Album review

The Serge Gainsbourg Experience

Touches of Paris and British pop

Paris 

18/01/2011 - 

British-born Brad Scott has swapped his double bass for a microphone to take an energetic, unruly ride through Gainsbourg’s repertoire, aptly entitled, The Serge Gainsbourg Experience ...

Like many other musicians, Brad Scott met Serge Gainsbourg once. They were on a television set and, because they both had to wait around, they got to talking about music – all kinds of music.

Scott studied classical music, dabbled with punk, spent years playing double bass with Arthur H, Alain Bashung and Jacques Higelin, and has been performing in France long enough to have been dubbed the most Francophile of British musicians, although the most British of French musicians might be more accurate.

Put another way, Brad Scott seems to possess an inner current of electricity and after-dark, along with an instinct for insolent splendour and classieux* gestures. His tackling of Gainsbourg’s repertoire is quite naturally undaunted, and coloured with the characteristic poses of a late-night rock star. With The Serge Gainsbourg Experience, Brad Scott has got into the skin of the frontman.

The enthusiastic singer’s voice is suggestive of seventies glam rock (at least the high notes are), and he has partnered up with a talented group dominated by the well-defined guitar sounds of Gul (ex-leader of Guldeboa). Some of Serge’s songs have been translated into English by Boris Bergman, also born in the UK, who has written songs for Bashung among others, and wrote the lyrics to Aphrodite Child’s Rain and Tears.

Approaching Gainsbourg’s work today, almost twenty years after his death, what strikes most is his sheer diversity, and the extraordinary abundance of genres and hues that resume several decades of popular music in France, from the Rive Gauche and jazz to funk and rap, taking in “yé-yé”, pop and reggae.

Yet Scott manages to carry off all of these nuances with a solid sense of fantasy and formidable energy. Contact, Comic Strip, Initials BB and I Just Came to Tell You I’m Going (the English version of Je suis venu te dire que je m’en vais) are accompanied by some powerful guitar work; Ma Lou Marilou takes a Thomas Fersen-style walk through a musical toyshop with the spirit of a horse guard playing kettle drum (and what a lovely voice Celia Scott has!); La Chanson de Prévert is transformed into a lounge bar song, with some furious ukulele-playing and a dance-drunk bash at the accordion. And the single Requiem pour un twister oozes with the mischievous scent of sleazy jazz. This aromatic, joyful disk is a million miles away from the restrained kind of homage all too often served up.

* A term invented by Gainsbourg to define something classy.

The Serge Gainsbourg Experience (La Lune Rousse-Socadisc) 2011.

Bertrand  Dicale

Translation : Anne-Marie  Harper