A Song “From the New World”: Recording Serge Gainsbourg at the time of Swinging London
Résumé
By the mid-1960s, Serge Gainsbourg’s career as a professional songwriter was finally beginning to take off following his collaboration with France Gall (who’d won the Grand Prize at the 1965 Eurovision song contest with “Poupée de Cire, Poupée de Son”), and another two-year collaboration with French icon Brigitte Bardot. Yet, as a performer, he was still a rather obscure artist. As early as 1963, he’d felt a new wave originating in Britain was about to take the world by storm; determined to give his career a new turn, he returned to London in the spring of 1968 to cut four tracks, whose recording was documented by Yves Fefebvre in a short film. This presentation analyzes what the film tells us about this key moment in the career of a Left Bank singer-songwriter embracing the so-called “rock revolution.”