Serge Gainsbourg - Monsieur La Décadence

The shame of being born a Jew and the pride of a yellow star. Outer ugliness and self-awareness. Painting and music. Misogyny and dependence on women. Disquieting hedonism and the ingratitude of time. A thousand lovers and Jane Birkin. Cynicism and irony. Sensuality and sexuality. Contempt for money and a delirium of luxury. Grace and flatulence. Cinema and pornography. Charlotte and incest. Brigitte Bardot and the Rastafarians. Ballet slippers and eighty Gitanes. Charm and alcohol. The cabbage-headed man and Salvador Dalí. Bambou and Lulu. Brazenness and death.

An artist ill-suited to the tight confines of space and time, Serge Gainsbourg took reality and shattered it, reshaping it with the touch of a pagan god, spawning musical polymorphisms, reinventing an eternal feminine ideal that forever changed shape while remaining identical in substance, raising crystal pyramids and demolishing deceptive desires, celebrating the grace of the figure while lamenting the tragedy of the flesh.

A gentleman of the word, a master of melody, a lord of vision, destined to be born after surviving a failed abortion, and to shine until he burned out, Monsieur Gainsbourg managed to seduce France and the world with the gift of an eternally beautiful, multifaceted, intriguing soundtrack.

The tape runs a little over three decades, and we have tried to capture its infinite shades — singer-songwriter chanson, jazz, exoticism, psychedelia, reggae, new wave, rap — with the enchantment of a story that, by its very nature, is born and dies unrepeatable.

Lulu le juif

Pigalle district, Rue de la Perdition, summer 1927. Olia Besman is a young Ukrainian woman married to Joseph Ginsburg, a pianist of great talent and dramatic sensitivity. The couple already have a son, Marcel, and a daughter, Jacqueline. Another child is one passenger too many; they need to be rid of it.

The clinic in Pigalle, however, is too squalid, Olia is put off by it and abruptly changes her mind. Little Lucien is born, along with his twin sister Liliane, a few days after the spring equinox, on April 2, 1928. Marcel's death channels Olia's attention onto that one surviving son, who, from birth, becomes his parents' favorite, little Lulu.

Joseph is a liberal Jew, far removed from the theatricality of ritual, and much more focused on art and on instilling a love of beauty in his children, destined for a genetic mutation of their own DNA through a none-too-covert Frenchification. The Ginsburg family continues to live in Paris, supported by Joseph's earnings as a concert musician, a well-regarded itinerant player moving from one orchestra to another. Yet perfect integration does not neutralize the shame of belonging, and, in the wake of the totalitarian regimes, being Jewish, even if non-practicing, becomes a burden, a constant threat to be defended against in the race for survival. Events come to a head and the Ginsburg family is soon identified. Little Lulu, a model student, a precocious self-taught pianist, is forced to pin a yellow star to the jacket of his school uniform. It is the start of a possible end, which instead turns into a flight, a constant evasion of the anti-Semitic delirium of omnipotence through the French countryside, into a forced separation of the family, in which the path of subterfuge becomes the only viable one, until liberation and the return to the city.

1944, back in Paris. Lulu has changed. School is a straitjacket, people bore him, the shame of persecution leaves a desolate bitterness. For the sixteen-year-old, the garb of adolescence is that of a budding maudit, embroidered with art, cigarettes and the ecstasy of the feminine arcane. Still a victim of his own unfortunate appearance, yet unbeatable in his dealings with women, Lulu nonetheless longs to lose himself in his torments, timidly acting them out with a prostitute, only to come away with a disappointing sense of humiliation. But it's only the beginning: his father Joseph has decided to make up for his dropping out of school by enrolling him at an Art Institute, where he meets the model Elizabeth Levitsky, secretary to Georges Hugnet, a friend of Salvador Dalí. The surrealist master's house and Elizabeth's skin become the magnificent, sensual realm in which to let his senses run free: the astrakhan-draped walls of the master and the body of his young lover free Lulu's charm from the mortifying curse of outward ugliness, letting him rise toward a more stimulating self-awareness.

The idyll with Elizabeth, his first muse, continues, culminating in their 1951 wedding, which tempers the bohemian tension of their early days with a low-key cohabitation and a brief, mild stint as a teacher, alongside his ongoing painting studies. But Lucien is no one-dimensional artist, and his father Joseph, more convinced of this than ever, keeps quietly working behind the scenes to ensure that musical talent doesn't evaporate into indifference; in the years when the Rive Gauche welcomed the shadows of existentialism, Lucien begins to stand in for his father, often burdened with multiple simultaneous bookings. His early days are marked by an unexpected fascination surrounding this unhandsome yet so sophisticated man, and women are enchanted by that embryonic form of irresistible, majestic decadence; the thick allure of Gitanes smoke, alcohol — a habit picked up during a stint of military service of proverbial importance in further crystallizing his masculine double nature — the piano pulls him away from the family home, too spartan a path for a spirit so adorably hedonistic, and instead pushes him toward the spotlight. It's 1957, the adultery is done, and so is the divorce from Elizabeth.

Serge le chansonnier, from the Rive Gauche to B.B.

Lucien Ginsburg, weary of an identity now past, becomes Serge Gainsbourg, paying tribute to his Russian origins, echoed in the force of the name Serge, and to the English painter Gainsborough.

Fortified by this new habitus, Serge is ready to perform his own songs, until that point ennobled by the adored icon Juliette Gréco, and the opportunity comes with a booking at the Nightclub Milord L'Arsouille; the Milord, the venue of Charles Trenet's debut — the chansonnier who, during Serge's childhood, had provided the soundtrack to his discovery of feminine beauty, when the boy was left awestruck at the sight of a pretty girl on the beach — becomes the starting point of a new vital circle. Serge, after hearing Boris Vian perform there, reassesses the cultural depth a song can carry, capable of conveying mood, substance and emotion, and, pushed by Michele Arnaud, a young artist with a regular contract at the Milord, he finally decides to sing. The new chansonnier arouses curiosity; his elegant, at times cynical style begins to draw the attention of record executives too, and the chance to record an album comes from Denis Bourgeois, a Philips producer, who convinces his bosses to offer the young artist a contract. It's done. Serge is about to record his first album with Alain Goraguer, already Boris Vian's arranger.

Du Chante à la Une comes out in 10” format, with an introduction by Marcel Aymé, the French translator of Henry Miller and one of the sharpest pens of libertarian France, who presents Serge as author and chronicler of a mosaic of depravity, an acute observer of an imaginary world thick with alcohol, women, adultery, poverty and wretched jobs, narrated with an insanely cynical and nonchalant spirit, in a game of mirrors with ambiguous reflections, in which melody lets itself be seduced by rhythm. Pinning unambiguous labels on Serge Gainsbourg's debut album is a reductive exercise: the record alternates the Yankee swing of "Le Poinçoinner de Lilas," the tragicomic statement of dissatisfaction from a ticket inspector alienated by punching tickets on the buses of Lilas (“J’fais des trous, des p’tits trous, encore des p’tits trous/ Des p’tits trous, des p’tits trous, toujours des p’tits trous/ Des trous de seconde classe, des trous de premiere classe”), with strategically romantic chanson dispensing advice on how to seduce without suffering too much for it ("La recette de l'amour fou"), passing through melancholically and languidly ironic jazz on the murderous boredom of the ménage ("Ce Mortel Ennui") and the shadowy, exquisitely refined standard jazz of "Du Jazz Dans le Ravin," the pre-yé-yé misogynistic pride of "La Femme des Uns sous le Corps des Autres" (“La femme des uns sous le corps des autres/ A des soupirs de voluptés/ On s’en fout quand c’est pas la notre/ Mais celles des autres”), the solitary cha-cha of a drunk furiously seeking love and girls — who, however, mustn't resemble the skeletons in the closet from his first experiences in the boudoir, like the prostitute noisily chewing gum during sex, a failed erotic initiation for a teenage Serge ("L'Alcool") — and the playful, imported charleston of "Charleston les Déménageurs de Piano."

