International pressing. This album brings together artists from the international scene to interpret English adaptations of various songs by Serge Gainsbourg. Features 15 total tracks from the likes of Franz Ferdinand with Jane Birkin, Portishead, Cat Power and Karen Elson, Michael Stipe, Jarvis Cocker & Kid Loco, The Kills, Cat Power with Karen Elson, Tricky, Marc Almond with Trash Palace and more. Universal. 2006.
When a cover album was planned by Jean-Daniel Beauvallet, Christian Fevret and Timothée Verrecchia for the fifteenth anniversary of his last lungful of Gitane smoke, it quickly became obvious that only foreign groups and artists could give new life to a repertoire so ingrained in French culture. Invitations were sent out and the overwhelmingly positive responses returned like boomerangs. Everyone rushes for Gainsbourg, and the cast list speaks for itself – some of the most prominent British and American artists of the last ten years are featured. From Tricky to Franz Ferdinand, from Cat Power to The Rakes, from Placebo to Michael Stipe (REM), from Portishead to Marianne Faithfull, from Jarvis Cocker to The Kills… “Pas dégueu !” (not too rotten), as Gainsbourg would have said. Maintaining the links with the past, some of the best known original singers also agreed to appear: Françoise Hardy, Dani, and above all Jane Birkin!
One last hurdle remained – the language barrier, a risky business with Gainsbourg. An exercise in high precision, poetically and semantically, entrusted to two word-jugglers with a worldwide reputation, Boris Bergman and Paul Ives. Just reading their adaptation of Poinçonneur des Lilas set in a depressing working-class London shows how well the challenge was met. Despite the prestige of the cast and the difficulty of carrying it out, Monsieur Gainsbourg Revisited was above all a project undertaken with humility, lightness and a certain degree of impertinence. This would, no doubt, have pleased the man who, over the thirty glorious years of his career, inspired this very cocktail more than anyone else.
