The Claude Mono Blog

Back in 2011 either I completely missed or inexplicably did not buy the ‘Histoire De Melody Nelson SuperDeluxe Edition’ box set – probably much too pricey. A decade later and it has not got any cheaper and is now really hard to find now as I went looking this week as I wanted the ‘extras’ on ‘Les Sessions Melody Nelson’ for a little Gainsbourg mix I am working on. It has a very nice 9+ minute version of ‘Melody’. Anyway, no luck finding a copy I could afford but I found out lots of other interesting things so I did a blog post to share some of it.

With Histoire De Melody Nelson, Serge Gainsbourg composed a French sex god’s teenage symphony

Excerpt from article by Ashley Naftule for AVClub Permanent Records

The skeleton key to understanding how Gainsbourg “elevated song to the level of art” in France is the 1971 concept album Histoire De Melody Nelson.

By the time Gainsbourg started working on Melody Nelson, his career had already gone through several major stylistic shifts. Initially getting his start in the same lush, piano-driven world of ‘chanson’ where other singers like Edith Piaf and Jacques Brel had made their name, Gainsbourg became an in-demand pop songwriter during the ‘ye-ye’ movement—France’s version of America’s girl group craze—penning some of the biggest hits of the era for singers like France Gall and Francoise Hardy. He experimented with African and Latin rhythms on his 1964 album Gainsbourg Percussions, and in 1968 found his “classic” style on Bonnie & Clyde and Initials B.B.: the sleazy maestro waxing pornographic in-between puffs of cigarette smoke, a Gallic Lee Hazlewood to his Nancy Sinatra of the moment. When his duet with partner Jane Birkin, “Je T’aime… Moi Non Plus,” blew up in 1969 and became a worldwide smash, Gainsbourg essentially got carte blanche to do whatever he wanted on his next album. And what he wanted to do was Nabokov.

In the early 60s Gainsbourg had become fascinated with the Russian author’s Lolita and wanted to adapt it, but got beaten to the punch by Stanley Kubrick. “I even asked Nabokov if I could put his words to music but he refused, because they were in the process of making the film of his book,” Gainsbourg said. The idea of writing a song cycle about a creepy, sad man’s objectification of a girl would stay with him, though, and led him to create Melody Nelson.

Who is Melody Nelson?

The lush opening track, “Melody,” immediately drops the listener into the ominous, sensual vibe of the record. Gainsbourg narrates from behind the wheel of a Rolls-Royce, cruising the streets while the bass plucks and resonates with noirish intensity. The orchestra swells and recedes into silence through sudden bursts of volume, flashing out like a needle being threaded in and out of dark cloth. There is so much space and emptiness in the production—the song flows like a series of held and exhaled breaths. As it builds to its climax, with the narrator accidentally (?) hitting the red-headed teenager Melody with his car, the strings erupt like a Bernard Herrmann sting in a Hitchcock film.

Melody is barely fifteen years old. On “Ballade de Melody Nelson”, Gainsbourg sings of her age “quatorze automnes et quinze étés” – fourteen autumns and fifteen summers. Later on “Ah ! Melody” he sings “L’amour tu me sais pas ce que c’est / tu me l’as dit” – you don’t know what love is, you told me yourself. So, Melody is clearly a girl and the narrator’s relationship with her is clearly wrong. Adding to that, it isn’t clear exactly how long the chain of events is on this album. Did he hit her with a car in the morning and they are in a hotel room by the afternoon? It seems like they get to know each other but also there is little detail. (post on Reddit)

Melody

The wings of my Rolls brushed the pylons;

Not knowing where I was, lost,

We arrived, my rolls and I, in a place,

Dangerous and isolated.

There, standing at the edge of the bonnet

Of the Silver Ghost from the nineteen hundreds,

Shines the radiator’s silver Venus

Whose light wings fly forth and forward.

While the bursting noise of the radio

Covers the muted sound of the motor,

Proud and arrogant, she stares at the horizon,

Aimlessly, ignoring the asphalt pavements,

Back alleys, dead-ends with no parking

Allowed; serenely indifferent,

She holds the reins of my twenty-six horse power,

Princess of darkness, cursed archangel,

Modern Amazon whose sculptor

Named you Spirit of Ecstasy;

And there I was, fooling around before losing

Control of the Rolls. Driving slowly as if

Drifting along when a sharp thud

Pulled me out of my hazy dreams. Damn!

