A Serge Gainsbourg Essential, Remixed & Ruined
Poussin’s new remix of ‘L’Homme à tête de chou’ is an absolute disaster
In 2023, Serge Gainsbourg is possibly more controversial than he’s been since his 1991 death from a second heart attack at age 62. The upcoming museum opening of the artist’s Paris home, at 5 bis rue de Verneuil, sparked more than a few debates: can we still listen to the album about pedophilia made by a 42-year-old man with appearances by his 24-year-old girlfriend? Is it alright that he made a song with his then-12-year-old daughter about incest? Does anyone even need his “problematic” art anymore?
Those Twitter-grade culture war arguments completely ignore that that’s exactly the point; Gainsbourg was a great provocateur and a true artist, whose work therefore doesn’t survive our media-illiterate social media era unscathed. And no, he was not an incestuous pedophile, rather a shy, guarded man whose provocative public persona was merely a protective layer. To address the aforementioned examples, his 1971 album Histoire de Melody Nelson is meant to be creepy and self-aware of it, and the 1984 single “Lemon Incest” featuring his daughter Charlotte is literally about “the love that we will never make.” Serge might now be more repulsive to listeners in the Anglosphere, and maybe a bit more questioned in his native France, but he’s still rightly adored by the French masses (and anyone else willing to approach his nuanced work with context), his music repackaged multiple times a year and tributes scrawled all over his house. Now, his 1976 classic L’Homme à tête de chou gets a lavish deluxe reissue—expanded, remixed, and ruined.
Gainsbourg released his first 10” album in 1958, but the necessary background here starts with the 1969 single “Je t’aime… moi non plus” (“I Love You… Me Neither”), a duet with his longtime girlfriend Jane Birkin. She was 22, he was 40 (both legal adults, obviously, though try convincing those culture war mongers of that these days). By then Gainsbourg’s latest successful song and public controversy, “Je t’aime”’s four minutes infamously concluded with Birkin’s explicit moaning. Banned and denounced by institutions ranging from the BBC to the Vatican, it became a worldwide hit and gave Gainsbourg more creative freedom. He soon conceived his 1971 magnum opus Histoire de Melody Nelson ("Story of Melody Nelson"), a short, Lolita-inspired concept album about a middle-aged narrator who runs over a 14-year-old girl and has an affair with her until she dies in a plane crash. Melody Nelson juxtaposed a tight but energetic rock trio with dramatic orchestral arrangements, and is to France what Pet Sounds is to America or Sgt. Pepper to Britain: the moment that the pop album became high art. Its influence is easily traceable: Melody Nelson presaged trip hop’s sinister atmospheres and slower funk grooves by two decades, and where else did Jarvis Cocker get his whispery pervert thing from? Gainsbourg followed that with two more albums—Vu de L’exterieur (“Seen From The Outside”), a record mostly about shitting and farting made after his first heart attack at age 45, and Rock Around The Bunker, a rock ’n’ roll LP mocking the Nazis that occupied Paris while Gainsbourg, a Russian Jew born as Lucien Ginsburg, was a child.
That brings us to his 1976 release L’Homme à tête de chou (“The Man With A Cabbage Head,” or “The Cabbage-Headed Man”), another concept album. Like Melody Nelson, it’s about a middle-aged narrator who falls in love with a much younger woman. Unlike Melody Nelson, the narrator murders the girl, Marilou, after finding her in bed with rock stars. The narrator then loses his mind, ends up in a mental asylum, and believes that he has a head made of cabbage. The inspiration? A Claude Lalanne statue in Gainsbourg’s yard that appears on the album cover. You don’t need to understand French to sense and appreciate Gainsbourg’s wordplay, and Alan Hawkshaw’s musical arrangements provide an exquisite background to the artist’s speak-crooning (Hawkshaw did a lot of the KPM library music). It’s supposed to be background; many of Gainsbourg’s characters are in their heads, daydreaming, lost in their memories…
…Which is why the original mix works so well, with his voice very far forward and everything else in the back, wistful ARP Odyssey flourishes occasionally popping out. Those synth bits could’ve been a mere '70s novelty, but they serve the record’s atmosphere and narrative. The recording—done on 24-track tape in London—is bone dry, but the snare drum has a nice crack to it and everything’s well-arranged with good textural contrast. I played an early French repress in the Pure Audio Project room at last year’s Pacific Audio Fest, and the handful of us there all agreed that it’s a good sounding record. I also have Miles Showell’s half-speed cut from the recent 9LP Intégrale Des Enregistrements Studio, Volume 2: 1971-1987 box set. About that set, Showell told me:
“The master tapes all reside in the Universal vault in Paris, they will never leave Paris. I was sent archived high resolution flat transfers of the masters (all were 96kHz/24bit except for You’re Under Arrest which was mixed to 44.1kHz/16bit DAT).
"It was particularly challenging series of albums to cut as Serge smoked five packs of unfiltered Gitanes a day and drank plenty of wine too. As a result, his voice was pretty raspy and bright sounding and this is very prone to sibilance and distortion on vinyl playback. There were also a lot of mouth ticks and pops in the recordings because he was a fan of close miking. Because I cannot do any on-the-fly de-essing when cutting at half-speed, these tracks took a lot of line-by-line preparation… The most arduous track took over an hour to prepare and this was a 2:56 song!”
