Me and Serge Gainsbourg

Although I am in only the very early stages of filing an application to become a French national (that is, I’m looking at forms and saying to myself  “Why on Earth do they want to know that ?” ) I am a little concerned that I might flunk on being insufficiently adoring of Approved French Culture.

True, I am curiously enamoured of Claude François. Who, I am happy to clarify here and now, once and for all, was NOT murdered by the Brothers Gibb in that extraordinarily unlikely “dodgy electric light – bath full of water” scenario. That was clearly an accident in which they played no part whatsoever, no matter how otherwise convincing the circumstantial evidence might appear.

Can loving Claude the Crooner be enough?

Of course, I am also a huge fan of Asterix the Gaul. I even find Edith Piaf rather fine.

But Serge Gainsbourg ? Here I struggle.

For a start I don’t think I like any of his music, which to me appears to have all the lyrical and tonal merit of a shovel full of gravel being passed through a tumble drier. It must be admitted that he did write “Elisa” which, of course, went on to provide the music for the children’s classic “Bananas in Pyjamas,” but as for the rest of his output…

Serge was also (and this is a purely personal view) a foul-mouthed, philandering, misogynistic, drunk. Towards the end of his life he made frequent “tired & emotional” appearances on TV chat shows where he would importune female guests (most memorably, perhaps, Whitney Houston) or haul violent abuse at them if they failed to meet up to his measure of the feminine ideal.

My Dear Wife says that this is probably why SG appeals to the higher end of the French social scale: he’s lot like some of the nation’s more heavyweight philosophers.

Whatever, he is still a big cheese here. The month we’re even being treated to a new film about the man “Serge Gainsbourg: An Heroic Life” which gives some clue as to the regard in which the man is held almost 20 years after his death.

I’ve not yet found any section on the nationality forms asking me to rank Serge on a scale ranging from “inspirational” to “I’d become a woman just in order to sleep with him” so I can only assume it must be part of the oral examination.