Serge Gainsbourg- a Fistful of Gitanes by Sylvie Simmons

Author:Sylvie Simmons [Simmons, Sylvie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780306811838
Amazon: 0306811839
Publisher: Da Capo Press
Published: 2002-09-18T05:00:00+00:00

Au naturel

With Catherine Deneuve on the set of Je Vous Aime

Serge and Bambou

Serge and Charlotte

With lolycéenne Vanessa Paradis

Chapter 14

THE ART OF FARTING

Jane had gone, Serge was shattered, yet at the same time his star had never shone so brightly. To his record company’s astonishment – and to his own enormous satisfaction – the odd cult artist that they had pretty much left to his own devices since they had no idea how to market him, was suddenly outselling his unquashable label-mate Johnny Hallyday. The success, and subsequent scandal, of Serge’s 1979 album Aux Armes Et Caetera had a knock-on effect on the back catalogue. First to be re-examined and elevated to gold album status were his two concept album masterpieces Histoire De Melody Nelson and L’Homme À Tête De Chou. A live album – Au Théatre Le Palace (At The Palace Theatre) – recorded with his “rastas” in Paris and released in 1980, ensured that the media attention continued. A good time, all in all, to publish his first – and only – novella: a quasi-autobiography set to, as he put it, “a soundtrack of farts”.

Evguénie Sokolov is an erudite, tragi-comic tale of how a young man transcends suffering – in this case violent intestinal gas – by harnessing it to art and becoming in the process a huge success. Being Serge, it operates on a number of levels: an exposure of the often vile depths from which exquisite art can be created, an examination of the duality of the human condition (à la Vu De L’Extérieur), and an astute comment on fame and how successful artists are adulated for producing, quite literally sometimes, shit.

That last thought had become a popular subject with Serge in press interviews. “Records, TV, newspapers, having an impact on millions of kids, it’s hallucinatory,” he told one journalist. “A painting by Raphael will never sell as many tickets as Michael Jackson – never. Hallucinatory – a minor art screwing a major art up the arse.”1

The way his producer Philippe Lerichomme saw it, Serge didn’t really believe that what he was doing was ‘minor’: “It was just a game; when he died on 2nd March and we were going to leave on the 20th March for New Orleans, it wasn’t in order to paint pictures.” Perhaps not, but there was still something about Serge of the painter manqué, the would-be great artist who found himself feted for the lesser – and as he saw it less artistically significant – skill of writing pop songs.

Which is not an uncommon stance. Over the years, this writer has interviewed a number of successful, sometimes brilliant, rockstars who have expressed similar discontentment, and have tried their hand at writing novels, making films, taking photos or painting pictures, usually with unfortunate results. Being natural songwriters, they belittle what comes to them so easily on the presumption that something that takes such little effort can’t be valid art. Although Serge had always made it patently clear that for him the frontiers between

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