Memoir: Charlotte Gainsbourg’s Life in Music

Charlotte Gainsbourg was propelled into singing at the age of 13 by her charismatic father, chanson star Serge Gainsbourg. Together, they recorded the controversial single “Lemon Incest,” followed by the 1986 album Charlotte For Ever.

As she was already picking up roles in movies, Gainsbourg eventually chose to make the cinema her career. Over the next two decades, she appeared on the big screen countless times, picking up plaudits and awards for roles in such titles as L’Effrontée, Love, Etc., Antichrist, Melancholia and Nymphomaniac.

Gainsbourg returned to music in 2006 with a second album, 5:55, produced with Air, Jarvis Cocker and Nigel Godrich. Over the past decade, the acclaimed actress has pursued a dual career in music and film, recording two albums with Beck, contributing to soundtracks and performing live.

In a public conversation at l’Éléphant Paname for the Red Bull Music Academy Festival Paris 2017 – presented here in translated and edited form – Gainsbourg traced her musical evolution with a playlist including songs her parents played in the house, key soundtracks and the musicians that have fanned her ongoing interest in electronic music, leading to her collaborations with Parisian producer SebastiAn.

Ian Dury – Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll

When this came out, I think I was around six or seven years old. I know I was living at Rue de Verneuil with my father. My sister and I shared the same bedroom. She was four years older than me, so I was subject to her musical taste. But this time I really felt like the record was mine. There is a comical side to it, which I understood. I was such a fan of his voice and the rhythm – I didn’t realize the trashy element to it.

At the time, my parents got a lot of free records. They came back from meetings [with their record label] with these 7" singles with no cover. They allowed us to listen to things they brought back. There was a bit of everything. Some were really good and some were awful. At the same time, we weren’t allowed to listen to Annie Cordy, Dorothée or Chantal Goya!

To begin with, my record collection was just things I was given. My sister had more refined musical tastes. For her it was all about Blondie and the whole disco era. I followed the movement but I was a lot younger. I started buying records quite late actually, when I was a teenager.

Michael Jackson – Thriller

I discovered this at the same time as my father, when I was a teenager. He was blown away by it, as we all were. I remember really well that we had a big TV screen at home and we’d watch the music video that went with this song. I think that alongside “Billie Jean” it is one of the most powerful music videos. Those two were the first major music videos I’d seen.

Bonnie Tyler – It’s A Heartache

This is one of the records I bought myself as a teenager, so I’m completely responsible for it. It’s from the year I left for boarding school. I had decided I wanted to go myself. Sony Walkman [portable cassette players] had just come out. It was a certain way of listening that was really new – an isolated way of listening. I remember listening to this on the train on the way to boarding school as the scenery passed me by. Bonnie’s voice stuck so well with the things you go through as a teenager, that very lonely feeling that’s ever so sad. I would of course make a big deal of this.

Charles Aznavour – Emmenez-Moi

I did also like French music as a teenager. I find it difficult taking responsibility for liking this one. Since my childhood it’s always been easier to say it was my father or my sister. This was completely my choice. The fact that I liked it really hurt my father, because he was jealous of Charles Aznavour. That’s because Aznavour really was somebody. I was really quite obsessed by the musical universe this song creates because it was more about the lyrics than the music. This song really preoccupied me for quite some time.

Bob Dylan – Lay Lady Lay

I recall asking my father if there was one record I needed to have, or a song. He told me about this one and “Somewhere Over The Rainbow” sung by Judy Garland. For Dylan I regret one thing, which is that I probably just bought a “greatest hits” album. I didn’t instinctively listen to each of his albums and discover him that way – I went straight to this one song. Ever since it has stuck with me.

I did a film recently called I’m Not There which traced Dylan’s different lives. He is someone who is very important to me and I never tire of his music. Sometimes at dinner parties, if you play Dylan too much it can get on people’s nerves, but I can happily listen to him for hours. His lyrics are wonderful, but also the sound of his voice, his personality and his persona.

Glenn Gould – J.S Bach: Aria (Goldberg Variations)

My father had this album of Glenn Gould’s Goldberg Variations of Bach’s arias. My stepfather, Lou’s father, also had a copy. At the same moment in time the album was in both my homes. I find it very soothing and I’m always in a good mood when I listen to it. In some ways it’s very reassuring to come back to it.

My father played the piano, but very rarely at home. He would play in bars at the end of a night out. I think he had been quite traumatized as a youngster playing for his father, who was very strict. He got away from that. I’d see him play mainly when he was composing. He had a mechanical piano that he could record himself on. The keys played themselves. Every time he was working on a new album he let us listen to melodic ideas, so that we could grade him with little stars.

