Serge Gainsbourg pretended to be an alcoholic: Jean-Claude Vannier and a masterpiece with a depraved legend

By: Alexis Petridis / The Guardian
Translation: Telegrafi.com

Ask an interior designer to create a bohemian apartment in Paris and he’s likely to end up with something that looks a lot like Jean-Claude Vannier’s: books everywhere, an old Bauhaus-style chair, art on every corner of the wall. You’d say the living room is dominated by his grand piano, but your eye keeps drifting to the myriad of toy pianos placed above and around it. On closer inspection, there are also toy pianos on shelves, tucked in between the books. “I have more in other rooms,” says Vannieri, speaking through a translator. “I also have a house in the countryside that’s full of them. I take them with me to concerts and play a note every now and then. I think they add something to a live performance filled with virtuosos. I also have a specially tuned guitar that I kick with my foot and it makes a big boom.”

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Breaking up an orchestral performance by playing a toy piano or strumming a guitar seems typical of him: Vannieri, now in his eighties, has been a defiant presence in French pop music for 60 years. His latest project is rather odd: a song cycle performed by a large mandolin orchestra, accompanied by a story written by Vannieri himself, involving a failed romance, alcoholism, homelessness and murder.

“All great love stories are sad,” he says. “Because if people live happily ever after and have lots of kids, there’s not much left to tell.” Indeed, it’s less strange than the story that Vannier’s most famous collaborator, Serge Gainsbourg, created for his 1972 album, The Child Killer of the Flies [The child who killed flies]. It depicts a little boy torturing a fly before being covered and suffocated by a horde of insects.

If the project Jean-Claude Vannier et Son Orchester de Mandolines [Jean-Claude Vannieri and his mandolin orchestra] seems like an unusual departure, no stranger than his 2019 album, Corpse Flower [Corpse floweres], a collaboration with Faith No More vocalist Mike Patton (a big fan of Vannier, who is releasing the mandolin album on his own label, Ipecac), an album that featured songs about desperate monkeys and the dangers of losing bowel control when drunk. Equally strange was Vannier's own career as a singer-songwriter in the 70s, which began because, according to him, no one else wanted to sing his songs inspired by French chansons.

This has nothing to do with the quality of his albums, but it's easy to see why: Vannier's idea for a hit song was titled Hello, Spring is here. [Shit happened, spring came]. “I didn’t mean to shock anyone,” he says. “I just wanted to talk about what I saw around me. I had a song called My Beau Travelo [My beautiful transvestite]. I was making music for a ballet, with Roland Petit. After the show, he would take me to the alleys behind the old Paris Opera. There were a lot of transvestites there. We would watch them and that inspired me to write the song. It was very controversial at the time, and nobody wanted to sing it, but it wasn't shocking. It was just what I wanted to express."

However, Vannier’s reputation rests largely on his work as an orchestrator and soundtrack composer. DJ and composer of scores for a number of Steven Soderbergh films, David Holmes, has called Vannier “the greatest soundtrack composer of all of us, a true genius.” Vannier has worked with everyone from singer Françoise Hardy to literary provocateur Michel Houellebecq. He even wrote and recorded songs with the latter, prompting Houellebecq to take singing lessons to improve his voice.

The mention of Houellebecq's name provokes irritation in Vannier: "It's true that I worked with him, but he is someone who will never be my friend. I met one of his publishers in an antique shop near here, and he said to me: 'Houellebecq is worse than a gangster'! He has a terrible reputation, so I would never associate with him. But I am a great admirer of his writings."

For all of these artists, Vannieri has created extremely innovative orchestrations, occasionally touching on atonality and often bearing influences from Middle Eastern music – a result, he says, of his disastrous first job as an engineer in a Parisian studio.

“I started with the jeje singers [the yé-yé pop music style], young girls and boys, and I made a lot of mistakes. So they assigned me to record accordionists, who at the time were seen as very vulgar: their music was for Saturday night dances, which often turned violent. They didn’t have a good reputation. I made a mistake again, because I wasn’t particularly interested in this music, so they assigned me to record Arab musicians. This was during the Algerian war: there was a lot of fear and hatred of Arabs; they weren’t welcome at all in France. But I loved their music and I was happy to work with them.”