Du Chant à la Une is the calling card of a thirty-year-old esthete, a collection of short stories for indolent, sordid, worldly and refined adults, a canvas dense with sarcasm, class and intellectual independence from every cliché, in which Serge's voice, while distancing itself from the charm of chansonniers in the mold of Trenet or Brel, seduces with elegance. Boris Vian, his obsession, the object of his deepest elective affinity of the moment, is left enchanted and cannot help but champion the purchase of the 10", which, however, is not met with immediate and unanimous enthusiasm from critics. But what matters is having started, and not stopping there.

1958 passes between tours, returns to his father's house, and the recording of a new album, No. 2. Seated at his father Joseph's piano, with the indispensable pack of Gitanes, coffee, and the necessary dose of alcohol close by, Serge quickly composes the eight songs which, once again aided by Goraguer's arrangements, develop as a slightly sunnier appendix to his first work. No. 2, released in 1959, is catchy finger-snapping pop-jazz ("Le Claquer des Doigts"), winking exoticism nodding to the latinerie dances in vogue in European clubs ("L'anthracite," "Mambo Miam Miam"), a flashback to gypsy folk, perfectly rendered by the festive violin on "Jeunes Femmes et Vieux Messieurs," a gallant farewell ballad ("Adieu Creature"), and smoky, nervous be-bop about liberation from indifference: “En d’autres occasions je chanterais les transes/ De l’amour, mais aujourd’hui je m’en bilance/ Qu’importe le temps/ Qu’emporte le vent/ Mieux vaut ton absence/ Que ton indifférence” ("Indifférente").

The reception of No. 2 is rather lukewarm — no particular spark, some doubts about a vocal delivery that is tormented and not especially robust, scattered wariness — but Serge is beginning to be clearly identified, emerging from the anonymous, interchangeable crowd of jazz club regulars, helped by an unusually fascinating look and a way of combining grace and indolence entirely his own, effectively captured by the cover photo of No. 2, where, in his elegant pinstripe suit, smoking, he stares at the camera with brazen provocation, seated before a bunch of roses and a pistol, like the most gallant of gangsters.

That rakishly intriguing look, which would remain one of the defining elements of Serge's life, also opens the doors of cinema for him, making him a regular supporting presence in many period films, in which he generally plays characters of sadistic villainy, as in 1961's "La révolte des Esclaves," where he plays Corvino, the man who fed Christians to the lions. That same year, Philips releases L'étonnant Serge Gainsbourg, "the extraordinary and danceable Serge Gainsbourg," as the pretentious liner notes put it. The tones become more intimate and persuasive, and an homage to French poetry is immediately in order, with the mournful, shadowy "Chanson de Prévert," for which Serge, setting aside his shyness, decides to visit Prévert's home to ask permission to use his name; the poet agrees, sharing a glass of champagne with him and striking up an epicurean rapport.

It's 1961, and in France the sweet life is declined through confessions of nocturnal desires, encounters with a mixed-blood Andalusian woman, promises to keep (“Allons mon andalouse/ puisque la nuit jalouse/ Etends son ombre aux cieux”), in a slow, dense moderato ("Le Rock de Nerval"), which, in "Chanson de Maglia," turns romantically orchestral and whispered, all the way to the velvet rumba of the unsettling "Les Amours Perdues." More jazz, stylish and candy-coated on "Les Oubliettes" and feline on "Les Femmes c'est du Chinois," whose horns seem almost to reproduce the Indochinese spleen cited in the title. Something genuinely danceable in the flute-and-percussion delight of "Viva Villa" and in "Le Sonnet d'Arvers," a sort of stylish European cousin to the slightly older "Diana," the hit Paul Anka took to success in 1957.

The elite following of the rive gauche and the clubs isn't enough to secure national success, and L'étonnant Serge Gainsbourg, despite a promotional tour, fails to sell more than five thousand copies. The risk of remaining stuck in the niche of cocktail jazz, however refined, is amplified by the twist epidemic, which arrives in Europe from the United States, infecting even buttoned-up France and launching the very young Françoise Hardy and Johnny Halliday, barely out of their teens, into orbit as the privileged faces of yé-yé. Serge, a proud man little inclined to opportunistic compromise, is initially thrown off balance; he'd like to go back to painting, distancing himself from music for good, but, ever the lovable rogue, he finds a way to turn events in his favor, drawing attention through an ironically macabre take on the twist craze; "Requiem pour un Twister" becomes the mischievous, catchy mockery of Charlie, a young viveur and seasoned twister, done in by his very own passion for the frenzied dance, as Serge whispers in the syncopated chorus.

By now the demon has been exorcised, as shown by 4, his fourth studio album, in which Serge remains the same angular crooner as ever, swayed by floral languor on the decadent "Les Goémons," inspired by the suggestion of a dark trombone that becomes a co-protagonist in a story of passion and tedium ("Black Trombone"), the biographer of Boris Vian but also of himself on "Intoxicated Man," a nocturnal, drunken and visionary little jazz number, and an early experiment with a new language, franglais, a contraction of French and English and a wink at the Anglo-Saxon tongue as a possible launchpad for success abroad. The parade of vices continues with "Les Cigarillos," a samba whose soft spirals wrap around and shield him from shyness ("Les cigarillos ont cet avantage d' faire le vide autour de moi/ J'en apprécie le tabac/

Et la prévenance/ Les cigarillos n' sont pas comme moi, empreints de timidité/ Et leur agressivité/ Est tout en nuance/ Sans vous dire jamais rien qui vous blesse/ Ils vous congédient avec tendesse"), and gives way to the amoral celebration of the nouvelle jeunesse on the dedicated yé-yé track "Vilaines filles et Mauvais Garçons," also recorded as an EP made in London with Harry Robinson, the future arranger for Nick Drake and Sandy Denny. A little jewel of grace, a hymn to the ephemeral, is "La Javanaise," the siren song of a love as intensely brief as a majestic slow dance, revived in 1963 with inimitable magnetism by chanteuse Juliette Greco.

Right after the release of 4, an unusual web of coincidences brings together two figures destined, genetically, to become icons, even though it amounts to nothing more than a fleeting, fortuitous crossing of paths: still in 1963, Serge is called upon to compose the score for "Strip-tease," a film made by his friend Jacques Poitrenaud. The screenplay revolves around a hostess looking for work, played by a then-unknown Christa Päffgen, soon to become Nico, and a jazz pianist, a role for which Serge seems perfect. With the production handled by his faithful collaborator Goraguer, the vocal parts are originally given to Nico, but, unsettled by the haughty shadowiness of her distinctive voice, Serge decides to scrap those recordings (of which, miraculously, a few precious tracks survive online), calling in the more mature enchantress Greco instead; the result is, naturally, dizzying, but Nico's interpretation — young, fragile and beautiful — remains a gem of fleeting, nocturnal beauty.