He was very receptive to what the rest of the family said. We usually all agreed. On the last album he was working on [before his death] he started to use sounds that were very Russian and very melancholic. It was really beautiful. A lot of his songs came from Chopin, so I discovered Chopin through him. Classical music was important to him and to me growing up.

Really, my father didn’t listen to a lot of music at home. When he did, he played the music very loudly so our neighbors complained all the time. He would listen very loudly or not at all. It’s such an amazing way to listen. It was often his music, which I found pretentious at the time. As a teenager, I didn’t understand why he had to listen to himself so loudly. Now, I realize that he needed to listen to himself as it was part of his job.

Serge Gainsbourg – Ballade de Melody Nelson

I find it strange that my children never listen to my music. They wouldn’t even think to. I lived with my parents’ music growing up and listening to them was a real delight. It wasn’t just dumb admiration – it was part of my life.

The first song of my father’s that I ever liked was “L’Ami Caouette” and he was very ashamed of it. He thought it was the worst song he ever wrote. The fact that his daughter loved it and would sing it didn’t go unnoticed. Since then I’ve listened to everything he did. He didn’t like his voice early on, where it sounds more like he’s singing. I really liked it.

I find it very hard to listen to the Histoire de Melody Nelson. I held back from listening to it for 26 years. Yet this song has an influence on me without even listening to it. It really is part of me. Melody might just be the album that I’ve listened to the most.

I really like these conceptual albums that tell a story. It’s a short album and there is something magical about it. It is an album that a lot of music producers talk about, though every time I worked with Air, Beck or SebastiAn, we don’t talk about it. With Beck, I spoke to him about the percussion albums my father did, because that was the rhythm I was looking for.

Charlotte & Gainsbourg – Lemon Incest

For me, this song is the most important, from the experiences I have had with my father in music in any case. It was the first time he put me behind a microphone. I took part in this adventure without realizing what the subject matter was. It didn’t shock me. I wasn’t aware of the scandal surrounding it because I was 12 years old when we recorded it. The year after I left for boarding school, so I wasn’t there for the release. When we recorded it, I was young enough not to care about it all.

I understood the pleasure he got from making it, hearing me hit those high notes and my voice breaking a bit. Those were the things he was aiming at. Then I forgot about the song the minute I’d finished. It wasn’t a big deal. In any case it’s a very precious memory for me.

Portishead – Glory Box

This is one of the first songs that really mattered to me as an adult. I remember its release. I was around 20 at the time, I think. It affected many people like it did me. It was a new sound, a new personality. Even on stage, Beth Gibbons was different. I think it’s at this point that I started to ask myself if I wanted to make music again. It really motivated me.

Radiohead – You And Whose Army

Radiohead are one of the bands I really love. I tried to find my favorite song of theirs, but there are so many. It’s like with Dylan and Bowie – they have so many albums I can just listen to all the way through. For ten to 15 years, I loved Radiohead nonstop. I also saw what it feels like to be completely absorbed by music seeing them live, through Thom Yorke, because he is the one I look at. I can see something almost animal-like [in his performance], which is something that I have rarely seen.

Blood Orange – Best To You

Devonté Hynes, better known as Blood Orange, performed with me in the video to my song “Deadly Valentine.” He wasn’t somebody I met by accident in New York. I asked to meet him. He became a friend and I asked him for a lot of advice about my English lyrics, just to be sure I was going in the right direction. In French I have enough perspective and knowledge, but in English I fumble a bit more. My mother had helped me, but Devonté comforted me by telling me I was going in the right direction. I knew he was a great dancer so I asked him to be in the video after that.

John Williams – Theme From Jaws

Film soundtracks are important to me. They have influenced my music, but of course I have also acted in a lot of movies. This selection is my mother’s fault. She took me to London when I was four. The film was out and in London it wasn’t banned. I saw the film and it traumatized me. Musically, John Williams’ score is incredible. The soundtrack has haunted me ever since I first saw it. I listen to it again today with great pleasure. It’s a very prominent memory.

Richi E Poveri – Sarà Perchè Ti Amo

This is from the soundtrack of a film called L’Effrontée, which was the first movie I had a main role in. I spent two months filming alone with the team. This song already existed when we started filming. They would put it on during the scene where everyone was walking with Julie. Music is not necessarily something you remember from film sets, as it’s usually not very present. This song genuinely followed me through my first acting experience.

Charlotte Gainsbourg – Hey Joe

This Jimi Hendrix cover is from the soundtrack of a film I did with Lars von Trier called Nymphomaniac. It was done quite late on, once we had finished filming. I was really happy that Lars asked me to do it. It was our third film together, but up until that point, I don’t think he thought of me as a singer. The final product was less important than the fact that he asked me to do it.

