Serge Gainsbourg (French: [sɛʁʒ(ə) ɡɛ̃zbuʁ] ; born Lucien Ginsburg; 2 April 1928 – 2 March 1991) was a French singer-songwriter, actor, composer, and director. Regarded as one of the most important figures in French pop, he was renowned for often provocative releases which caused uproar in France, dividing public opinion. His artistic output ranged from his early work in jazz, chanson, and yé-yé to later efforts in rock, zouk, funk, reggae, and electronica. Gainsbourg's varied musical style and individuality make him difficult to categorise, although his legacy has been firmly established and he is often regarded as one of the world's most influential popular musicians.
Gainsbourg wrote over 550 songs, which have been covered more than 1,000 times by diverse artists. His lyrical works incorporated wordplay, with humorous, bizarre, provocative, sexual, satirical or subversive overtones. Since his death from a second heart attack in 1991, Gainsbourg's music has reached legendary stature in France. While controversial in his lifetime, he has become one of France's best-loved public figures. He has also gained a cult following across the world with chart success in the United Kingdom and Belgium with "Je t'aime... moi non plus" and "Bonnie and Clyde", respectively.
Serge Gainsbourg was born in Paris on 2 April 1928, in the maternity ward of the Hôtel-Dieu de Paris on the Île de la Cité. He was the son of Russian Jewish émigrés, Joseph and Olga Ginsburg.
Born Brucha Goda Besman (nicknamed Olia/Olga) in Feodosiya in 1894 to a Russian-Jewish family, Serge's mother was a mezzo-soprano singer. Serge's father Joseph was born in Constantinople in the Ottoman Empire of Ukrainian-Jewish descent in 1896. Originally interested in painting, he entered the Petrograd Conservatory and then the Moscow Conservatory to study music, becoming a classically trained pianist. He came to Crimea, where he met and married Olga in 1918. The couple fled Odessa for Paris via Georgia and then Istanbul in the years following the Russian Revolution. The couple arrived in Marseille in 1921, settling in Paris near Olga's brother, who worked for the Louis Dreyfus Bank. Joseph became a piano performer at bars, casinos, and cabarets, while Olga sang at the Conservatoire Rachmaninoff.
Serge and his twin sister Liliane had an elder brother Marcel, born in 1922, who died at sixteen months of pneumonia. They also had an older sister Jacqueline, born in 1926.
The family lived in the working-class districts of Paris, first at 35 Rue de la Chine in the 20th arrondissement, and then at 11 Rue Chaptal in the 9th arrondissement. They obtained French nationality in 1932. Joseph taught Serge and Liliane to play the piano. At age 12, Serge enrolled at the École Normale de Musique de Paris.
Gainsbourg's childhood was profoundly affected by the occupation of France by Germany during World War II. The identifying yellow star that Jews were required to wear haunted Gainsbourg; in later years he was able to transmute this memory into creative inspiration. Early in the summer of 1941, the family temporarily sought refuge in the commune of Courgenard in the Sarthe department, at a place called "La Bassetière," with Baptiste and Irma Dumur.
During the occupation, as artistic professions were forbidden to Jews, his pianist father crossed to Limoges in 1942. At the time, Limoges was part of zone libre, an area of France governed by the Vichy regime that was not occupied by Germany, but it became unsafe for Jews after Germany eventually occupied the area in 1942. As police raids became more frequent, in January 1944, the rest of the family joined him, using forged documents. The family took refuge in the town of Grand Vedeix in the commune of Saint Cyr in the Haute-Vienne department, using the name Guimbard. Jacqueline and Liliane were hidden with the nuns of the Sacré-Cœur school in Limoges and Lucien (Serge) in a public college, in Saint-Léonard-de-Noblat. He remained a boarder there for six months under his false identity. One evening, the Gestapo raided the establishment to check that no Jewish children were hiding there. Warned, the boarding school officials sent him to hide alone in the forest, equipped with an axe to defend himself, where he spent the entire night in fear of being caught and killed.