Greco, almost the same age as Gainsbourg, is a stunning, dark-haired Amazon of thirty-six, a self-assured, effortlessly poised woman, a dazzling chanteuse, and her relationship with Serge becomes the nightmare of his new partner, the aristocratic Beatrice, who in 1964 becomes his devoted and possessive wife. Serge is sealed off by his own love: the social whirl becomes a longing he can only indulge in secret, and even the excuse of visiting his father's house to compose at Joseph's treasured piano no longer holds up; Beatrice dismantles the scaffolding of that excuse by giving her beloved partner a precious Steinway piano of his own. Serge has no alibi left to escape the suffocation of married life; now he has everything within reach. This spell of forced domestic calm is put to strategic use: in just two days, with jazzmen Michel Gaudry on electric guitar and Elek Bacsik on double bass, he records his fifth studio album, and the first in 12" format. Gainsbourg Confidentiel is a work of fine craftsmanship, a perfect embroidery of essential jazz, yet happily shot through with skillfully electrified rock ("Chez le Yé-Yé"), dense with swinging basslines and intriguing wordplay ("Le Talkie Walkie," "Elaeudanla Téitéia"), irresistible swooning for voice and little guitar ("Le Temps des Yoyos"), noble hymns to depravity as on "No, No Thank's, No" (“No no thanks no/ Je ne fume que la marijuana/ No no thanks no/ A quoi bon insister/ No no thanks no/ Ma dernière cigarette/ No no thanks no/ Est dèja refroidie/ No no thanks no/ Je n’aime que le bourbon”), and cynical, sophisticated snapshot-blues ("Negative Blues"). Intimate despite the minimalism of its arrangements, and refined to the point of languor, Gainsbourg's fifth album is hailed by critics as the best of his works, and, having claimed that prized title, becomes the swan song of the jazz lineage of his compositions, soon betrayed by his imminent, if not entirely unforeseeable, infatuation with percussion.

October 16, 1964: five percussionists, a chorus of twelve French girls converted to aphrodisia, and Gainsbourg Percussions, his sixth studio album, is ready. At the piano, as ever, his trusted Goraguer, an inspired arranger and passionate devotee of Gainsbourg's flair, once again happily indulging it. One of the stories surrounding the album is the ambiguous nature of his relationship with Nigerian percussionist Babatunde Olatunji, whose extraordinary 1959 record "Drums of Passion" Serge draws from and Frenchifies, albeit masterfully, preserving its possessed, incandescent rhythm: "Kiyakiya" becomes "Joanna," the obese yet miraculously graceful dancer twirling through the clubs of New Orleans; "Akiwowo" is transformed into "New York – U.S.A.," a syncopated anthem worthy of the American giants; "Gin-go-lo-ba" (later appropriated also by Carlos Santana), whose linguistic metamorphosis leads to "Marabout," an African bird but also a pagan holy man, underscored by the obsessive refrain.

Gainsbourg Percussions is also the debut of France Gall, a blonde lolita, diabolically innocent, who makes her entrance with a silvery laugh on "Pauvre Lola," alongside a return — more knowing and winking — to satin jazz ("Machins Choses"), to the lightness of a coffee-flavored aphrodisiac spell in the mannered salsa of "Couleur Café," to the bossa-nova melancholy of a gentleman seduced and abandoned to a redeeming nothingness ("Ces Petits Riens"), drawing on the incurable nihilistic fatalism typical of Serge's emotional spectrum (“Mieux vaut n’penser à rien/ Que de penser à vous/ Ça n’me vaut rien/ Ça n’me vaut rien du tout/ Comme si de rien/ N’était je pense à tous/ Ces petits riens/ Qui me venaient de vous”).

The reviews of Gainsbourg Percussions are not unanimously generous, but Serge doesn't care: the snobbish mockery of the spreading, imported rock'n'roll craze has been accomplished, as has the celebration of percussion as a transposition of abstract painting into sound waves, through the rejection of pre-packaged form and harmony, in an irresistible and playful cultural synthesis. Expressive freedom, a reward above all to oneself, as is often the case, brings no equivalent worldly recognition, but for Serge it's fine to go back to being the guest of honor at the Milord L'Arsouille.

In 1964, the birth of Natascha, his first daughter, failed to tie him down to domestic life, pushing him instead toward a gradual escape that ran parallel to his collaboration with emerging artists from a scene he paradoxically mocked: yé yé. Serge began writing pop songs for ingenue dolls who weren't quite so ingenuous after all; among his chosen muses was France Gall, who won the 1965 Eurovision Song Contest with "Poupée de Cire, Poupée de Son". The decision to write songs for these emerging baby popstars was no accident: however flattered he was to have won the hearts of the Left Bank and the snobbiest fringes of the Parisian intelligentsia, Serge still wanted to make the leap into a somewhat more democratic market, and working as a songwriter-for-hire seemed like a viable path forward.

1965 was also the year that Michèle Arnaud, a friend from the early days who had by then become a television producer, decided to return to the recording scene with an album that included "Les Papillons Noirs", a sophisticated track Serge wrote for her, in which he began dressing his compositions in intoxicating strings and a dense bassline — soon to become the favored hallmarks of his future work. It was also Michèle Arnaud who introduced Serge to director Kolnarik, the author of "Anna", a French TV film centered on a young advertising man in love with an image: a young woman he's seen in a photo and searches for in vain across all of Paris, only to realize that this woman is none other than his own assistant — just without her glasses. Serge plays the young photographer, while the role of Anna, after passing over a very young and willful Marianne Faithfull, went to Anna Karina, the Danish muse of her husband Jean-Luc Godard's early films. The arrangements were handled by Michel Colombier, the highly esteemed composer chosen to replace Alain Goraguer. The album Anna alternates between instrumental moments, like the orchestral intro "Sous le Soleil Exactement", a classy piece of ambient lounge whose second track is picked up by Karina's thin, seductive voice — a forerunner of a vocal style that would anticipate, by a couple of years, the debut of another adorable national starlet, Claudine Longet — and engaging two-voice beat numbers seasoned with background party noise, as in "C'est la Cristallisation Comme Dit Stendhal", a duet between Serge and Jean-Claude Brialy, his male co-star in the TV film. Often the singing turns into an evocative spoken delivery, almost whispered ("Pas Mal Pas Mal du Tout"), or a kind of musical frame around a two-voice dialogue with Anna ("Rien Rien J'Disais ça Comme ça"), which returns to the fore with the melancholic, heartfelt "Un Jour Comme un Autre", before setting aside its trademark affectation to plunge brazenly into the rhythm of "Roller Girl" and the country-bop of "Pistolet Jo"; "Un Poison Violent, C'Est ça l'Amour" is a masterful example of the Morricone-esque cinematic tension Serge, together with Colombier, was capable of conjuring, alongside a bandstand divertissement on "G.I. Joe", right up to the sinuous soft-rock close of the instrumental "Je N'Avais qu'en Seul Mot a Lui Dire".

