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It was a mixtape made by a Frenchman and handed to Mick Harvey in reunified Berlin that first alerted him to the oeuvre of Serge Gainsbourg.
Like the rest of us, he’d heard ‘Je T’aime (Moi Non Plus)’, but the variety and depth of Gainsbourg’s genius took him aback – so much so that he set about fastidiously translating the lyrics into English and disseminating the chansons to the anglophone world with a missionary zeal.
The scope of the project he undertook was breathtaking, not to mention the attention to detail: string arrangements were lovingly rephrased but with broadly the same intentions, Anita Lane stepped into the breach as Jane Birkin…The Australian guitarist covered so much, from the well-thumbed ‘Bonnie & Clyde’ to the doggedly obscure ‘Quand Mon 6.35 Me Fait Les Yeux Doux’ (Harvey’s version is called ‘The Barrel Of My 45’) that you wonder if Mick did much else with his time during the mid-90s that didn’t involve immersing himself in all things Gainsbourg.
Between ‘95, when Intoxicated Man came out, and ‘97 when Pink Elephants dropped, Harvey covered 33 songs and wrote one (the title track of the latter with Bertrand Burgalat) and attempted a whole lot more besides that never quite made the cut. One wonders where he found the time.
“I’d left Crime And The City Solution,” he explains via a phone line from his hotel in Dortmund. “That broke up and I found I had a surprising amount of time on my hands. [Nick Cave And] The Bad Seeds took up a lot of time but there were still big openings for me to do the albums. So that’s what I did with the time.” Harvey is back in Germany with his band Ministry of Wolves playing nightly for a production of Republik Der Wölfe at the Dortmund Theatre. It’ll be no surprise to most to find that Mick has not been putting his feet up since leaving the Bad Seeds in 2011.
Intoxicated Man came out in 1995. Are you ever surprised when records you made are nearly 20 years old, or 30 years old for that matter…
The passage of time always surprises people, especially when you’re busy and you’re not really watching it go by. It’s probably more surprising that the Birthday Party stuff is over 30 years old; that feels very strange to me. Maybe you become a bit more aware of the way time passes.
Do you think English markets are more receptive to Gainsbourg and ‘foreign’ music in general now?
I wouldn’t really have any insight into that I’m afraid. I think in the last 20 years they’ve become a lot more familiar with Gainsbourg’s work and I suppose that’s partly due to my offerings, but broadly speaking I really wouldn’t know about that. I live in Australia and don’t spend a lot of time in England, but I don’t think the Australians are more receptive, no.
How did you come across Serge yourself?
Well, he’s a very well known figure. He’d had a couple of notorious hits, ‘Je T’aime (Moi Non Plus)’ and what have you. I was living in Berlin and I had a French friend who made me a compilation tape of his best stuff, and that’s what really opened it up for me I guess. I think I thanked Olivier [Picot] on the record. That’s what the old mixtape used to do, you’d come across all sorts of unexpected things!
Do you speak French?
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Pretty badly. I kind of do, I’ve realised, but I really can’t understand what they’re saying back to me so it’s pretty useless. If I have to sit there and explain something I can do it quite efficiently actually, but once they start talking back I’m lost. The French talk far too quickly. On the other hand, I’m fluent in German.
You say in the liner notes that you make “no excuses” should any of Serge’s double and sometimes triple entendres get lost in translation.
Yes. I mean, they’re incredibly complex at times, but I think I attempt to stay true to what’s in the lyrics. I made stringent efforts and had a more strict policy and approach than most translators would ever take. In my experience they’re often quite willing to dispense with something, and I really wasn’t willing to do that. So if occasionally – my disclaimer in the liner notes – if something’s been missed here or there then it wasn’t because I wasn’t trying really hard. I’m not going to apologise for that. I did my utmost to do them justice and I don’t think you can do any more than that.
From what I can gather you did a good job.
Yes, I think so too for the most part. There are a lot of songs that were left by the wayside that were sort of dropped in the “too hard” basket. In fact, I was surprised with how many I was pleased with the translations of. I would say I was very respectful in that department.
Is it easier to do a lesser known composition like ‘Sex Shop’ than it is doing a well known number like ‘Bonnie & Clyde’?
It depends. There’s a real oddity with ‘Bonnie & Clyde’ in that he based the lyrics on a letter Bonnie Parker wrote to the newspapers, so he actually based it on an original English text. So in many ways I felt quite at liberty to change back anything used in the original text where that song was concerned. That was just a case of checking Bonnie’s letter. There’s a version of Serge reading her letter over the music which is pretty hilarious actually. You should give that a listen, it’s pretty strange. He obviously doesn’t have a very good grasp of English (laughs).
His English was meant to be appalling.
I think probably proudly so. I’m sure he didn’t care.
He was quite an Anglophile mind you…
Yeah absolutely, but I think he stopped short of the language. I’m sure he didn’t feel any obligation speaking the language. He had an English speaking partner for the most part, so he could just let her do it.
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