The old French Phillips pressings, all essentially the same as the originals, have more sibilance than the half-speed reissues, but it’s cleaner sibilance. For some reason, the 96/24 transfers of Gainsbourg’s discography render the sibilance choppy, where everything disintegrates when he hits those “sss” sounds. Showell’s half-speed cut of L’Homme à tête de chou (only available in the box set) lacks the original’s transparency but is the best that can be done with a digital file. There’s more bass and the overall presentation is thicker, but it gets you about 85% of the way there and is surely better than the other digitally sourced pressings. Still, make sure you have an earlier pressing if you only have the half-speed box.
L’Homme à tête de chou didn't need a remix, but it hadn’t yet received the lavish deluxe treatment like Histoire de Melody Nelson and Vu de L’exterieur have. Universal Music France fixed that with several configurations of this remix set: a 2CD+Blu-ray set with Poussin’s new stereo and Atmos mixes plus instrumental tracks and alternate vocal takes; a 2LP set with almost all of the same material; standard CD and LP packages with the album remix; and a picture disc LP of the remix.
The 2LP set is expensive—€42 at French retailer Fnac, £40 from Juno in England, and if you’re also in America, it’s an import costing $55-60 (I ordered mine from Juno with some other records to reduce shipping costs). However, the package feels lavish, with a glossy direct-to-board gatefold jacket containing the two records and a 20-page full-size booklet. It’s all in French, but the annotation is clearly detailed (if useless for those of us still learning) and there are some great photos and scans of handwritten lyrics, tracking sheets, and room service receipts. There’s a reissue producers’ note espousing “the technical expertise” of remix engineer Poussin (also in charge of other Gainsbourg remixes and archival projects) and approximately saying “any anachronistic treatment or artificial ‘inflating’ is prohibited here.” It also notes the supposed challenges of original engineer Peter Olliff not having an SSL console with automation recall. What does that have to do with anything? Nothing, really, because plenty of great sounding records were made before automated SSL boards hit the market, including the original mix of L’Homme à tête de chou!
And who cares what console—if it was even an actual console and not just a DAW controller—was used for this new remix. It sounds terrible. Serge Gainsbourg’s voice now exists on the same, mostly one-dimensional plane as the instrumentation, which seems to be drenched in some sort of “subtle” reverb or weird EQ. “Subtle” in that it doesn’t register as anything in particular, but it renders everything as thick, congealed, annoying slop. The drums are arranged with nice depth, but all the drums sound like literal cardboard and the cymbals sound thin and trashy (with compression artifacts at the end of “Aeroplanes”). Some songs like “Ma Lou Marilou” aren’t as offensively bad, while others like the opening title track and album climax “Variations sur Marilou” are an absolute travesty. The acoustic guitars on “Marilou sous la niege” lack any sparkle and transients found on the original, the ARP Odyssey is buried throughout, and on the new mix, the lead guitar at the beginning of “Marilou Reggae” sticks out as hard and grating. Bass is a bloated blob, and Gainsbourg’s voice is smeared and cloudy. Sure, it’s not as sibilant as the original, but it lacks its distinctive natural qualities. The drums on closer “Lunatic Asylum” on the original are bold, the tympani distant but dramatic. Here, it elicits the reaction of “oh, a tympani, so what?” Serge’s final "Marilou!" whisper on that track jumps out at you on the original, but like the rest of the remix, all emotion, drama, and texture is gone. I could go on but you get the point by now. Earlier this week, editor Michael Fremer reviewed Jon Astley’s new remaster of Pete Townshend & Ronnie Lane’s Rough Mix, asking, “Why take a wonderful, magical recording with depth, space, transparency, transient purity, shimmer, delicacy, three-dimensionality, and the sense that you are right there, and turn it into a flat, compressed, bass-shy, midbass heavy, bloated piece of dry, boombox-like sonic shit?” I feel similarly about this L’Homme à tête de chou remix. It completely misses the point of the original record.
The bonus LP features instrumental versions of the full album plus a few alternate vocal takes. There are a few minor details that you don’t hear on the finished record, such as some extra synth parts on “Variations sur Marilou,” but it’s the average bonus disc fare: cool to hear once then promptly forget about. The sound is just as bad as the album remix. (The deluxe CD set has an alternate vocal take of “Variations” that the vinyl set doesn’t. I would’ve preferred the alternate “Variations” over the four shorter vocal alternate tracks on the bonus LP, but that’s the least of my complaints.)
GZ cut and pressed the 180g 2LP set. Both discs arrived flat and clean, though there’s some minor surface noise throughout. As for whether or not the records sound better than the digital files (I streamed CD-resolution on Apple Music), the vinyl sounds slightly softer and therefore more engaging for this material, but it also highlights the disastrous mix more than the file. The better your listening situation and setup is, the worse it sounds. The vinyl on my main setup is a more infuriating listen than the CD-resolution stream played through the SSL 2+ DAC and my Audio-Technica M50x headphones. This isn’t even a “for completists only” release; as a big Gainsbourg fan, this isn't worth occupying shelf space. The booklet is nice but not $50+ nice, and you can stream all the bonus material anyway. Spend your money instead on an early French pressing of this or any other Serge Gainsbourg record, most of which will sound far better than any digitally-sourced reissues.