Anna aired in early 1967, around the time Serge moved into a small flat at the Cité Internationale des Arts et Lettres, while he kept churning out EPs and appearing in various films. Everyday life might have idled along lazily in the soft indolence of his new single life, but a temporary visit from Beatrice, accompanied by a brief rekindling of their romance, once again threw everything into turmoil: Serge was about to become a father for a second time; far from retracing his steps and shouldering the burden of a cohabitation built on the bourgeois value of fatherhood, the man — now free of guilt — went back to live, albeit temporarily, with his parents, while waiting for Joseph, his devoted father, to find him that long-coveted flat on Rue de Verneuil.

But the event destined to leave a mark more on Serge's personal life than on his output was his encounter with Brigitte Bardot, the stratospherically beautiful star of "Et Dieu… Créa la Femme", the iconic 1956 film directed by her first husband Roger Vadim, co-starring Jean-Louis Trintignant. Sensual, uninhibited, mischievously lascivious, Brigitte met Serge on the Sacha Show, the TV programme hosted by Sacha Distel, famous in England above all for his rendition of the Burt Bacharach classic "Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head". The passion between Serge and Brigitte was immediate, white-hot, uncontainable, and neither of them cared about unfinished business with their respective partners, Gunther Sachs and Beatrice; the two became inseparable, caught up in an affair that left no room for any form of rationality. Brigitte was a voracious, fickle woman, and Serge indulged both her hunger and her vanity by writing for her some wonderful pages of love songs, among them a seminal, intoxicating "Je T'Aime, Moi Non Plus", recorded on a winter night in 1967 at Barclay Studio in Paris, arranged by Michel Colombier. Locked away in the recording booth, the couple gave themselves over to a regal, dizzying courtship, widely described as a genuine bout of petting, in which Serge kept his usual aplomb while Brigitte held nothing back, leaving very little to the imagination. This first version of "Je T'Aime Moi Non Plus" is pure erotic game-playing, joy and pain, gasoline poured on the senses and carnal delirium, all the while retaining an unmatched elegance — it's Serge who sadistically withholds, dictating the rules of the game, blindfolding his partner, who murmurs, pleads, whispers love.

The fatefulness of their meeting, after the erotic exploits of "Je T'Aime Moi Non Plus", caught its breath again across two albums that, in 1968, stand as the ultimate tokens of their love. Bonnie And Clyde, inspired by the American outlaw couple Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, who in the 1930s entered the collective criminal imagination, even turning their own death into a wild, armed car chase, unfolds across recycled tracks ("Un Jour Comme un Autre", previously performed by Anna Karina, "La Javanaise", written for Juliette Gréco, the timeless, intriguing rascality of "Intoxicated Man"), delightful reworkings of old jazz standards, like "Everybody Loves My Baby" written by Spencer Williams in 1924 and transformed into a cheeky swing number by Bardot's insolent little voice, and new, middling material, among which the title track stands out above all — a sinister, psychedelic splendor, a small two-voice preview of Serge's new imagery, accompanied by an evocative video.

Initials B.B. marks the end of a fire perhaps more fleeting than one might have imagined; Brigitte, in Spain filming a new movie, decided to give her husband Sachs another chance, leaving Serge in the deepest despair; but by then the new album was nearly finished, and it was as well to complete it and put it out on the market: a few more leftovers (the pop cartoon of "Comic Strip", the freakbeat of "Docteur Jekill et Monsieur Hyde", the yé yé theme of "Marilu"), along with a handful of fleeting, unforgettable gems accidentally slipped in among the déjà-vu veneer — the title track inspired by the epic Symphony No. 9 by Dvořák and reshaped around "Le Corbeau", Edgar Allan Poe's poem, the innocent twist of "Shu Ba Du Ba Loo Ba" and "Ford Mustang", a natural, crowd-pleasing two-voice follow-up to Bonnie And Clyde.

By the end of 1968, what remained for a magnificently forty-year-old Serge was the unspeakable pain of the end of his relationship with Bardot, having the scandalous first version of "Je T'Aime Moi Non Plus" sent back to him, only to be pulled out of the drawer of memories in 1986, and a forced stay at his parents' house while he waited for his definitive move to Rue de Verneuil, all while he frantically carried on composing film soundtracks.

Jane Birkin, psychedelic delirium

Cinema became the link in an elusive chain of chance events through which Serge, in 1969, was about to open a new chapter of his life, destined to become a defining theme of his existence, the crowning of that particular ideal of ecstasy — dense with beauty, passion, total sensory intoxication and a sweet monopoly over the mind — that would find its most enchanting embodiment in Jane Birkin. The opportunity came courtesy of director Pierre Grimblat, who asked Serge to compose the soundtrack for "Slogan", the film then in production, in which he was also to star. In "Slogan", Serge plays an advertising director who loses his head over a young woman he meets at a film festival; the infatuation is so strong that it drives him to leave his pregnant wife, unaware that he himself is destined to be abandoned by his new, short-lived conquest. Initially, Evelyne, the female lead, was meant to be played by the sophisticated, aloof Marisa Berenson, at the time one of the most fascinating and sought-after top models, but at the last minute Grimblat decided to opt instead for an English girl who could perfectly embody the imagery of Swinging London — a girl with long, soft, straight hair, thick fringe, big doe eyes, and a slender, sinuous physique.

After several auditions, Evelyne became Jane Birkin, a twenty-year-old Englishwoman who had been noticed three years earlier in "Blow Up", the film directed by Michelangelo Antonioni, in which, still a teenager, she had given English screens her first full nude scene. Her first meeting with Gainsbourg was a disaster: Jane was a girl of disarming innocence, didn't speak French, and was the exact opposite of Berenson's typically aristocratic allure, around which Serge had already built a grand and intriguing castle of sand. Every attempt to establish an empathetic line of communication was undone by Serge's snobbish attitude, which bordered on belittling poor Jane, who on several occasions came close to tears and to the decision to walk off set and go back to England for good — until, mortified by a nude scene that simply wasn't working, she asked the director to arrange a more relaxed three-way meeting over dinner. That dinner marked the seduction: Jane invited Serge to dance, and realized she was in the presence of one of the most brazen and, paradoxically, shyest men she had ever met; Serge's confidence was just one of the many shades making up an unusual, elusive personality, as rich and intricate as a mosaic, a labyrinth in which Jane was about to lose herself, to settle with unrepeatable grace, as if she had been born for this and this alone. The night ran from one club to another, with Sibelius's "Valse Triste" played by an ensemble of Russian violinists in front of the taxi that was about to take the couple to the Hilton Hotel, to the room of their first dizzying spell and their final oblivion. The pull toward the Absolute was so strong that it banished every ghost and allowed them to look with indifference on old wounds of abandonment — for Jane, that of her husband John Barry, the Bond composer and father of her daughter Kate, and for Serge, that of Brigitte Bardot, voracious for everything and ungrateful.

