Serge Gainsbourg, the singer-songwriter-Pygmalion-actor-filmmaker-author-entertainer-agitator-gambler-lady’s man, a man whose many facets reflect in each other to form one of the most dazzling prisms in twentieth-century French culture, and whose sparkle now spreads well beyond both France and the century. A few years ago both the superstar Madonna and the underground prophet John Zorn declared their admiration for Gainsbourg – separately, but with the same zeal. The English group Portishead lifted the heady atmosphere of Cargo culte from the Melody Nelson album for their stunning remix of Massive Attack’s Karmacoma. De La Soul sampled Gainsbourg, Beck borrowed wholesale (Paper tiger), and countless artists cover his songs. In France and worldwide (from Air to Sonic Youth) artists by the dozens claim him as an influence. Most are flabbergasted when they realise that at the beginning, he was the heir and soon-to-be conspirator of the Left Bank cabarets and the cellars of Saint-Germain, mixing Baudelairean poetry and oblique jazz under the influence of Boris Vian, coloured with exotic essences from lounge music. Again, when they discover he became the transformer of the pop movement, turning young Londoners’ heads, handing out songs to girls like sugar-and-spice pills. Or once more, when they come across the film soundtracks, mirroring some of his intensely cinematographic albums, such as Initials BB or Melody, not to mention when he parachuted into Jamaica at the time of the reggae version of La Marseillaise, or into New York USA under the blows of digital funk. For Gainsbourg is the classical and the modern combined in one man – ultra-classical and ultra-modern, able to absorb, Bowie-like, all that is avant-garde and bring it into the light, or to wrap up slang in the words of the great French orator, Bossuet.

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 – 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. 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.