Gainsbourg

Verlant's tome

Paris 

02/03/2001 - 

Gilles Verlant, the most prolific writer on Gainsbourg, has published a dozen years' worth of research: Gainsbourg, a hefty volume of almost eight hundred pages. Both the anecdotes and the analysis contain treasures to be expected from this definitive biography.

Gilles Verlant has already published a significant number of books on Gainsbourg, biographies just two or three hundred pages long, collections of witty sayings or photographs. Here is the sum total, his doubtless final collected works, THE biography. The scope of the undertaking is breath-taking : 762 pages, over three hundred people interviewed, thousands of articles and audiovisual material examined in detail, as well as several hours' worth of interviews with the man, Serge Gainsbourg himself.

Starting with the death of the singer, this gigantic undertaking is obviously a mine of information., beginning with the fairytale affair between Joseph and Olia Ginsburg, Russian Jews fleeing the October Revolution and Russian anti-Semitism. Here, Verlant draws on the best source : Gainsbourg's father's unedited autobiography. In the same way, he is able to mine the copious correspondence between Joseph Ginsburg and his daughters, an unrivalled means for understanding the private Gainsbourg. In this manner, Verlant is able to sprinkle his account with an enormous quantity of personal details, that are further pursued in the course of his research as in the case of the interviews with Gainsbourg's earliest partners and wife.

For he met everybody, or almost everybody, and this is what brings illuminating revelations to each episode of the singer's life and career. He introduces most of the witnesses in an unedited way, in a kind of polyphonic account by friends and loved ones, by artists and technicians with whom he worked, and even interviews Gainsbourg himself.

For example, whilst describing the filming of Equateur, within a few pages Gainsbourg, Barbara Sukowa, Francis Huster, the head cameraman Willy Kurant, Bambou and France Roche are interviewed. Gilles Verlant has had the honesty to not just rely on accounts by friends of the singer, but also contacted many people who had been at odds with him, and who often add a caustic edge to the portrait, like Alain Chamfort who recounts how difficult it was to collaborate with him to produce an album, or France Gall who alludes to the bitter-sweet development of their professional relationship.

Gilles Verlant does his best not to be blinded by love for our subject, not to avoid embarrassing issues, in either the public or the private life of Gainsbourg. In this way he brings to our attention lots of previously undiscovered information about Gainsbourg before he was famous, which does a lot to explain his subsequent attitude to women, and which makes up the "sub-text" of many of his songs.

Precisely, in studying this work, Gilles Verlant brings many new elements into the picture, among others, by cross-checking sources (archives Philips, letters, anecdotes related by witnesses, Sacem files) which enable a genealogical tree to be established of his songs. While strictly adhering to a chronological time-scale, he takes the time to explain in detail, record by record, concert after concert, exactly what Gainsbourg sang.

Moreover, he resituates what Gainsbourg produced in a context that time has since erased. In this way, he returns scrupulously to the hits and misses of a career that took a long time to be accepted and understood by the general public, as much by examining record sales as by analysing the critics in the press. A unique, inexhaustible mine of detailed information, here is Gainsbourg's definitive biography.

Gilles verlant Gainsbourg (Albin Michel) 2001

Bertrand  Dicale