With his sledgehammer wit and uncompromising songwriting, Serge Gainsbourg was revered in France as the Gallic Bob Dylan — an untouchable and utterly unique subversive genius and cultural deity. But by an infamous appearance with Whitney Houston on a live television show, the crumbling icon was little more than a raging, foul mouthed alcoholic. This is the story.
The 1980s was a decade that proved a tricky transition to navigate for some of popular culture’s most enduring talents — Bowie, Cohen, Dylan, Elton et al. And over in France, the celebrated national icon Serge Gainsbourg wasn’t having a great time of it wither.
Jane Birkin, Gainsbourg’s lover, muse, and companion of 13 years, had recently left him for director Jacques Doillon, leaving the singer-songwriter in an increasing state of alcoholic social disarray, which would continue throughout the decade.
Bittersweet memories, as someone sang.
Birkin’s departure would forever change Gainsbourg, and he crafted his alcoholic alter-ego Gainsbarre as a sort of dissolute defence mechanism against criticism of his increasingly erratic, misogynistic public behaviour on television chat shows and the like.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lxSKzEQkcP8Every telly producer who invited him on to talk knew he was a dab hand at controversy, of course. This was the man who dressed in drag on the cover of Love On The Beat, his penultimate 1984 album best known for Lemon Incest, a highly uproarious duet with his daughter Charlotte Gainsbourg, and which seemed to ambiguously refer to the impossible physical love between an adult and his offspring.
With his fondness for punning absurdities, biting wit, and dizzying, often humorous carnage, barely an interview had started before he’d brood and start causing mayhem wherever he deemed appropriate.
To name just three: he’d illegally set fire to French currency, as a protest against rising taxes; and in 1986 called Les Rita Mitsouko’s singer Catherine Ringer a “filthy fucking whore”.
Ringer, who had enjoyed a previous career as an adult film star, gave back as good as she got. “Look at you, you’re just a bitter old alcoholic,” she scolded back. “I used to admire you but these days you’ve become a disgusting old parasite.”
Touché.
Finally, someone in France had the temerity to challenge the country’s crumbling deity in public. Oh, and it was great television. And this was even better.
Most notoriously, during an earlier appearance that April on Michel Drucker’s Saturday night live flagship show Champs-Élysées, the chain-smoking old alcoholic told the shiny and new Whitney Houston, in barely coherent creep mode English, that he “want[ed] to fuck her.”
”What?!!! What did you say?”
The look on her face is priceless. This is the black but closeted, commercially whitened superstar who‘d just performed one of her schmaltzy ballads (Saving All My Love For You); a carefully contrived construct so poised, polished and patrician that she could deflect the most vulgar attention from even the most sleazily powerful men.
Well, usually.
No one comes out looking good: neither the haughty, flustered Houston, not the slobbering, sordid ‘Gainsbarre’. Meanwhile, the French host looks on impotently as though a rhinoceros had just stampeded into the studio.
Like some sort of epiphany, it’s almost as if this ageing libidinous lothario with a face like a gargoyle, 35 years Houston’s senior, really believed he could be the man to break the seal on that cat box. Ultimately, it would take another six years before she finally let Bobby Brown fill her with dishonour.
Oh, je t’aime.
Steve Pafford
