Homage to a Gallic symbol

Over here, Serge Gainsbourg was known for a rude pop song. In France, he was a new Baudelaire, as Sylvie Simmons tells in her new biography

Serge Gainsbourg: A Fistful of Gitanes
Sylvie Simmons
Helter Skelter £12, pp224

In France, the day of Serge Gainsbourg's death in 1991 was a national shock almost on a par with the death of Princess Diana or JFK's assassination. The media were flooded with gushing eulogies, flags were flown at half-mast and barricades were put up outside his house to control the crowds who gathered there. President Mitterand delivered a speech mourning the loss of 'our Baudelaire, our Apollinaire'. The rest of the world, meanwhile, looked on in bemusement.

To most people outside France, Gainsbourg is a familiar but rather hazy figure. Although some tales of his dissipated lifestyle - his alcoholic debauches, sexual liaisons and lifelong devotion to Gitanes - have filtered back to the shores of the English-speaking world, Gainsbourg's enormous body of work remains largely unknown.

On this side of the Channel, he is remembered for 'Je T'Aime, Moi Non Plus', his raunchy 1969 duet with Jane Birkin, and little else. At the time of its release, 'Je T'Aime' was a huge succès de scandale. With its provocative orgasmic groans, it was Gainsbourg's only international hit in a career spanning more than 30 years, 25 albums, numerous original soundtracks and hundreds of songs written for other singers. After being banned by the BBC, it went on to become the first foreign-language single to reach number one in the charts. In Rome, it was deemed obscene by the Vatican, and landed the head of Phonogram's Italian division in jail. Over in the US, it peaked, rather appropriately, at number 69.

Propelled by its inbuilt shock value, 'Je T'Aime' gave Gainsbourg a taste for the inestimable powers of bad publicity which he was later to explore to the full. The song had another major thing going for it - you didn't have to be French to understand it. Whereas most of Gainsbourg's wordplay was lost on non-French speakers, the premise behind 'Je T'Aime' was pretty clear (with lines like 'Je vais, je vais et je viens/ Entre tes reins', it wasn't hard to imagine what was going on). Gainsbourg was speaking the universal language of sex.

Language barriers are one major reason why we're baffled by Gainsbourg over here. Another is the lack of Anglo-Saxon equivalents. Critics have drawn comparisons with Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Frank Sinatra and Tom Waits, but none of these reference points seems particularly apt. Matters are made trickier by Gainsbourg's artistic promiscuity. Over the years, he was an actor, director, artist, singer, composer and novelist. His albums borrow from rock, jazz, French chanson, classical, reggae, disco and rap.

In this biography, only the second English-language account of Gainsbourg's life, Sylvie Simmons somehow manages to touch on all the various facets of his career without drifting out of focus. She follows him from his early years, wearing the yellow star during the Second World War, to his initiation in music as a bar pianist and first record deal at the age of 30. She delves into the bizarre nuances of his lyrics - 'mind-bending exercises in French triple entendres and rhythmic, onomatopoeic word-percussion' - as well as interviewing his lovers.

Simmons is best, though, at investigating the seemingly endless contradictions of her subject. Gainsbourg begins to emerge as one vast paradox: a rock'n'roll poet who would write a song about Chatterton one day and the next pen a novel dwelling on scatology; an intensely shy man who thrived on publicity; a dishevelled-looking drunk who was relentlessly prolific.

The older he became, the more Gainsbourg seems to have delighted in his adopted role as a cultural enfant terrible. He upset right wingers by adapting 'La Marseillaise' to a reggae tune, infuriated socialists by burning a 500-franc note on TV, and unnerved everyone by appearing in the video for his song 'Lemon Incest' on a bed with his 13-year-old daughter, Charlotte.

No matter how offensive his transgressions, though, Gainsbourg still remained a presidentially endorsed national treasure. In a life filled with strange inconsistencies, perhaps that's the greatest paradox of all.