See Mick Harvey Channel Serge Gainsbourg’s Decadent Ennui
“I don’t think the French’s taste in rock music is that good most of the time,” Mick Harvey says with a laugh. “There’s not a great history of really high-quality rock there. They do a lot of things quite well, but that’s not really one of them.”
One notable exception, the former Nick Cave collaborator says, is the ornate, often cinematic music of singer-songwriter Serge Gainsbourg, most of which transcends rock. In his first two decades as a recording artist, Gainsbourg commanded a varied palette of hazy jazz, lushly arranged French chansons, pulsing yé-yé pop and even some ambitious prog, before trying out reggae and New Wave with diminishing returns in the Eighties. The through line was his witty wordplay, which was always in French – sung in a mumbly jumble – and which often courted controversy. (Witness his immortally horny biggest hit “Je T’Aime … Moi Non Plus.”) The singer-songwriter died in 1991, but he posthumously became an underground-rock legend, influencing Beck, Faith No More’s Mike Patton, Arcade Fire and De La Soul, among countless others.
Long before Gainsbourg’s popularity spread, however, Harvey discovered his music during a stay in Berlin in the late Eighties. “A good friend of mine made me a big compilation tape,” he tells Rolling Stone during a short break before a Helsinki gig with PJ Harvey, whose band he’s playing in. “There was a big awareness about his material on the continent but not a hell of a lot of people knew it outside of there.” In 1995, after years of playing with Cave’s Bad Seeds, the Birthday Party, Crime and the City Solution, and other equally dreary groups, Harvey dedicated his first solo album, Intoxicated Man, solely to Anglicized translations of Gainsbourg’s often upbeat music. He recorded another in 1997, Pink Elephants, and now the Australian musician, age 57, has followed up those two LPs with a third disc of Gainsbourg interpretations, Delirium Tremens.
“When I made my first Gainsbourg albums, his music was quite unknown and obscure,” Harvey says. “So those records were a voyage of discovery. I took it very seriously. Now I’m doing it just because I enjoy it. I don’t feel a cultural responsibility or something.”
The idea of doing more interpretations arose after Harvey played a handful of gigs supporting reissues of the first two albums, leading him to fall back in love with the music. Moreover, he enjoyed the challenge of attempting to translate Gainsbourg’s clever calembours into something English speakers could appreciate.
One of the more difficult songs to get over the net was Gainsbourg’s loungey 1958 jazz number “Ce Mortel Ennui” – “Deadly Tedium” – the video for which premieres above. “That one was always on my radar as a possibility to translate,” Harvey says. “Being a kind of anti-love song, it’s typical of the more perverse aspects of Gainsbourg’s writing and atypical of songs about the breakdown of love and relationships, and it is loaded with dry, black humor.