Any other woman might have been offended at receiving, as a gift, a piece of jewellery returned after the end of another relationship, but this — despite an initial hesitation — didn't happen when Serge asked Jane to re-record "Je T'Aime Moi Non Plus"; Jane cleared the hurdle and understood that, this time, the mood was different, the weight of the words far more deliberate, yielding a result that existed in a wholly different universe from Bardot's carnal, if magnetic, urgency. The new "Je T'Aime Moi Non Plus" opens Serge Gainsbourg/Jane Birkin, the two-voice album recorded, again for Philips, in London in 1969. The scandal is just one of the trappings of this new version — perhaps the funniest one: where Bardot, with that feline, famished way of singing, whispering, panting, left the curtain wide open to the most demanding voyeurism, Jane instead, with an innocently perverse modesty, preferred the discretion of a mere glimpse, and is perfect, moving, in her fragile, devoted sensuality, perfectly in tune with the churchy organ, in a sublime interplay between the sacred and the profane. This time, "Je T'Aime Moi Non Plus" — branded, excommunicated, shunned like the plague by the Vatican's upper echelons, by the English middle class, by Queen Juliana of Denmark, co-owner of Philips — was proudly kept in circulation, and, although it vanished from record shop shelves in many countries, mysteriously climbed to the top of numerous international charts, becoming a universal cult object in many corners of the world.

The other ten songs making up Serge Gainsbourg/Jane Birkin build a delightful frame around it: plenty of room is given to Jane, charming in the orchestral pop of "Orang Outan", irreverent in the charleston of "18-39", dramatically seductive as she describes her own possible death, in an arrangement inspired by Frédéric Chopin's Prelude No. 4 in E minor (Op. 28) ("Jane B."), a lovely folk chanteuse on "Le canari est sur le balcon", a gem in the vein of Joni Mitchell. Elsewhere, Serge offers up a delicate, sun-drenched "L'Anamour" — originally written for Françoise Hardy, who had included it on "Comment Te Dire Adieu", an album recorded in 1968 — and the richly blooming string-orchestra march of "Elisa". A moment of rare, knowing refinement is "69 année érotique", a dreamy ballad punctuated by bass and adorned with violins, like liquidly losing oneself in the waves of a journey full of happy omens (“Gainsbourg et son Gainsborough ont pris le ferry-boat/ De leur lit par le hublot ils regardent la cote/ Ils s’aiment et la traversée durera toute une année/ Ils vaincront les maléfices jusqu’en soixante-dix”), celebrated by Jane's clear little chorus, which repeats, richly, "69 Année Érotique".

Trying to describe Love outside of any convention, and yet so deeply rooted in the immortal archetype of yin and yang, in a perfection independent of space and time, in the sphere of a multiplicity steeped in soul and body, in moody, pulsing grace, is an arduous and unlikely task, so all that's left is to imagine the affinity between Serge and Jane as an unrepeatable, eternal uniqueness, a precious work of art sculpted and masterfully carved with human essence, a spiritual and sensual pact, full, noble and three-dimensional. 1970, psychedelic and hippyish, was a year of travels around the entire planet, with stops even in India, a land of mystical inspiration and liberating purification, a kind of preparatory ground for the creation of something exceptional, astonishing, unexpected.

1971: the masterpiece was at hand, a hymn to innocence, to discovery, to perversion, to fantasy, to Love, to death, to possession, to loss, to conquest, to longing, to initiation and to awareness; it is a work of art and the definitive consecration of an undying bond, despite the graceless, future turns each of their lives would take. Histoire de Melody Nelson, planned over two years and written in eight hours, came together around the purchase of a vintage car, a 1910 Rolls Royce bought with the fee from a job in Eastern Europe — a provocative gesture following a brief arrest for having burned a Slavic banknote, in defiance of the stoic austerity of the communist regime. At the wheel of the Rolls is a middle-aged man, who comes across a fifteen-year-old girl, Melody Nelson, a transfiguration of Jane, and "Melody Nelson a des cheveux rouges/ Et c'est leur couleur naturelle".

The Rolls' seat seems like a purple armchair set down in a crack in the world, strategically hidden so as to better indulge a shadowy voyeurism, fixated on the most decadent, sensual, clinging details, elusive to the flattening effect of the universal. Melody wears white trousers, her slender hand toying with a soft lock of hair, the echo of her laughter clear and ringing, unaware of its effect on the man driving the car that's about to run her down.

Melody is about to stumble with feigned clumsiness into the mischief of play, elegantly oblivious to her surroundings, glowing with an insolent, adolescent beauty. The randomness of the encounter tickles the male mind, indolently accustomed to observing unripe female bodies, gleaming with grace, fresh energy, regal unconsciousness. For the man, it's vertigo. And vertigo feeds the masterpiece generously.

The stream of consciousness winks morbidly from below, obsessively cadenced, impertinent, hollow, becoming one of the dominant traits of the whole album, caught in the web of an impalpable sonic fabric, spun with skillful cunning by the knowing bow, conducted by Jean Claude Vannier, as if announcing an imminent emotional catastrophe, the link between Eros and Thanatos, in a piercing sense of danger ("Melody"). And if the conditio sine qua non of such an oppressive urge is “Un petit animal… Une adorable garçonne/ Et si délicieuse enfant”, there's no moralistic outrage that can hold up against such morbidity, against the sublime carved into the air by the unsettling decadence that pervades the whole work. The Unwitting Nymph is gallantly led into the sweetness of a waltz, with the gift of delicate white roses, streaked only by her own inner shadow ("Valse de Melody").

The dizziness surrounding this rollercoaster of the senses ends in the emptiness of a lucidity, locked in the pain of its obsession, and, at the same time, resigned to admitting the inevitability of Chance, with the trumpet standing in solidarity, supporting what remains of its struggle toward life ("Ah Melody"). Letting passion slip away is a volcanic risk, everything could go up in flames of loss and remorse, so let it be a narcotic swoon. The Hotel Particulier is the place to consummate the physicality of this mania, worthy of the most decadent and fascinating Art Nouveau ruin, with paintings of Aphrodite and Salome on the walls of the staircase leading to the sins of room 44, Cleopatra's room, with its rococo bedposts and a large mirror reflecting the churning of the senses ("L'Hotel Particulier").

The spatio-temporal dilation infects the whole record, and the distorted electric guitar – another hallmark of the whole album – is especially intoxicating on the voluptuous psychedelic rock of "En Melody".

What remains is the feeling of a sweet plane crash, the plane about to return Melody, the object of desire, to her family, leaving her lover in the most unbearable desolation, adrift in a memory still too raw, a psycho-physical flashback, bulimic with sensuality, reaching its epic climax in the ecstasy of the final chorus, a selfish celebration of death, crystallizing Melody in her eternal, perverse, innocent adolescence, enshrined in the Olympus of the Senses ("Cargo Culte").

A unique, unrepeatable work, Histoire de Melody Nelson unveils the most humanly true secret of sensuality, isolating us from the moral uniformity demanded by every religious commandment, and letting us drift on our own innocent perversions, like the most bewitching and decadent of escapes.

On the cover of Histoire de Melody Nelson, Jane wears a red-haired wig, flared jeans, and holds her inseparable stuffed monkey, in a delicately flirtatious pose against a completely blue background, while Serge, in the lyrics booklet, casually shows off his new look: worn jeans, an elegantly sloppy white shirt, medium-length, deliberately unkempt hair and little white dancer's shoes, a gift from Jane. It's beauty content with itself, relaxed, wonderful. In the cover photo, Jane's trousers are undone because she is expecting Charlotte, who will be born five months later.

