Serge Gainsbourg: A Fistful of Gitanes by Sylvie Simmons

A veritable Requiem for a Twister, Fistful of Gitanes is Simmons’ homage to one of the geniuses of twentieth century pop music who died in 1991. Gainsbourg was a prolific songwriter who refused to stick to any genre, a provocateur who caused outrage with his priapic behaviour and drunken appearances on French Television, a poet and an artist, legendary in his home country, but whose reputation abroad is more of cult figure.

Born Lucien Ginsberg in 1928 to musician parents, both Jewish refugees from revolutionary Russia, Gainsbourg suffered a traumatic adolescence which saw him forced to wear a gold star in Nazi occupied Paris, and crippling stage-fright, (both in the concert halls and the bedroom), which he overcame by drinking, a habit he picked up during national service:

“Serge was the only person I’ve ever known who liked the service militaire,” said Jane [Birkin]. “He learned to drink in the army. I think, timid thing that he was, he found that if he had a little bit too much to drink he was funny – he was the one standing on the chair telling jokes whereas before he would have gone red with shyness – and that the could suddenly have chums and take a girl out without being too worried.” ... “I went into the French Army having never touched a drop of alcohol in my life,” he would later claim, “and I left 13 months later, an alcoholic.”

Starting out like his father as a nightclub piano player, success was slow for Serge. He was signed to record label Phillips but his records never sold, despite his strong song writing. As teenage rock music took over France, Serge thought he was never going to make it, then he wrote a winning song for the Eurovision Song Contest (some countries take it seriously, you know) and the French public couldn’t seem to get enough of him. By the late sixties, the charts were full of his songs and he was in the midst of an affair with Brigitte Bardot...

“There’s a trilogy in my life,” said Serge in Mort Ou Vices, “an equilateral triangle, shall we say, of Gitanes, alcoholism and girls – and I didn’t say isosceles, I said equilateral...”

An enthusiastic smoker (three to five packets of Gitanes a day!) as well as a drinker, Gainsbourg had his first heart-attack at 45. Not that he would let it cramp his style:

...although is doctors had warned him that cigarettes were bad for his heart; others in the medical profession had announced that drinking was good for it; so by upping the intake of one, he figured, he could cancel out the harmful effects of the other.

Gainsbourg spent the 70s with English actress Jane Birkin, with whom they had a daughter, actress Charlotte Gainsbourg. He wrote prodigious amounts of songs for her to sing, as well as for other artists and himself. His masterpiece Histoire de Melody Nelson was released in 1971, and he courted considerable controversy with a reggae version of the French national anthem at the end of the decade. Sadly, he was also getting increasing drunk and difficult to live with: Jane left in 1980. Gainsbourg himself, was turning into a Mr Hyde like character, his dissipated, alcoholic alter ego, Gainsbarre.

Serge himself had a wonderful phrase ready for when anyone else asked him about the Gainsbourg/Gainsbarre duality, something along the lines of fellow-drinker Tom Waits’ line about preferring “a bottle in front of me to a frontal lobotomy” but with a few added layers: “Gainsbourg se barre, Gainsbarre se bourre.” (For the non French-speakers, ‘bourre’ is pronounced like the ‘bourg’ bit of Gainsbourg. ‘Se barre’ means to cross yourself, shut yourself out or disappear, and ‘se bourre’ means to get shit-faced drunk, something usually achieved in un bar).

The effect on Gainsbourg wasn’t pretty, even if he was still producing music at a phenomenal rate:

...there was beginning to be a look of corruption about him. Like a negative image of Dorian Gray, as his work stayed fresh and invigorated, his appearance became more worn and debauched.

Rock journalist Nick Kent ran into him at a film festival in Val d’Isères:

“He looked like someone who wasn’t taking care of himself. His eyes had that bloodshot, unfocussed look of someone who was not so slowly poisoning himself with alcohol. One of the other people on the panel was staying in the room next door to Giansbourg’s suite, and he told me that every night he was awakened by Gainsbourg screaming – screaming – ‘I’m going blind!’..."

The writing was definitely on the wall. In 1989 he had another heart attack:

That year he would be in and out of the American Hospital five times. The first time, in January, the doctors warned him that if he didn’t stop drinking he would be blind in six months and dead in twelve. “My back’s against the wall, but I don’t give a fuck,” Serge shrugged.

To his credit, he actually stayed sober for a while, after he had had two thirds of his liver removed first. Still, all was going well until he started work with teen sensation Vanessa Paradis. The stress put him straight back onto the bottle. In the ever decreasing circles of his final decline, he spent his time with old friends and lovers including Jane Birkin:

“He couldn’t stop at a petit verre – a glass or two. He had to finish the bottle. Then another bottle. And as he didn’t used to eat at midday, if you have a Pernod as your breakfast then you’re usually pretty slaughtered by tea time...”

