ALBUM REVIEWS
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ALBUM REVIEWS |
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Hige Club
CHARLOTTE FOREVER MARKETSTALL RECORDS 8.10 @www.vanguard-online.co.uk
Beck has helped Charlotte Gainsbourg regain critical regard after a passable previous album marred by luvvies like Jarvis Cocker fawning over her simply because she’s the offspring of Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin. Charlotte had a prior album though – her debut at 13, written and produced by dear old Daddy. By 1986 and reaching the end of his life, Serge had, rather like Miles Davis, gone slightly off the rails in searching for a new, contemporary style. Like that dresser-up, David Bowie, he was wrapping new clothes round his tunes, glamming them up for chart success. His Love On The Beat album, mostly a paean to kinky sex and featuring him made up cross-dressed on the cover, has a harsh electronic eighties sound with those synthesised drums everyone was so fond of then. As a finale he slipped in his duet with Charlotte – Lemon Incest. However you doll it up – based on a Chopin melody, the title being a pun on “une zeste du citron” – this was the old rascal creating a scandal to sell records. Combined with a nigh-on incomprehensible movie, largely consisting of him rolling about on satin sheets in bed with his thirteen year-old daughter, he got an album out – Charlotte Forever. Charlotte Forever suffered from the same dubious production values that have dated it badly (cheesy bass, sax solos and other eighties horrors). In some parts of the world it was released as Lemon Incest, to milk the publicity a bit more. I’m not fond of the era and though I have over a dozen Serge albums, most of Jane Birkin’s albums (I know, I know, but I like the songs) and a few other related discs, I only know two songs off the Charlotte album – the title track and Lemon Incest. It’s a crime for Serge songs to languish in obscurity – whatever you make of the old goat, his pop writing is world class – neat and crafty tunes and witty lyrics, made of word-play and puns, confections that are often lighter than air. Unlike writers like Jacques Brel, no-one has made the songs their own in English. There are covers albums but they are in the spirit of tributes. Hige Club haven’t made this their own, either but they have done a public service in rescuing these songs. The songs have been triple rescued. Rescued from obscurity, rescued from a tasteless production and rescued from Charlotte’s teenage voice. Back then she would have been aping that squeaky, breathy style favoured by Serge for his female singers, including, of course, Mummy, Jane Birkin. This album is a straight run-through of the whole album – a cover version of the whole set – arranged more simply and less naffly. Markus doesn’t have the astonishing tones of Serge – since he probably hasn’t been consuming 5 packs of unfiltered cigarettes and a bottle or two of over-strength Pastis a day for a few decades but he does a credible job. Charlotte McEwan interprets the songs in a much less painful way than tiny Charlotte. It’s still a cool, gentle, poppy journey with a particular Gallic cool. It smells of black tobacco, strong sweet coffee and mornings spent flicking through Paris Match magazine. Hige Club is a one-off project brought together by a commission from the London Short Film Festival to coincide with the release of the Gainsbourg biopic. Uber-fan Phillip Ilson, from the festival, is convinced the album is a lost classic of songwriting and asked Markus (frontman of Their Hearts Were Full Of Spring) to reconstruct the album. I believe he succeeds and the album brings quality songs to our attention, albeit minor and fleeting attention. They aren’t going to reach the stratospheric heights of the late-sixties and seventies pop classics but it’s a worthwhile exercise. Now, how about a reworking of the astonishingly delicate and sad songs on Birkin’s Baby Alone In Babylone? What we need, though, is more English covers, making the work accessible to the parts of the world that don’t speak French. The biopic will have convinced many of the crazy and classic pop tunes – now add words and there’s a new tranche of Gainsbourg fans. www.marketstallrecords.tk |