For Serge, geometry is nothing more than the reduction of pleasure to an equilateral triangle, in which – as he declared more than once – women, alcohol and cigarettes carry exactly the same value. This decadent hedonism, sparing when it comes to other, lesser vices, rests on the scaffolding of a rather dangerous triad, bound to exact its toll prematurely, though not entirely unexpectedly. Two years after Charlotte's birth, Serge – never embarrassed to talk about his obsessive passion for Gitanes, the unfiltered cigarettes he smoked in massive doses, especially while composing his songs – suffers a heart attack. It's 1973, he is forty-five, and Jane is terrified. Not even a heart attack is enough to curb the insatiable need for pleasure provided by smoke rings; intoxication is an ecstatic experience, a voluptuous satisfaction, a primary need, and not even Jane's slap, outraged by a convalescence that turns into a secret relapse into the habit, can stop it. The episode leads to a habit that becomes shared, and to the writing of a new record, for which Serge flies to England, hiring keyboardist Alan Hawkshaw for the arrangements, thus ending his collaboration with Jean Claude Vannier, who is unjustly left on the sidelines of the Histoire's success.

Vu De L'Exterieur is a physical concept, tied to a corporeality caught in the fulfilment of its most natural needs – a theme that will fill the dense, ironic pages of "Gasogramma", a semi-autobiographical novella about an artist whose style is determined by a peculiar form of anal painting.

The theme of anality, which for Serge is an expression of anguish and a fall from humanity into animality, cracks the delicate painting of a pure, immaculate aesthetic ideal, and becomes the leitmotif of almost the entire album: some tracks, starting with their titles, leave little room for imagination ("Panpan Culcul", "Des Vents, Des Pets, Des Poums", "Pamela Popo"), while others, like "La Poupée Qui Fait", dedicated to little Charlotte, are small, funny tributes. The lifeline of this unusual album, marked by warm, elegant arrangements and hilarious, at times incomprehensible, provocative lyrics, is "Je Suis Venu Te Dire Que Je M'En Vais", a melancholy ballad, viscous with the finest honey, an example of chanson made from sheets soaked in tears and fury.

Vu De L'Exterieur catches people off guard, it isn't understood, and 1974 is a year of complete withdrawal from the record scene for Serge, who increasingly becomes Jane's shadow, as she is extremely busy on screen, in rather lightweight, empty films. Nevertheless, media exposure is at an all-time high, finally granting the man the long-craved status of rock star, giving him the freedom to write without reins, without worrying too much about the market or the critics.

Rock Around The Bunker, written on the Calais-Dover ferry on the way to England, is handed over to Alan Hawkshaw in absolutely bare-bones form, ready to be completed and arranged. Lyrically built on an irreverent deconstruction of Nazism – of which Serge had had a fleeting yet bitter experience as a child – the album is a rock'n'roll blues concept that swims against the current, both against the genres fashionable at the time and against the refined psychedelia of the "Histoire". Skipping the yé yé wave entirely, it goes back to classic rock'n'roll: Hawkshaw plays piano à-la Jerry Lee Lewis ("Nazirock"), wordplay and alliteration abound in practically untranslatable lyrics ("Tata Teutonne"), the record launches into frenzied blues imported from Prohibition-era America ("Rock Around The Bunker") and slows down with a sly nod to jazz standards (the incredible, hilarious version of "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes"), returns with cynical, amused irony to his own past as a little Jewish boy, deserving of a shining yellow star to pin on his jacket, as "Yellow Star" puts it (“J’ai gagné la Yellow star /Je porte la Yellow star /Difficile pour un juif/ La loi du Struggle for life /Quand il y a la Yellow star/ Yellow star”), and almost unwittingly delivers a more snobbish, baroque, Doors-like take on "Roadhouse Blues", with the added value of a delightful female chorus ("Est – Ce Est – Ce Si Bon"), a recurring element running through nearly the whole record.

Between 1975 and 1976, Serge tries to exorcise the lack of recognition for his two recent, misunderstood albums and the indifference of English-speaking audiences by betting on his media image, playing the cards of narcissism and talent back in his homeland. With his usual nonchalance, and the same chameleon-like ability to slip, without much embarrassment, from one genre to another and from one context to its diametric opposite, he tries his hand at advertising, composing jingles and starring in them alongside Jane. One ad that remains fondly fixed in the collective memory is the Woolite detergent commercial, in which Jane, wrapped in a soft black-and-white striped wool sweater, smiles while extolling the softening qualities of the product, set to a light, naive tune. By this point in his artistic journey, Serge can move freely between the lightness of commercials and the complexity of a new, sulfurous concept album. The opportunity arises from a love-at-first-sight encounter, followed by the immediate purchase, of an unusual sculpture depicting a life-sized man with a cabbage instead of a head. L'Homme à Tête de Chou is the work of artist Claude Lalanne and becomes the title of Serge's new record. Dark, oppressive, stripped-down in Hawkshaw's and Serge's own arrangements, the album is a concept record that, in some ways, can be seen as a possible counterpart to Histoire de Melody Nelson, a sort of negative image of it, more jagged and guilt-ridden. The epilogue of a story – the second, after the one told in the Histoire – of love and death is reversed, with the lover seduced, outraged, resentful and torn apart by madness for a black love. Elusive, ungrateful, he leaves clues from the intro onward ("L'Homme à Tête de Chou"), which, with an epic, mournful organ later dissolving into evaporating synthesizers, introduces itself to its interlocutor (“Je suis l’homme à la tête de chou/ Moitié légume moitié mec/ Pour les beaux yeux de Marilou/ Je suis allé porter au clou/ Ma Remington et puis mon break”); Marilou is the exotic, giggly hairdresser's assistant met in "Chez Max Coiffeur Pour Homme", whose soap-slicked hands stir murky thoughts in the mind of the cabbage-headed man, who immediately asks her out, only to then consummate their playful coupling in a carefree reggae ("Marilou Reggae") and in a tribal cunnilingus, in a whirling, percussive and frenzied transfiguration of reality ("Transit à Marilou").

But exclusivity over Marilou is just an illusion: libertine and shameless, the exuberant black woman wastes no time cheating on her partner with two hippies, ape-like leftovers fresh from some flower-power festival, engaged in a menage à trois in the violated bedroom, as recounted with sarcastic disgust by the protagonist ("Flash Forward"), who, in "Premiers Symptomes", goes on to describe the first symptoms of the cabbage-headed man's metamorphosis – as in a retelling of the anguished Kafkaesque theme – in a phantasmagoric puddle of circles traced by the obsessive synthesizer, contrasted with the female chorus that, from afar, whispers "Marilou". Humiliated and wronged, the cabbage-headed man keeps sliding into the voluptuousness of an obsessive, lascivious, magnetic desire, and, with a slurred, admiring voice, sings the praises of the exotic whore, in the opiate space-funk of "Variations sur Marilou". In the end jealousy wins out, the unbearable nature of having to share, from time immemorial, the object of one's desire, and Marilou is slaughtered with a fire extinguisher ("Meurtre a l'Exincteur") and, buried under a snow of foam, finally freed from the guilt of malice and bulimic sensuality, to return to being an innocent child, gently rocked by the lullaby of a soft guitar in "Marilou sous le Neige". The price to pay for all this is madness, the conviction of truly having a cabbage instead of a head, a vegetable endlessly gnawed at by the Playboy bunny, plagued by insects, tormented by memory, in a danse macabre stretched out by a form of syncopated electronic tribalism ("Lunatic Asylum").