In March 1991, the years of strong cigarettes and stronger drink finally took their toll and Serge died, one month shy of his 63rd birthday. France mourned. Difficult, sometimes impossible, outrageous, but also warm hearted and amusing as well as incredibly talented, Gainsbourg led a colourful, contradictory career that has only recently been given the appraisal it deserves outside of his native France.

The Inimitable Jeeves by PG Wodehouse

Guildford born Wodehouse is still one of the most popular authors in the English language and his most famous inventions, the unflappable gentleman’s gentleman, Jeeves, and his foppish idle rich employer, Bertie Wooster, are still a joy to read over eighty years after they were first written.

The hat pin picked out The Inimitable Jeeves this time, but I could easily have chosen any of the books as they’re all great fun and I’m certain that there would be a drink to be found somewhere in the lot of them for the purposes of 120 Units. In this volume, Bertie is put upon by the usual crowd of bossy aunts, ne’re-do-well friends and ghastly relatives, leaving Jeeves to save the day, either by subterfuge, or by the presentation of a well poured drink:

“I say, Jeeves,” I said. “Sir?” “Mix me a stiffish brandy and soda.” “Yes, sir.” “Stiffish, Jeeves. Not too much soda, but splash the brandy about a bit.”

The appearance of Bertie’s two ghastly cousins, twins Claude and Eustace, who are supposed to be on a boat en route to South Africa, gives him another headache. Not only do they take advantage of his hospitality, but his formidable Aunt Agatha is convinced that her husband is going mad after he thinks he spots one of the boys in the street. Aunt Agatha wonders if he’s seen a ghost:

“Do you think it is possible that he could see things not visible to the normal eye?” I thought it dashed possible, if not probable. I don’t know if you’ve ever met my uncle George. He’s a festive old egg who wanders from club to club continually having a couple with other festive old eggs. When he heaves into sight, waiters brace themselves up and the wine-steward toys with his corkscrew. It was my Uncle George who discovered that alcohol was a food well in advance of modern medical thought.

When one of the brats swipes Uncle George’s cigarette case, Aunt Agatha decides to have him sent off to Harrogate to take the waters:

“...You know as well as I do that your poor Uncle George has for many years not been a – he has – er – developed a habit of – how shall I put it?” “Shifting it a bit?” “I beg your pardon?” “Mopping up the stuff to some extent?” “I dislike your way of putting it exceedingly, but I must confess that he has not been, perhaps, as temperate as he should...”

Fortunately, Jeeves comes to the rescue, as ever, and tricks the twins into getting the next steamer to Cape Town and Uncle George is revived by Jeeves’ miracle pick-me-up...

Bad Science by Ben Goldacre

I’ve rather enjoyed reading this book on the train of late, probably because I find myself broadly agreeing with it, which always helps. It’s an amusingly written jaunt through quack remedies, alternative therapies and bogus nutritionists, along with a good long look at the sins of the pharmaceutical industry and the media’s role in the MMR fiasco.

At the risk of ‘cherry picking’ I’ve homed in on a little gem concerning those reports that appear in the press on a fairly regular basis, telling everyone that a little red wine each day is good for you. (This, of course, is code for: ‘sink a bottle of it’.)

Sadly, we are fooling ourselves by wishful thinking. Goldacre explains that, just in the way that nutritionists seek to prove that certain food supplements improve our health but fail to take into account all the other factors in people’s lifestyles, the same is true of booze and the differing lives of drinkers and non drinkers.

Now, to be fair to nutritionists, they are not alone in failing to understand the importance of confounding variables, in their eagerness for a clear story. Every time that you read in a newspaper that ‘moderate alcohol intake’ is associated with some improved health outcome – less heart disease, less obesity, anything – to gales of delight from the alcohol industry, and of course from your friends, who say, ‘Ooh well, you see, it’s better for me to drink a little...’ as they drink a lot – you are almost certainly witnessing a journalist of limited intellect, overinterpreting a study with huge confounding variables.

It’s very possible, that someone of moderate intake is healthy for different reasons. Or that someone of no intake at all, has underlying health problems, or damages themselves in other ways:

This is because, let’s be honest here: teetotallers are abnormal. They’re not like everyone else. They will almost certainly have a reason for not drinking, and it might be moral, or cultural, or perhaps even medical, but there’s a serious risk that whatever is causing them to be teetotal might also have other effects on their health, confusing the relationship between their drinking habits and their health outcomes.

And anyway:

Perhaps some of the people who say they are teetotal are just lying.

As much as I enjoyed this book, this was one piece of nutritional bunkum that I was sad to see debunked. From now on, if ever I go on about the ‘medicinal properties of red wine’, I’m afraid that it’s just talk.

