Everything about this sleazy song by Serge Gainsbourg is fantastic. Except its problematic subject matter – paedophilia.
Its funky bass and psychedelic flourishes underscore the music’s musky allure – dark and fecund, mysterious and exotic, ominous and threatening.
The spoken and whispered vocals are underpinned by brooding bass, growling guitars and ominous strings, creating a claustrophobic, corrosive atmosphere that perfectly fits the dark subject matter of the record.
There’s only one reservation. It’s the title track of a pseudo-autobiographical concept album about a middle-aged paedophile and a 15-year-old girl.
Obviously, it’s by France’s most celebrated dirty old man, Serge Gainsbourg.
A paean to perversion and corruption, its from Gainsbourg’s Lolita-like magnum opus Histoire de Melody Nelson, released in 1971 .
In this ooening number, a middle-aged man (Gainsbourg himself, obvs) driving his Rolls-Royce at night, knocking an angelic underage girl off her bicycle. Then seducing her.
Predictably, poor Melody, dressed in only a white vest and a big black belt for her nocturnal cycle ride, is powerless to resist.
In most other countries, of course, Gainsbourg would have been locked away for the safety of the nation and, in the present day, cancelled.
In France they have historically looked far more favourably on men who dedicate themselves to Serge’s preferred pastimes of smoking, drinking and “womanising”, making him more of a cause celebre than persona non grata (to mix the languages of my metaphors).
If you’re a girl, then Gainsbourg is the sleazy older man your mother always warned you about (watch his notorious TV chat show appearance with Whitney Houston to be truly alarmed), and Histoire de Melody Nelson is the record she should have warned you about.
If you’re a Frenchman, perhaps it awakens some sort of Lolita-like fantasy, emphasised by the album’s cover photo of an innocent young girl clutching a child’s doll to her naked chest.
And yet… It’s regarded, with plenty of justification, as the template for trip-hop, influencing everyone from Tricky and Portishead to R.E.M. and Pulp, Arctic Monkeys and Air.
Portishead went as far as covering the song – in French – with Gainsbourg’s one-time paramour, Jane Birkin.