I see lying there in front of the car

The wheel of a bicycle still spinning

And like a doll who’s lost its balance,

Her skirt is pulled up on her white pants:

‘What’s your name?’

‘Melody’

‘Melody what?’

‘Melody Nelson’

Melody Nelson has red hair

And it’s her natural colour.

You can also hear the sublime in “Cargo Culte”: As the song heads toward its last minute, Vannier brings in a massed chorus whose voices build in intensity, a heavenly choir that drowns out Serge and bears Melody’s soul up into a heaven he’ll never be allowed entry into. 

WANT MORE…

Melody TV Special – 1971

A 30 minute musical adaptation of the concept album ‘Histoire de Melody Nelson’. It is sprinkled with tracks from the album coupled with psychedelic sets, combining embedded videos and paintings by some of the greatest masters in the art world. A highlight is Jane Birkin gyrating to a wallpaper of psychedelia and surrealism. Watch on Vimeo here.

Photo Shoot: The Story Behind Jane Birkin’s Transformation into Melody Nelson

In ‘Bleu Melody’, the photographer Tony Frank brings together his complete archive of photographs and documents from the 1971 photo shoot for the cover of Histoire de Melody Nelson. The photos have become as iconic as the album itself. Remembering the day he recalled “All I know is Jane will be wearing jeans. So I decide to set up a light blue background while waiting for her to arrive.”

Read the full article in AnOther magazine here

Munkey

Jane Birkin’s toy monkey ‘Munkey’ appears on the cover of Histoire De Melody Nelson”My mother slept with it until Serge’s death, and she put it in his grave with him”

Lou Doillon (Jane Birkin’s daughter by Roger Vadim)

“I’ve been keeping a journal since I was eleven, writing it to my confidante, the stuffed monkey won in a tombola: Munkey. He has slept by my side, shared my life… and been witness to every joy and sadness. Before my children arrived wreaking havoc on my life, I left Munkey in Serge’s arms, in the casket where he lay, like a pharaoh. My monkey, protecting him in the after-life”.

From Jane Birkin’s Munkey Diaries

The Origins of Melody – Lolita, Barbarella, Mondo Cane and others…

“The beauty of culture, for everyone bar the territorial and the delusional, is that it’s an echo chamber and no work can really exist without ancestors and descendants”. 

Around the time of his Percussions album, Gainsbourg attempted to adapt a poem by the narrator of the book Humbert Humbert to music but Stanley Kubrick had already secured the rights for his film. The song intended would eventually become the track ‘Jane B’, written for his future Melody Nelson muse Jane Birkin (an entire album Lolita Go Home would follow in 1975). Gainsbourg would read Humbert’s poem on French television in 1975 and smuggle Lolita into his songs in various guises (the voyeuristic track ‘Pauvre Lola’ for one). It’s most evident in Histoire de Melody Nelson.

Lolita is “a complex novel as much about solipsism, male delusion and the complicity of power as it is about sex. Lolita is manifestly not about Lolita, just as Histoire de Melody Nelson isn’t about Melody Nelson. They are ciphers. The real protagonists are the narrator and the audience. And there is an electricity in the novel’s ambiguities and the extent to which it makes the reader an accomplice, either through empathy or condemnation. You’re never quite sure about Nabokov’s deeper motives. To paraphrase Groucho Marx, ‘He may talk like a pervert, and look like a pervert, but don’t let that fool you: he really is a pervert.’ This would be mirrored in Gainsbourg and Melody Nelson.

Read the full article The Origins of Melody By Darran Anderson at the 333Sound blog here

The Secret World of Serge Gainsbourg

“Carefully avoiding eye contact with the tourists in the street, Charlotte Gainsbourg quickly lets me into the small, graffiti-covered house… where her father, Serge Gainsbourg, lived and, on March 2, 1991, died at the age of 62. For 16 years this house has been shuttered and locked, with only the housekeeper or occasional family member allowed inside. Charlotte, an actress and a huge star in France, is now the owner of the house and wants, with the help of architect Jean Nouvel, to turn it into a museum. For the first time since Serge Gainsbourg’s death, she has agreed to reveal the private world of France’s most beloved and important songwriter”. Read the article here

By Lisa Robinson – Vanity Fair – October 15 2007

Sampling: Initial B.B.