Cry, The Beloved Country by Alan Paton

Redolent of The Grapes of Wrath in its scope and social commentary as much as its written style, Cry, The Beloved Country is Paton’s heartfelt work of protest about the problems facing South Africa in the late 1940s.


Rural pastor Stephen Kumalo travels to Johannesburg after receiving news that his sister Gertrude is unwell, also hoping to find his son Absalom while he is there. In the city he meets local priest Theophilus Msimangu who tells him the sad news that Gertrude’s illness is in fact a life of drinking and prostitution.

She lives in Claremont, not far from here. It is one of the worst places in Johannesburg. After the police have been there, you can see the liquor running in the streets. You can smell it, you can smell nothing else, wherever you go in that place. He leant over to Kumalo. I used to drink liquor, he said, but it was good liquor, such as our fathers made. But now I have vowed to touch no liquor any more. This is bad liquor here, made strong with all manner of things that our people have never used. And that is her work, she makes it and sells it. I shall hide nothing from you, though it is painful for me. These women sleep with any man for their price. A man has been killed at her place. They gamble and drink and stab. She has been in prison more than once.

Moonshine and bad beer are part of a raft of issues that Paton tackles, and despite the author’s overall spirit of optimism, history tells us that things got a lot worse before anything got better. Even today, South Africa is in the news again, the fragility of its social fabric under the spotlight once more.

A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams

I’m plundering my A-Levels again; this time Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire, in my mind one of the finest dramatic works written in the twentieth century. One story goes that Williams was convinced that he was dying when he wrote Streetcar and thinking that it was his last chance to get everything onto the page, he created his most powerful and personal work. It’s certainly got a lot going on: madness, claustrophobia, sexuality, class prejudice, and drink of course.

My well thumbed copy of the play is filled with notes in the margins, following the slow war of attrition between blue collar tough Stanley Kowalski and his sister-in-law, the fading Southern belle Blanche Dubois. By the time the play is reaching its dénouement, the sordid details of the loss of Belle Reve, the former home of Blanche and her sister Stella, have come creeping out of the woodwork, and Stan has made it clear that Blanche has outstayed her welcome at their poky apartment in New Orleans’ French Quarter. He’s also killed any last chance that Blanche might have had of happiness and stability by telling his friend Mitch, who has been dating Blanche, that she was drummed out of her former home town for licentious behaviour with drunken soldiers, and finally, a seventeen-year-old high school student.

Left alone at the flat as Stanley goes to the hospital with heavily pregnant Stella, Blanche sits in an armchair in her scarlet satin robe:

On the table beside the chair is a bottle of liquor and a glass. The rapid, feverish polka tune, the ‘Varsouviana’ is heard. The music is in her mind; she is drinking to escape it and the sense of disaster closing in on her, and she seems to whisper the words of the song.

Mitch turns up, drunk, unshaven and still in his work clothes, determined to remonstrate with Blanche about her deception after she has given him a considerably edited version of events regarding her recent past. Blanche tries to be chatty and fishes around for a bottle:

BLANCHE: ...here’s something. Southern Comfort! What is that, I wonder?

MITCH: If you don’t know, it must belong to Stan.

Not content with ruining her reputation, Stanley has put the boot in, telling Mitch that Blanche has been drinking his grog all summer as well:

MITCH: I told you already I don’t want none of his liquor and I mean it. You ought to lay off his liquor. He says you been lapping it up all summer like a wild-cat!

Mitch clumsily tries to rape Blanche but she frightens him off. Stanley’s return brings no respite though, Stella is to remain in the hospital. They are at the flat alone together. Stan, tipsy already, picks up a bottle of beer:

STANLEY: ...seen a bottle-opener?

[She moves slowly towards the dresser, where she stands with her hands knotted together.]

STANLEY: I used to have a cousin who could open a beer-bottle with his teeth. [Pounding the bottle cap on the corner of the table.] That was his only accomplishment, all he could do – he was just a human bottle-opener. And then one time, at a wedding party, he broke his front teeth off! After that he was so ashamed of himself he used t’sneak out of the house when company came...

[The bottle cap pops off and a geyser of foam shoots up. STANLEY laughs happily, holding up the bottle over his head.]

STANLEY: Ha-ha! Rain from heaven! [He extends the bottle towards her.] Shall we bury the hatchet and make it a loving-cup? Huh?

Stanley’s final act is to rape Blanche, destroying her sanity forever. Despite knowing what he’s done, Stella stays with her husband and their baby, but she hardly has a choice in the matter. Blanche is finally committed to an institution, and as she is led away from the flat by a doctor, another of Stanley’s drunken poker nights with the boys starts up again.