sort of approach to funk — and although Jane Birkin sings on one number, the rest of the score is instrumental — making for a further display of Serge’s mighty talents in the 70s.
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Serge Gainsbourg – Mauvaises Nouvelles Des Étoiles
The cover photo and the title (trans: Bad News from the Stars) are the best things about Gainsbourg’s second reggae LP with legendary rhythm section Sly & Robbie. It’s clever, but since it’s such a top-shelf, organic sounding reggae album, it doesn’t really offer the stylistic bizarreness of much of Gainsbourg’s work.
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Serge Gainsbourg – Théatre Des Capucines
This is Serge’s jazz album for those who don’t dig jazz, due to its wicked club vibe.
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Serge Gainsbourg – Vu De L’exterieur
A great Serge Gainsbourg album from 1973 – one that we’d rank right up there with his best work! The record’s got a slinky funky groove that’s right in a perfect post-Melody Nelson mode — music written by Serge, and played by a hip small combo that includes lots of great guitar from Alan Parker and sweet electric keyboards and organ from the great Alan Hawkshaw — both of whom really help keep the sound great!
Many tracks have that mellow funk groove that’s become the best-remembered Gainsbourg sound over the years — and as with many of his other albums of the time, this one’s brimming over with potential samples and riffs to steal.
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Serge Gainsbourg – Enregistrement Public Au Theatre Le Palace
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Recorded on New Years’ Eve 1979, in Northern Paris. The recordings, culled from three major performances, feature Sly & Robbie, the Revolutionaries, and the great Ansel Collins on keyboards and organ.
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Serge Gainsbourg – Love And The Beat (Volume 1)
Although Serge Gainsbourg has already been served very well in the digital era by collections and reissues, his long and varied career benefits from this novel thematic compilation. Love and the Beat is divided into two discs, the first of which includes a rough compendium of his bestknown songs “Comic Strip,” “Ford Mustang,” “69 Année Érotique,” and “Ballade de Melody Nelson” (unfortunately, “Je T’Aime…Moi Non Plus” appears only in a new, serviceable remix).
The second disc presents Gainsbourg as sonic chameleon, restlessly looking for new forms to chain to his slinky performances. As such, it travels many more miles than the first disc, traversing all the way from the languorous jazzcafe years of the late ’50s (”Du Jazz Dans le Ravin,” “Coco and Co”) to his Central and South American flirtations of the ’70s and ’80s (dub versions of “Lola Rastaquouère” and “La Nostalgie Camarade,” plus a Brazilian samba track, “Les Sambassadeurs”).
An odd collection of this sort is just the prescription for postmillennial listeners who would much rather hear Gainsbourg the musical polyglot than be subjected to a heavier dosage of his lightweight ’60s French pop recordings. The five remixes included are mostly successful, since the compilers recognized Gainsbourg’s obvious comparisons to the fullspangle European house on display by remixers like Dax Riders (”No Comment”) and Moné (an especially slinky version of “Love on the Beat”).
- John Bush, All Music Guide
Serge Gainsbourg – Love And The Beat (Volume 1)
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Some of these MM hosts may not be working so here’s a NEW LINK:
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=BG44BQT1
Serge Gainsbourg – Love And The Beat (Volume 2)
Some of these MM hosts may not be working:
http://massmirror.com/ca62e29a287a37913f421fea712ccc9f.html
NEW LINK:
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=4LOYFOJF
Serge Gainsbourg – Le Cinéma De Serge Gainsbourg (3 Discs)
A whopping collection that features a wealth of soundtrack material recorded by Serge Gainsbourg! Serge is certainly famous enough for his pop recordings of the 60s and 70s — but he also turned his talents to countless films over the years, penning great sexy and groovy tunes that were among some of his best work of the time, much of which was never issued properly on LPs, but only appeared briefly on limited eps and 45s in France.
This set brings together a total of 72 tracks — a motherlode of killer tunes that are essential if you dig Serge, all packaged together in a great box set that includes a book with great pictures and a heck of a lot of notes! Includes tracks from films that include Strip Tease, Les Loups Dans La Bergerie, Madame Claude, Sex Shop, Projection Privee, La Pacha, Manon 70, L’Horizon, Le Jardinier D’Argenteuil, Si J’Etais Un Espion, Cannabis, La Horse, Slogan, and Stan The Flasher. Includes loads of titles never reissued on CD!
Le Cinéma De Serge Gainsbourg (Disc 1)
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Le Cinéma De Serge Gainsbourg (Disc 2)
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Le Cinéma De Serge Gainsbourg (Disc 3)
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Great Jewish Music Serge Gainsbourg
Tzadik’s fledgling Great Jewish Music series promises to be excellent, if this album is any indication. On it various members of the American and British avant-establishment take turns arranging songs by the great French songwriter Serge Gainsbourg, with results varying from fairly straightforward (Cibo Matto’s surprisingly gentle “Je T’aime, Moi Non Plus” and Ikue Mori’s delightful “Pauvre Lola”) to bizarrely wonderful (Faith No More frontman Mike Patton’s take on “Ford Mustang” and Zorn’s own all-vocal “Contact”).