“Gainsbourg had actually pioneered the practice of sampling before there were commercial samplers available; using a snippet of the First Movement of Antonín Dvořák’s “Symphony No. 9 (‘New World’)” for his climatic chorus to “Initial’s B.B.” The best of his descendants have been those who have absorbed and transformed his music into something that at least appears new”.

Darran Anderson Author: Darran Anderson (Serge Gainsbourg’s Histoire de Melody Nelson)

Jarvis Cocker sings ‘Melody’ (with English Lyrics) – Jean-Claude Vannier live London Barbican, 2006

A shaky video of a not entirely perfect performance but well worth watching. As the review by Jonny Trunk for Record Collector nicely put it “A totally unique, blissful mixture of art, nostalgia, music and high-end record nerdism…” and in a little more detail “A one-off sold-out concert of avant garde oddness and Serge Gainsbourg homage was a risk that paid off handsomely for Vannier, who, by the end, was quite overwhelmed. After performing his encores first, Part One involved JCV conducting his experimental opus, L’Enfant Assassin Des Mouches. More like a magician than a conductor, he brought his sonic vision of SFX, children, a choir, strings, jazz and percussion, brilliantly to life. The performance engaged and nigh on overpowered, with Herbie Flowers, ‘Big’ Jim Sullivan and Vic Flick among the original sessioneers reappearing. The BBC Concert orchestra revelled in the weirdness and hanky waving and the Crouch End Festival Chorus took delight in playing teacups and spoons. The SFX man, playing matches, blenders, and walking in a gravel box, stole the show, while the second half was a run-through of Gainsbourg/Vannier’s L’Histoire De Melody Nelson, with guest vocalists, including Jarvis Cocker, Badly Drawn Boy, Mick Harvey and Brigitte Fontaine…”(Reviewed by Jonny Trunk for Record Collector)

 Les Chemins de Katmandou Soundtrack

“The title track, however, signpost the future: alternately swinging, lurching, grooving and brooding, the thunderous drums and fuzzed-out guitars of the former, and the swelling arrangements of the latter, would, in just a couple of years, be married to unbeatable effect on Histoire De Melody Nelson. It’s been a five-decade wait, but it’s been worth it.” (Record Collector)

and this

“I was in Cevennes when my copyist friend’s daughter Dominique Marechal phoned me. She told me that she’d found a little suitcase full of tapes with my name on it,” renowned producer Jean Claude Vannier tells us below, recalling the discovery of his collaborative soundtrack with Serge Gainsbourg for the film Les Chemins de Katmandou.

This very soundtrack, considered the final shard in piecing together the collaborative discography of the composer Jean Claude Vannier and Serge Gainsbourg, was found after nearly 50 years, having been assumed destroyed. Now, Finders Keepers Records, founded by Andy Votel, present the first ever pressing of these master-tapes.

From the article ‘Cult producer Jean Claude Vannier on his recently unearthed Serge Gainsbourg collaborative masterpiece’ – Robyn Cusworth 2017 for Hero

Recommended Reading

Serge Gainsbourg’s Histoire de Melody Nelson

Darran Anderson

“Absolutely awesome…my favorites in the series are when they give an overall history of the artist, or some historical context for the record. This one does both”. Goodreads review

Je t’aime

Veronique Mortaigne

Synonymous with love, eroticism, glamour, music, provocation, their affair would set France aflame as the sixties ebbed, and set in motion many of the ideas we have by now come to think of as specifically ‘French’.

From Publisher Allen and Unwin

“This book has received a lot of not so good reviews saying its just too hard to get into the lyrical very French stream of consciousness writing style – what everyone hated I loved the most – this book also gets quite deep into the dark side of Serge and the strange contradictions in the love shared between Serge and Jane – a great read”

Claude Mono