Back in her native Japan, Shoko Uehara originally made a name for herself dressing up in cow-print pyjamas and bemusing audiences with absurdist lyrics. Then, in 1997, Shoko swapped her pyjamas for a long-haired wolf suit and reinvented herself as "Jon The Dog", singing stories about dogfood and the neighbourhood cats. Shoko's canine concept took off outside Japan, too, when the New York-based musician John Zorn signed her to his avant-garde record label Tzadik.

Invited to perform as part of the Cité de la Musique's Gainsbourg tribute, Jon The Dog was guaranteed to make an impression on the Paris crowd. The audience appeared to be rather suspicious at first when Shoko arrived on stage in her long-haired wolf suit and perched her doggy bottom behind her harmonium. But after a couple of hilarious mispronunciations and an interesting Freudian slip ("Love on the Beat" presented as "Love on Œdipe"), Shoko had the Paris audience lapping up her canine take on Gainsbourg. Her thirty-minute set included a truly funereal rendering of Requiem pour un con (complete with cardboard percussion) and a revolutionary reworking of La Marseillaise on which Shoko's childlike vocals transformed France's militaristic anthem into a sentimental teen pop ballad. In short, Shoko's reworking of Gainsbourg's revered repertoire contained just the right dose of irony and "second degré" to win over French fans. And the normally reserved Parisian crowd went wild when she enhanced her performance of Love on the Beat with a spot of crazy canine choreography.

Giant sushi  

Fellow Japanese avant-gardist Kenzo Saeki claims he had a musical epiphany equivalent to an electric shock when he heard his first Gainsbourg song (69, année érotique) in a café one day. Consequently, Saeki - already a well-known musician in Japan - ended up devoting more than half of Camembert et Sushi (his 2004 cover album of French songs) to "l'homme à la tête de choux." Saeki arrived on stage at the Cité de la Musique rather more soberly dressed than Jon the Dog, wearing head-to-toe black and a giant sushi on his head. Accompanied by his pianist Nanase To, Saeki performed in front of a giant video screen, projecting surreal images of Japanese bikers during his reworking of Harley Davidson. Saeki, who appears to base his stage performances on the principle that 'too much is never enough!', managed to transform the sexy motorbike classic popularized by a leather-shorted Brigitte Bardot into an avant-garde hymn to freedom.

Kenzo Saeki is also a firm believer in audience participation and he insisted on throwing "egg maracas" into the crowd, getting Parisians to shake along to his cover of Couleur Café. But his burlesque performance also included a nod to Gainsbourg's tragic side with a spine-chilling version of Les Goémons. Whilst there can have been few people in the audience who understood a word of his Japanese lyrics, Saeki's performance of this lesser-known Gainsbourg song was actually rather moving - which is, in itself, no mean feat when singing with a maki roll on your head!

The highlight of the avant-garde 'soirée' was when Kenzo Saeki and Jon the Dog joined each other on stage for an encore, performing a surprisingly minimalist version of Sea, sex and sun. If Gainsbourg was watching the show from up on high, he must have been grinning ear to ear with approval!

Ludovic Basque

"Gainsbourg 2008" at the Cité de la Musique, Paris (21 October 2008 - 1 March 2009)