But it is Gainsbourg who remains his most famous collaborator. Vannieri worked with him on acclaimed soundtracks for films Cannabis [Cannabis], The Horse [The merciless] and The Paths of Kathmandu [Paths of Kathmandu], as well as – above all – on the 1971 album, Melody Nelson's Story [The Story of Melody Nelson]. A commercial failure at first, this album is now considered not only Gainsbourg's masterpiece, but also one of the greatest French-language albums in pop history.

The album's belated rediscovery through the use of samples and by musicians in the 90s also seems to have prompted a broader shift in the traditionally snobbish and dismissive attitude of English speakers towards French pop: if something so extraordinary had gone unnoticed, what else could French musicians have produced?

“I think you’re right,” says Vannieri. “When I started getting emails from young people in Britain, raving about how amazing this album was, I thought they were making fun of me – I know the British are very sarcastic. But then, the magazine Mojo "They called my daughter, saying they wanted to do a long article about me. I was surprised. I think they just hadn't had access to these albums before. They welcomed me with open arms and more than that. That's when I realized I had influenced a lot of people."

This is true. The echoes of the dramatic orchestrations of Nelson's Melody can be heard everywhere, from [album] Be Change [The transformation] from [singer] Beck to [album] Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino [Hotel and casino, "Rest base"] by Arctic Monkeys, and they have been sampled by artists ranging from Portishead to De La Soul. In recent years, Vannieri has conducted major, star-studded music concerts in London, Paris and Los Angeles.

However, his relationship with Melody Nelson is complicated. Vannieri says he wrote most of the music – “Sometimes Gainsbourg would come to me with a melody, but more and more often he would come without anything and leave me free” – but Gainsbourg refused to give him credit. They remained friends until the French singer’s death in 1991, but Vannieri seems to have found Gainsbourg’s proclivity for provocations annoying.

“He pretended to be a troublemaker,” he says, “because it was financially profitable. In fact, he wasn’t interested in politics, philosophy, or psychology—he just followed what his press and public relations people suggested. Before television appearances, he would run his hands through his hair to make himself look more disheveled. At first, he actually pretended to be an alcoholic when he wasn’t—trying to deliberately shock his audience. By the end of his career, he was really an alcoholic, but at first it was just a pose.”

Melody Nelson There was another delayed effect. While working for a French record company, British DJ, producer and “Gainsbourg obsessive” Andy Votel heard “weird rumors in the record shops in Paris” about “a follow-up album by Nelson's Melody” which was never published. Some of these rumors were quite exaggerated: it was said to be based on [the work] Lord of the Flies [Lord of the Flies], that it had a cover that was banned for erotic content and was censored.

In the end it was understood that it was about The child who killed flies"The producer of this album was working with a singer named Mike Brant, a very kitsch artist who was very famous in the 70s – although Eminem later used elements of the orchestrations I had created for him." This happened on the song Crack a Bottle [Break the bottle] in 2009. “I had created some hits with this singer, so, to thank me, his producer told me he would make an album with me, where I could do whatever I wanted. It was extremely expensive to make. I don't think anyone today would invest that much money on such a strange project.”

The result was stunning but deeply strange: a mix of funk, free jazz, hard rock, musique concrète, and grand orchestrations. The record company was horrified and refused to make more than a few copies. If Vannieri was surprised by the belated interest in Nelson's Melody, had no words for his surprise when Votel contacted him to relaunch The child who killed flies, which happened in 2005 and was met with great acclaim.

It has been an extraordinary career. At 82, Vannieri says he “doesn’t work much” these days, but he doesn’t seem to be slowing down, with a new soundtrack coming soon. Perhaps he can’t stop. “When you love music,” he says, “there’s nothing that can stop you from making your own music. My parents were devout Protestants. They hated artists. There was no way I could have pursued a career in music. But as soon as I turned 18, I had the right to do so. When your true passion is music, it’s like a wave that nothing can stop.” /Telegraph/