Serge Gainsbourg - “Melody”
The next morning, Serge went out to breakfast with his friend Etienne. They ate eggs benedict with steak knives, yolks running. Serge used his hands to depict the Rolls-Royce, the bicycle, the slow way that they collided. At first he used passé simple. There were three kinds of glint in his eye.
“She was just a girl, Etienne; but mon dieu, what a girl. What a girl, what a girl, what a girl...”
“Pretty?” said Etienne.
Serge rolled his eyes, “Oh come on, voyons, oui, pretty as- pretty as- ...”
Etienne raised his eyebrows. His friend was not often starved for words in matters such as these.
“A gazelle,” Serge said finally, “long, long, long. I watched her drink from a bottle last night and I could have spent the year watching. I brought the Rolls to a stop and on the road she tossed her hair, she got to her feet, she showed me her eyes.”
“She showed you her eyes and you took them,” Etienne smiled.
“I felt like a bear, looking at her. Felt like a raincloud. 'Melody Nelson,' she said. That was her name.”
“Sounds like a song.”
“It will be a song. I will make it a song. I need to make a song. The slowest-ever song. Slow as the way she brushed her hair from her face. Slow as her tongue darting across her lips. I do not know if I will see her again. A suite of songs.”
“A whole album?”
“An album of jaguars, gazelles, moons. Rose quartz, black plastic, white steel, red hair. Ah, oui oui. Choirs, strings!”
“All that?”
“All that,” said Serge. He scraped the knife along his tongue. “Did I tell you the red hair was her natural colour?”
“Yes,” said Etienne.
“The way she felt... The way she felt, Etienne, when finally I brought her lips... When I tasted them.”
“When she gave them,” said Etienne.
Serge shrugged. “A girl, Etienne. A gazelle. Young, taut, tall, quick. Her heart leaps and strains in her breast. Hands meant to hold rose-stems. Feet meant to lie in sheets.”
“Okay, okay.”
“I should never see her again. Why would I? Let her live wild, away. She will die young. I know this. I will worship at her altar like a supplicating native. I will burn ferns, blacken my eyes. I will eat ash and lay in the sand. I will feel the sun all up and down my skin and I will remember last night. Birds will howl in my ears and I will feel wine in my mouth. Strings! Bass! Choir! Kettle drums! Trembling and then sudded storming noise! Oh, I can hear it, Etienne.”
“Café?” said the waiter.
“This morning, with sugar.”
Serge Gainsbourg's 1971 masterpiece, Histoire de Melody Nelson, which must make Jarvis Cocker long to have been born 20 years earlier, which Beck must dream of making, which has been sampled right and left, which makes even me wish to be a Parisian ladykiller, which is deep and tin-hot and thrilling, has just & at last been reissued in North America. Light In The Attic have released it on CD and 180gm gatefold LP, and you can buy it now. Do.
We also have one copy to give away! For your chance to win, leave a comment below, with the most seductive french word in the world. It doesn't have to be a real French word - it can be something you've made up, that you imagine balanced on yr tongue like a sparrow. We'll pick a winner later this week.
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