After the liberation of Paris, the family returned, living at 55 Avenue Bugeaud in the 16th arrondissement. Serge attended Lycée Condorcet in Paris, but dropped out before completing his Baccalauréat. In 1945, Gainsbourg's father enrolled him in Beaux-Arts de Paris, a prestigious art school. Serge later transferred to the Académie de Montmartre, where his professors included the likes of André Lhote and Fernand Léger. There, Gainsbourg met his first wife, Elisabeth "Lize" Levitsky, the daughter of Russian aristocrats and a part-time model. Serge and Lize were married on November 3, 1951, and the marriage ended in divorce in 1957.
In 1948, Serge was conscripted by the military for twelve months of service in Courbevoie. He never saw action, spending his time playing dirty songs on guitar, visiting prostitutes, and drinking. Serge later claimed that the military service turned him into an alcoholic. Gainsbourg obtained work teaching music and painting at a school in Le Mesnil-le-Roi, just outside of Paris. The school was founded under the auspices of local rabbis to serve the orphaned children of murdered deportees. Here, Gainsbourg heard accounts of Nazi Germany's acts of persecution and genocide, and these stories inspired his songwriting several decades later.
1957–1963: Early work as a pianist and chanson singer
Gainsbourg was disillusioned with his school painting gig and instead moved on to working odd jobs playing the piano in bars, usually as a stand-in for his father. He soon became the venue pianist at the drag cabaret club Madame Arthur. Whilst filling in a form to join the songwriting society SACEM, Gainsbourg decided to change his first name to Serge. According to his future partner Jane Birkin, "Lucien reminded him of a hairdresser's assistant." He chose Gainsbourg as his last name, an homage to the English painter Thomas Gainsborough, whom he admired.
Gainsbourg had a revelation when he saw Boris Vian performing at the Milord l'Arsouille club, whose provocative and humorous songs would influence Serge's own compositions. At the Milord l'Arsouille, Gainsbourg accompanied singer and club star Michèle Arnaud on the guitar. In 1957, Arnaud and the club's director Francis Claude discovered Gainsbourg's compositions while visiting his home to see his paintings. The next day, Claude urged Gainsbourg to perform on stage on his own. Despite his stage fright, Gainsbourg performed his own repertoire, including "Le Poinçonneur des Lilas," which describes a day in the life of a Paris Métro ticket man, whose job is to validate passenger tickets by stamping holes in them. In the song, the job is described as so monotonous, that the ticket man eventually thinks of putting a hole through his head and being buried in another hole. After the debut, Serge was given a steady performance segment at the club, where he was eventually spotted by talent agent Jacques Canetti, who helped advance Gainsbourg's career with a regular performance segment at the Théâtre des Trois Baudets, as well as by touring. In 1958, Arnaud began recording several interpretations of Gainsbourg's songs.
His debut album, Du chant à la une !... (1958), was recorded in the summer of 1958, backed by arranger Alain Goraguer and his orchestra, beginning a fruitful collaboration. It was released in September, becoming a commercial and critical failure, despite winning the grand prize at L'Academie Charles Cross and the praise of Boris Vian, who compared him to Cole Porter. His next album, N° 2 (1959), suffered a similar fate. He made his film debut in 1959 with a supporting role in the French-Italian co-production Come Dance with Me, starring his future lover Brigitte Bardot. In the following year, he featured as a Roman officer in the Italian sword-and-sandals epic-film The Revolt of the Slaves. He would continue playing "nasty characters" in similar productions, including Samson (1961) and The Fury of Hercules (1962). Gainsbourg's first commercial success came in 1960 with his single "L'Eau à la bouche", the title song from the film of the same name, for which he had composed the score. L'Étonnant Serge Gainsbourg (1961), his third LP, included what would become one of his best known songs from this period, "La Chanson de Prévert", which lifted lyrics from the Jacques Prévert poem "Les feuilles mortes". After a night of drinking champagne and dancing with singer Juliette Gréco, Gainsbourg went home and wrote "La Javanaise" for her. They would both release versions of the song in 1962, but it is Gainsbourg's rendition that has endured. His fourth album, Serge Gainsbourg N° 4 was released in 1962, incorporating Latin and rock and roll influences whilst his next, Gainsbourg Confidentiel (1963), featured a more minimalistic jazz approach, accompanied only by a double bass and electric guitar.