Intoxicated, cantankerous, morbid, L'Homme à Tête de Chou is the visionary peak of a thirty-year career, almost the final chapter of a long saga that, crossing through different styles, lays bare the most intimate nature of attraction between the sexes: an Escher-like architecture of traps, mirages, narrow suffocating tunnels, mirrored staircases, dazzling and crumbling towers, and a Pandora's box brimming with tension, ecstasy, moods, contradictions, will-o'-the-wisps and inconsistencies. Misogyny is nothing but the sincere flip side of an age-old magnetism, the illusion of possession, the predator's resentment at being diminished by his prey, rapacious instinct, the weakness of reason, regal eroticism, intellect subdued by carnality. Pornographic, psychedelic, morally far more offensive than any punk sneer, just days before 1977, this dark counterpart to the "Histoire", dense with allusions, quotations and references, remains perhaps the visionary peak of Gainsbourg's entire body of work, even if confined to a niche, devoted and elite audience.

Monsieur Gainsbarre, the Nihilist

Serge is a free man, caught in the contradictory grip of a refined hedonism and a subtle, elegant vanity that push him to seek a public image that is never an end in itself, but a vehicle for having his genius and his cultured excess properly recognised. While his relationship with Jane – irreplaceable muse and devoted feline – begins to fade, his gaze drifts toward recent musical trends: how can he keep being a daring outsider without necessarily having to reckon with punk, by now a pervasive phenomenon on the world scene? The question is settled by producer Philippe Lerichomme, a young and brilliant record man, who, during nocturnal tours of Paris's most varied venues, is struck by a dancehall that is half punk and half reggae.

Lerichomme has no doubts: Serge Gainsbourg must fly to Kingston, hire the cream of Jamaican musicians and make a stunning offbeat record, a pioneer of a new strain of the genre, french reggae, contracted into freggae. There's no time to waste; Serge's enthusiasm must be seized on the spot, and after massively absorbing the vinyl Lerichomme supplies him in bulk, he picks his star musicians: Robbie Shakespeare on bass, Sly Dunbar on drums, Uziah “Sticky” Thompson on percussion and the I Threes on backing vocals, among them Rita Marley, wife of the legendary Bob. Island is alerted, and off they fly to Kingston. The atmosphere, after an initial anthropological misunderstanding born of the musicians' total cultural distance from one another, relaxes immediately once the Jamaicans discover they're dealing with the author of "Je T'Aime Moi Non Plus", which had been played to excess on local radio.

It's a constant party: Serge drinks and smokes Gitanes like a man possessed, and the exotic ensemble happily and ceaselessly works its way through joints. The idea of making a nice, clean record, polished by overdub, is dropped by Serge, who instead wants warm, raw, utterly natural sounds, a kind of wild tabula rasa on which to act out his provocations and his outrages. The final result is Aux armes et caetera, an album destined to receive both gold and manure in equal measure. "La Marseillaise", the French national anthem, is shipped overseas and transformed into "Aux Armes Etc", the title track and a steamy reggae bouquet, graced by the I Threes' backing vocals, while Serge, drunk, declaims its legendary words. Evidently relaxed to just the right degree, the old rogue doesn't hesitate to strip down the structure of the sophisticated, venerable "Javanaise", turning it into a dub remake to be danced to sinuously in comfortable beachside déshabillé ("Javanaise Remake"), pairing it with the story of an underage mixed-race girl, between whose breasts one might roll a seditious joint ("Lola Rastaquoere"), shifting the scene into a cartoonish reggae'n'roll ("Relax Baby Be Cool"), and celebrating the collective fascination with a little savage named Daisy Temple, an enigmatic creature who loves "rasta, Papuans, Watusi and Zulus" ("Daisy Temple").

Aux armes et caetera, released in March 1979, is immediately caught up in a thoroughly gripping media rollercoaster: skyrocketing sales, which will earn it gold-record status, go hand in hand with the outrage it stirs at home for its desecration of the Marseillaise; some even go so far as to propose stripping Serge of his French citizenship, since the Vatican's condemnation hadn't been enough to discourage the artist's blasphemy. But Serge couldn't care less, and his enthusiasm runs so high that he decides to take Aux armes et caetera on tour across Europe, inviting along all the musicians who had worked on it. Strange as it may seem, even in the post-'68 years, amid the violent backlash of '77, there are still those who proudly wave the idiotic flags of the most pig-headed nationalism – which, in Strasbourg, erupts into the outrage of a group of paratroopers, issuing rather direct threats. The Jamaicans are forced to take refuge in Brussels to escape the racist hatred, and Serge's pleas to see the tour through come to nothing; it's already too late, and the only way to calm things down is to sing "La Marseillaise" in front of the nationalists in its traditional version, whose ovation, however, is followed by a liberating middle finger – but by then the danger has passed. While Aux armes et caetera keeps sailing on a sea of gold, cementing Serge's status as reggae's luxury importer in France, the musicians who co-authored the record go back home, and, with their typical cannabis-flavoured calm, having gotten over the bitterness of receiving nothing but a single, measly photo of the gold disc, will go on to keep an excellent and grateful memory of the man and the record.

Analysing human relationships is a fascinating and complex speculative undertaking, one too often impoverished, stereotyped, and inflated by the egotistical self-regard of various figures from a supposed, pretentious psychoanalytic intelligentsia – among others. The bond between Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin, so exclusive, intense, sensual and moving, is something to be handled with the utmost respect, without the pretension of examining it under a microscope – a lens that, however precise and sharp, could certainly never capture its every hidden micro-particle; for this reason, any moral judgment about the end of their relationship, around the start of the 1980s, rings hollow, and there's something vulgar, too, in the morbid curiosity with which one might pick apart such a deeply unsettling emotional mosaic, marked by an elegant misogyny, by a kind of artistic possession, by a dependency as sweet and sorrowful as a slow drip. Jane, who even attempted suicide by throwing herself into the Seine after a public row with Serge in a nightclub, at the mercy of the public's ravenous curiosity – the very public on which the artist's contradictory narcissism feeds – is by now nearly thirty-five, and the role of a work of art frozen in time, even immortalised in a statue in her own image, no longer fits her. A woman now, long since a mother, she decides she will no longer be anyone's innocent, bewitching daughter, but rather a partner and lover on equal terms, freeing herself from the ghost – eternal as it may be – of Melody Nelson, perhaps aware of the tragic insubstantiality of a character destined, by its very nature, to fade away, as happens in the work's epilogue, so as to avoid the grotesque tragedy of growing old.

