Mikethep’s Chanson thread is extremely enjoyable. But it’s got a little top heavy with YT clips.

Nothing for it but to start Volume Two! Particularly so as Paris has a new tourist attraction. The former home of French pop’s enfant-terrible, Serge Gainsbourg, is now open to the public and tickets for visits are selling like hot croissants. What a very remarkable chap he was!

“In this “very arranged mess”, as Charlotte calls it, of objects – furniture, photos, album covers, a collection of police badges – it is as if Gainsbourg has just popped out for another packet of cigarettes. The window and skylight blinds are closed, giving the place a tenebrous air. The house is like the man: dark, brooding, chaotic and a little rough around the edges. No 5 bis rue de Verneuil, with its graffitied and sticker-covered exterior walls, sits uncomfortably among the bourgeois neighbouring houses and flats in the one-way street. Gainsbourg bought the two-storey property in 1969 and lived there with Birkin until 1980, when she left him, and then until his death in 1991. He once said of it: “I don’t know if it’s a studio, a museum, a salon or a brothel.”

Allons » Continue Reading.