Lars was the one who wanted me to ask Beck to do it. I wasn’t sure that Beck would accept, but he was really up for it. Although we’d already made an album together, on this we recorded our parts alone. He made the music, heavily influenced by my father’s music, and I sung my parts alone in a different studio.

Charlotte Gainsbourg – 5:55

Cinema is something I like to lose myself in. Music requires me to be more willful. I started acting and singing the same way, in my father’s footsteps. It always made my father happy. It was natural for me, but I wasn’t in control. With film it carried on like this. I was happy not to be in control and be at the director’s service. Without my father, my relationship with music has become very complicated because everything had become a bit painful. It evoked the memory of my father. I still miss him so much.

There were two decades between recording my first album, Charlotte For Ever, and 5:55 with Air. It took me 20 years to realize that maybe I was allowed to express myself through music. Then I started looking around me and started wondering with whom I could work. I never thought of doing it alone. I didn’t want to. I was not capable of it. I needed to admire different artists like I had admired my father. So it was obvious to me with Air, then with Beck it was another kind of evidence. But I really needed to be able to move forward and I had trouble coming to terms with it.

Charlotte Gainsbourg – IRM

“IRM” is the title track from the first album I did with Beck. I really respect his work, so when I asked him I didn’t expect him to say yes. We met up in the studio and he said we’d have to see if it worked well together for the both of us. We started by doing three songs together and then realized that we had good musical chemistry.

The album was made bit by bit at his house in Los Angeles. At each stage, it took a new direction. I went to see him and I had just had a serious accident and had to do some MRI scans. I felt like the best way for me to personally involve myself in the album was to speak about that and make music about it. There wasn’t a negative side to it because MRIs are reassuring now.

I really wanted to find a musical element to it. Beck’s response was that he couldn’t think of something more exciting. He would start off with the rhythm and that’s why my father’s percussion album was important. The beginning of every song originated from a rhythm he had either recorded before, or I saw him creating. It was really magical getting that understanding of how he wrote and composed songs. It was so easy for him. He would go away with his notebook and then come up with stuff just like that.

Charlotte Gainsbourg – Rest

Through doing my second big live performance, I got to know Connan Mockasin quite well. He was convinced that I should be writing in French and wanted to help me. So we started doing work sessions together, with him on the guitar. I started putting words to his music. Because he doesn’t understand French, I had fewer inhibitions. I left with a few songs I liked.

Just after that, I started thinking about maybe making a new album. Electronic music had already become a vital element a long time ago. It’s a style of music I love. Listening to SebastiAn and discovering his work, I realized that all the violence, brutality and orchestration in his songs was exactly what I wanted. I also wanted to see if my voice, which isn’t very strong, would mix with that kind of universe.

So SebastiAn came to my house and our first meeting wasn’t very promising. He was very sure of himself and he was right in saying that I needed to sing in French and more like I did on my first album that I made with my father in 1986. You might saw he was lecturing me, though I found him to be very charming in spite of that.

He was playing a part, like all shy people do. I found that touching. Anyway, not a lot happened straight away. I gave him a list of horror film soundtracks and some other musical reference points. There was a lot of music that people in the electronic sphere know about, like [Giorgio] Moroder, but also the Psycho soundtrack and some classical music. My ambition was chaotic.

He replied with five demos that were exactly what I was hoping for and more. I replied, but arranging sessions was tough, as he’s really hard to catch. We eventually had several work sessions, but by that point I’d already recorded this song, “Rest” with Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo of Daft Punk. That was really a side project – something done because I admire him a lot.

We started with a loop that he had made and was keen to use. When I started to write with him, I used my notebooks and personal diaries. My sister had just passed away, so we shortened it down and tried to abridge what I wanted to say. Looking back we did it in quite a naïve way but it was very spontaneous. So that was done. After that I needed to leave Paris, so I moved to New York. At that point SebastiAn finally understood we had to do the album then, and that he had to come. So he came and what became the album Rest finally took shape.

There are some very personal songs on the album. “Lying With You” was one of the first lyrics I wrote and it’s about my father’s death. My memory of him is torn between my childhood and the moment when I saw him dead. I wanted to speak about him in a blunt way. I’m more affectionate in the English choruses than I am in the French verses. By speaking in English I could distance myself and embrace him, whereas I used French to be a bit more vindictive.

I think going to New York enabled me to write an album that was a lot more personal. I allowed myself to be shameless and self-critical, but also still constructive. That happened in part because I was completely isolated in an unknown place. I could rediscover myself and go through a sort of rebirth. The album chronicles a moment in my life of three or four years.