The new life cycle opens with Serge being left for the filmmaker Jacques Doillon, with whom Jane will have a daughter and make a series of important films. In 1980, Serge is a free and desperate man who, at first, refuses to accept the end of the relationship, though he proudly rebuffs several attempts at reconciliation; single, he has eyes for nothing but alcohol, with which he establishes a final, mutual bond of understanding, himself opening a new, last chapter of his existence: Serge Gainsbourg, sophisticated perfection poised in the middle ground, gives way to Gainsbarre, who retains not the faintest trace of the original Lucien Ginsburg, the small, ugly Jewish boy on the run. Dissolution reigns supreme, while an outward order persists in the black-walled, immaculately kept house-museum. The descent into humanity's most wretched depths grows more sarcastic than ever, and sex becomes, without the slightest embarrassment, permanently entangled with man's most primitive needs. Gainsbarre, in a disgustingly hilarious piece of theatre, spreads his buttocks and bares his sphincter, first under the pseudonym Evguénie Sokolov, a faecal painter and his alter ego, tragicomic protagonist of "Gasogramma", the fast, surreal little novel about the art of the mark made by a hand through the vibrations of flatulence, the protagonist's cross to bear and delight from birth to death; the discourse continues in Mauvaises Nouvelles des Etoiles, whose title is drawn from a Paul Klee work hanging in his living room, a second and less successful reggae record, made with the same musicians as Aux armes et caetera.

Listening closely, and reading the backstory, the record is not born as a natural continuation of its predecessor: the musicians have grown wealthier and have by now lost the relaxed spontaneity of their first collaboration, Serge is wholly in thrall to his anal delirium, and 1981 is a year of a thoroughly different, diametrically opposed triumph of genres, with new wave dictating the rules of the record market. Throwing out Mauvaises Nouvelles des Etoiles would, however, be an ungrateful act, given Serge's innate inability to produce anything truly bad, and, if only for how it dovetails with the obsessions of the moment, the record retains an intrinsic value of its own: "Ecce Homo" is Gainsbarre's official unveiling, "Juif et Dieu" is a Jewish redemption, tracing the very best of human culture back to the Semitic race, while "Evguénie Sokolov" is the flatulent symphony, laid over a dub carpet, dedicated to the protagonist of "Gasogramma". A track that comes somewhat back to proverbial grace, and that, however faintly, links "Mauvaises Nouvelles des Etoiles" to "Aux Armes Etc", is "La Nostalgie Camarade", with its hushed, intriguing spoken word caressed by the I Threes' velvety harmonies.

The point-of-no-return dissolution into which Serge chooses to sink, in the last decade of his life, is seemingly softened by the birth of a new son, little Lucien, born of his relationship with Caroline Paulus, known as Bambou, a Eurasian model and his devoted fan even before she was his lover. Jane, however, is not shut out; almost like ivy he can cling to in his darkest moments, in his alcoholic ravings, in the bleak loneliness that looms large after the end of their relationship, revealing Serge in all his vulnerability and weakness. Bambou is the mother of his son, but she is not the woman of his life, and it would be touchingly naive to believe she could be, for a sixty-year-old man whose years had already reached unrepeatable peaks of intensity.

Despite the alcoholic fog, impending blindness, and the symptoms of cirrhosis, Serge still wants to work – whether on film scores or anything else – and is absolutely determined to make yet another album. Love On The Beat comes out in 1984, preceded by a hilarious television scandal: in March, Serge, a guest on French TV, burns a five-hundred-franc note in defiance of that "whore called socialism", proudly declaring that he pays every last cent of his taxes. Love On The Beat, on the suggestion of his trusted producer Philippe Lerichomme, is recorded in New Jersey, in the garage of guitarist Billy Rush, with other musicians who had worked with Peter Gabriel and David Bowie (Larry Fast, Stan Harrison, Steve and George Simms). Exploring various sexual morphologies and perversions, homosexuality among them, Love On The Beat depicts Serge on its cover made up as a woman, smoking with a knowing look, and, with absolute ease, from the very first track manages to adapt in thoroughly fascinating fashion to the morbidly sulphurous funk-wave of the title track. The theme of homosexuality returns, clingingly, in "Kiss Me Hardy", a pop song with a gay chorus, which name-checks Francis Bacon and Admiral Nelson, in a farewell from his lover on his deathbed.

The point from which there's truly no return from scandal, though, is the pornosoft offshoot "Lemon Incest", the sensual declaration of love between him and his teenage daughter Charlotte, a complex and ambiguous electronic fairy tale for adults, set to a Chopin backing track. The video, with Serge bare-chested and Charlotte wearing nothing but her father's shirt, the two of them lying on a bed singing their love for one another amid innocent caresses, was branded an insulting, disgusting, blatant sign of mental disturbance – thereby misreading its original intent, and dragging through the mud something that, stripped of all moralistic outrage, is nothing other than a sensual father's declaration of love for an adorably fragile daughter.

As life continues to fade away, like smoke rings from his inseparable Gitanes or the poisonous aftertaste of his faithful alcohol, Serge's final studio statement, in 1987, is an album brazenly of its time. You're Under Arrest, born of an ambivalent fascination with the police, as an offshoot of an admiration for the uniform never fully extinguished, and of the degrading enchantment of the ghetto's dark sensuality, is his last studio album, lyrically unhinged and squarely in line with the pop-wave current, shot through with black music rendered in the then-novel form of rap. Serge sings, detached, of having run into two policemen in the Bronx searching for an underage, drug-addicted prostitute named Samantha, but the policemen can't help but recognise his legendary greatness, declaring, in the title track, "You're under arrest, because you're the best". And Samantha is the toxic obsession that resurfaces in "Baille Baille Samantha", a stretched-out synth-funk number in which Serge sings of his disgust at drug addiction, a theme later picked up again in "Aux Enfants de La Chance", a melancholy electronic ballad.

His lascivious visionary streak is not lacking, and recent existential storms haven't dulled his taste for dialectical games, reaching peaks of scandalous divertissement in "Suck Baby Suck", in which Samantha is invited to perform fellatio over a Chuck Berry soundtrack ("Suck, baby suck, with the cd of Chuck, Berry Chuck"). Nearly blind, at the very end, alienated from his surroundings, Serge, to close things out, even allows himself the pleasure of a disco hit, "Mon Légionnaire".

In the last four years of his life, Serge gives himself over definitively to vice, to the point of beginning a back-and-forth stay in hospital in an attempt at detox. While Lulu, his youngest, grows up in Bambou's care, his primary point of reference remains Jane Birkin – lover, wife, daughter and eternal friend all at once – whose home is more loving and comforting than any medical facility.

On the evening of the first of March 1991, Serge returns to his apartment on Rue De Verneuil after celebrating Bambou's birthday; she lives with little Lulu just a few blocks away. A few hours later, Bambou calls him on the phone, gets no answer at all, and, growing suspicious, rushes over to his place. The door, to which the woman had never been given a key, at Serge's explicit wish, is broken down by firefighters, who find themselves facing not the leering Gainsbarre, nor even the dandy Gainsbourg, but a man barely past sixty who, like a newborn of death, has become Lucien again, le petit juif.

On March 2nd, France comes to a standstill, returning the golden, furious memory of its devoted protégé to room number 44 of a Hotel plus que Particulier, while handing his physical remains, a few days later, to the Montparnasse cemetery.

Il est venu nous dire qu'il s'en vait.

(in collaboration with Mucchio Extra, whom we thank)

Ride the wave of great music

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