The Underground of Happiness

27 tunes to mark the 27th anniversary of Serge Gainsbourg's death in March 1991. The Provocateur Extraordinaire. Playlist Serge Gainsbourg & Jane Birkin – Je t’aime (moi non plus) Serge Gainsbourg – Le poinconneur des Lilas Mick Harvey feat. Anita Lane – The song of slurs Serge Gainsbourg & Brigitte Bardot – Initials B.B. Serge Gainsbourg – Mambo miam miam Jane Birkin – C’est la vie qui veut ca Serge Gainsbourg & Jane Birkin – Ballade de Melody Nelson Jean-Claude Vannier – La girafe au ballon Charlotte Gainsbourg – Le chat du café des artistes Mick Harvey – Intoxicated Man Jean-Claude Vannier – Danse de l’enfant et du Roi des Mouches Anna Karina – Roller girl (from the soundtrack of the film Anna ) Michael Stipe – L’hotel Beck – Wave Charlotte Gainsbourg – Rest Serge Gainsbourg – New York USA Serge Gainsbourg & Jane Birkin – 69 Année Érotique Serge Gainsbourg & Michel Colombier – La Horse (from the soundtrack of the film La Horse )...

Valentines are in the air. We had a few but not the soppy kind. Manly regret and nostalgia soaked in strings from Richard Hawley . Stirring moving heartwrenching soul lament from Nina Simone . Serge & Jane with a glorious JC Vannier arranged paean to love in the margins. Charlotte Gainsbourg with a gorgeous melancholy love letter to her father. And Jack Hayter with wonderful quixotic and earthy English folk songs. More on these pages. The Underground of Happiness uplifting pop music of every creed www.theundergroundofhappiness.blogspot.com www.facebook.com/theundergroundofhappiness Twitter: UndergroundOfHappy Playlist 478 Tues Feb 13 2018 11.00am-12.00pm (repeated on Tuesdays 8.30pm) UCC 98.3FM listen live on the web at www.ucc.ie/983fm *listen back to this show here goo.gl/VR3cLv Playlist Richard Hawley – For your lover give some time Nina Simone – Black is the colour of my true love’s hair Spindle Ensemble – Kite ( playin...

File this in the 2017 “ones that got away” pile. A brilliant insistent minor key of an album which takes on the vast shadow of Serge and comes through with something authentic and individual and (for anyone with any interest in Serge) very poignant. The production by SebastiAn (with help from Brian Burton aka Danger Mouse and Guy-Manuel de Homem Christo of Daft Punk ) is crucially sympathetic to Gainsbourg’s voice which is by no means a powerful instrument. Where it is most effective is in its hush its intimacy and this is how the production locates it. Plus lyrically there is the inspired decision to address not just the loss of her father but also her half sister Kate (after whom one of the songs is named). The songs are shared between French and English (wisely most of the choruses are in English with the verses in French) as a nod to her joint heritage. Overall there is the sense of an update of Jean Claude Vannier’s Serge productions ( Melody Nelson in particular...

Beck revisiting his work with Charlotte Gainsbourg from a few years ago (on her IRM album), in which he recruited his father David Campbell to channel the spirit of Jean-Claude Vannier, the man who added the stardust arrangements to what might otherwise have been Serge Gainsbourg’s sordid sexual psychodramas, most notably on Histoire de Melody Nelson . Here Campbell’s strings are the only backing to Beck’s flailing, drowning vocal, suggesting first a deep-sea undertow, then some kind of soaring transcendance as the end approaches. It’s a beautiful, although distinctly upsetting, piece, a mid-album emotional trough which reaches convincingly into the depths of relationship death.

We've spoken about Serge Gainsbourg in these pages before . His Histoire de Melody Nelson album from 1971 is one of the great concept albums, in fact albums full stop. Which you might not guess to read this description. http://www.allmusic.com/album/histoire-de-melody-nelson-r288302 You don't need to speak a word of French to understand Histoire de Melody Nelson - one needs only to look at the front cover (with its nearly pornographic portrait of a half-naked nymphet clutching a rag doll) or hear the lechery virtually dripping from Serge Gainsbourg's sleazily seductive voice to realize that this is the record your mother always warned you about, a masterpiece of perversion and corruption. A concept record exploring the story of - and Gainsbourg's lust for - the titular teen heroine, Histoire de Melody Nelson is arguably his most coherent and perfectly realized studio album, with the lush arrangements which characterize the majority of his work often mixed here wit...

A couple of other notes to add to the Serge Gainsbourg post yesterday . For anyone in the Los Angeles area, next Sunday would be a good day to get down to the Hollywood Bowl . They're throwing a special event to commemorate the 20th anniversary of SG's death , which features a mouth-watering line-up consisting of Jean-Claude Vannier conducting a full orchestra, as well as Beck, Sean Lennon, Ed Droste (Grizzly Bear), Victoria Legrand (Beach House), and others. Full details here. FFS, I think is the appropriate abbreviation. http://www.hollywoodbowl.com/tickets/performance-detail.cfm?id=4575 Funnily enough, it had passed me by that this year was the 20th anniversary of his death. But this gorgeous looking box-set release by Wrasse Records seems like another worthy tribute. Nice to see they've included 2 full CD's of his songs and scores for films in there. 20th Anniversary Box Set And finally, I also came across this fine article from the Guardian by Nick Ke...

I've been going back through one of my favourite DVD's, Serge Gainsbourg : D'autres nouvelles des étoiles , a 2 x disc compilation of tv appearances, broadcasts and interviews from 1958 to 1989, which Mercury/Universal brought out in 2005. It's fascinating stuff and gives a thorough overview of every stage in Gainsbourg's career, from the early jazz-influenced tunes, to lush string orchestrations, and on to later reggae experiments. (As with everything, I'm sure you might find a free download somehere, but the extensive sleevenotes and credits make it well worth the purchase price.) It was Mick Harvey's Gainsbourg cover albums of the 1990's (interpretations is probably a better word), which my friend Grand Snr turned me on to, that gave me a proper obsession with the man. Those were Intoxicated man (1995) and Pink elephants (1997), both on Mute Records . This was the first time (that I know of) that Gainsbourg's lyrics had been translated into ...