Medeski, Martin and Wood contribute a version of “Intoxicated Man” on which Medeski does his best to imitate a woozy French accordion before veering off into the trio’s more familiar organic jazz-funk territory; Fred Frith acquits himself nicely on a one-man-band version of “The Ballad of Melody Nelson.” All in all, this is a fine and fitting tribute to an underappreciated songwriter.
~ Rick Anderson, All Music Guide
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Lucien Forever A Tribute to Serge Gainsbourg
The Spanish label compiles indie-pop covers of the French icon. Stereo Total, Luna, Stereo Deluxe.
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Gainsbourg Versions Femmes
19 Tracks Collection featuring Timeless Songs Written by Serge Gainsbourg and Performed by Legendary French Female Artists.
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Jane Birkin & Serge Gainsbourg – Je T’Aime, Moi Non Plus
Jane Birkin/Serge Gainsbourg (also known as Je t’aime… moi non plus) is an album featuring duets and solo performances by Jane Birkin and her then lover, Serge Gainsbourg.
It was released in 1969 and included the worldwide hit Je t’aime… moi non plus, which achieved its fame for its salacious lyrics against a background of female moaning and groaning, culminating in an orgasm at the song’s conclusion! Nice!
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Christian Marclay – Je T’Aime, Moi Non Plus etc
Here is a short collage of that salacious world wide hit and other sounds from the album reworked by Christian Marclay:
http://www.zshare.net/audio/6273333769d15d/
Jane Birkin – Rendez-Vous
On her 2004 comeback outing, vocalist Jane Birkin returned with a splash, welcoming into the studio a cast of such heavyweights as Bryan Ferry, Manu Chao, Francoise Hardy, Placebo’s Brian Molko, and Etienne Daho.
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Jane Birkin – Jane B
A nice compilation by lil Jane of some classic Serge ditties.
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Brigitte Bardot – Brigitte Bardot Show
This is Brigitte Bardot when she was an uber hot sex kitten. Now she’s a mad granny type obsessed with fascists and kittens!
One of the greatest Brigitte Bardot albums you could ever buy! This essential CD compiles material from a rare album that Brigitte cut during the 60s for the French A-Z label, and the set includes some killer work written for BB by Serge Gainsbourg and Francis Lai.
Tracks are a mix of sexy vocals and instrumentals, with super-fab French arrangements by Michel Colombier, Paul Pio, and Christian Gaubert. There’s plenty of moments with a nice groove and a bit of fun!
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Francoise Hardy – Comment Te Dire Adieu
Her lower profile didn’t prevent the lyrically clever Comment te dire adieu, a song penned by singer-songwriter Serge Gainsbourg (who had also been behind many of France Gall’s hits) from becoming one of the biggest hits of 1969. Further releases from an album of the same name followed, including the weaker, banjo-laden Etonnez-moi, Benoît.
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Mick Harvey – Intoxicated Man
“Intoxicated Man”, finds Bad Seed Harvey drawing a portrait of Gainsbourg’s finest moments.
From the nihilistic sleaze of “Barrel Of My 45″ and “Jazz In The Ravine”, through the reckless terrain of classics like “Bonnie & Clyde” and “Harley Davidson”, this is an album revealing the works of a great artist to a public that, for the most part, they would otherwise have never known.
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Mick Harvey – Pink Elephants
‘Pink Elephants’ marks the culmination of Mick Harvey’s project to transform the songs of Serge Gainsbourg into English which began with the now already classic ‘Intoxicated Man’ (1995). ‘Pink Elephants’ is makes for a fantastic
Volume II.
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Charlotte Gainsbourg – 5 55
The album’s central appeal lies in Gainsbourg’s whispery, London-accented vocals. Like her mother, English actress and singer Jane Birkin, Gainsbourg has a limited tonal range that belies her beguiling interpretive powers– and statuesque je ne sais quoi. She can sing of love as surgery on sweaty lavalamp groove “The Operation” without sounding totally creepy, and moan about being “drunk here on the edge of space” on “Af607105″ without recalling William Shatner doing “Rocket Man”.
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This is a rather strange project Houellebecq got involved with some years back.
Carla Bruni – Comme si de rien n’était
Bruni will release her third album “Comme si de rien n’était” (As if nothing happened) on July 21, 2008.
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Yungchen has toured the world, singing unaccompanied a combination of songs of her own composition and traditional Buddhist chants and mantras. She has performed with an array of famous artists such as Annie Lennox, Billy Corgan, Peter Gabriel, Sheryl Crow, Natalie Merchant, etc. bringing her traditions to new audiences. She has also toured extensively as a part of the WOMAD World music festivals.
Where would us existentialists be without lil Albert C.!)
EOE could be the strangest rock band on earth, consisting of Eraldo Bernocchi (guitars, samples), Bill Laswell (basses) and Mick Harris (drums).
Here she be:
The album opens with a plaintive monk’s chant, and the drones that follow are of a quality that evokes wide-open spaces rather than urban paranoia. Adding to the mystical angle are tracks like “Loa” which exhibit a strong vodoun influence.
