‘Serge Gainsbourg pretended to be an alcoholic': Jean-Claude Vannier on making a masterpiece with the louche legend

The Guardian

17-02-2025

Ask a set designer to create a bohemian Paris apartment and they'll probably come up with something that looks a lot like Jean-Claude Vannier's: books everywhere, vintage Bauhaus armchairs, art on every bit of wall space. You would say the living room was dominated by his grand piano, but your eye keeps getting drawn to a plethora of toy pianos that sit on and around it. On closer inspection, there are toy pianos on the shelves too, crammed among the books. 'I've got more in the other rooms,' shrugs Vannier, speaking through an interpreter, 'and I have a house in the country that's full of them too. I take them to concerts and play a note or two. I find it adds something to a live performance that is filled with virtuosos. I have an open-tuned guitar that I kick, too – it makes a big boom.'
Disrupting an orchestral performance by playing a toy piano or kicking a guitar seems characteristic: Vannier, now in his early 80s, has been a disruptive presence in French pop for 60 years. His latest project is pretty odd: a song cycle performed by a vast mandolin orchestra, accompanied by a story written by Vannier that involves a broken romance, alcoholism, homelessness and murder.
'All the great love stories are sad,' he says, 'because if people live happily ever after and have lots of children, there's not much to say.' In fairness, it's certainly less strange than the story Vannier's most famous collaborator, Serge Gainsbourg, came up with for his 1972 album L'Enfant Assassin des Mouches (The Child Fly Killer). This involved a small boy persecuting a fly before being smothered to death by a swarm of the insects.
If Jean-Claude Vannier et Son Orchestre de Mandolines seems an unlikely diversion, it's no more peculiar than Vannier's 2019 album Corpse Flower, a collaboration with Faith No More's vocalist Mike Patton (a Vannier superfan who's releasing his mandolin album on his label Ipecac) that featured songs about despairing monkeys and the danger of voiding one's bowels when drunk. Nor indeed Vannier's own career as a singer-songwriter in the 70s, which came about, he says, because no one else wanted to sing his chanson-inspired songs.
It's meant as no reflection on the quality of the albums to say you can see why: Vannier's idea of a single was a song called Merde, V'la le Printemps, or Shit, Here Comes Spring. 'It wasn't my intention to shock anyone,' he says. 'I just wanted to talk about what I saw around me. I had a song called Mon Beau Travelo – My Beautiful Transvestite. I was doing the music for a ballet with Roland Petit. After the performance, he would take me to the side streets off the old Paris Opera. There were many drag queens there. We used to watch them and that's what inspired the song. It was very controversial at the time, and no one was willing to sing it, but it's not shocking. It's just what I wanted to express.'
Vannier's reputation, however, really rests on his arrangement and soundtrack work. David Holmes, DJ and creator of soundtracks for a host of Steven Soderbergh movies, has called Vannier 'the greatest soundtrack composer of them all, a true genius'. Vannier has worked with everyone from singer Françoise Hardy to literary provocateur Michel Houellebecq. He wrote and recorded songs with the latter, Houellebecq even taking singing lessons to get his voice up to scratch.
Mentioning his name provokes a frown from Vannier: 'It's true that I've worked with him, but he's someone who will never be my friend. I met one of his publishers in an antique shop near here and they [joked], 'Houellebecq is worse than a gangster!' He has a terrible reputation, so I would never associate with him. But I'm a huge fan of his actual writing.'
For all of these people, Vannier constructed astonishingly inventive orchestral arrangements, that occasionally touch on atonality and often bear the influence of music from the Middle East – the result, he says, of his disastrous first job, as an engineer in a Paris studio.
'I started with yé-yé singers, young girls and boys, and I made a lot of mistakes. So they had me record accordionists, who at that time were seen as very vulgar: their music was for Saturday night dances that were a bit violent. They didn't have a good reputation. I messed up again, because I wasn't particularly interested in this music, so they had me record Arab musicians. This was during the Algerian war: there was a lot of fear aimed at Arab people, they were not popular at all in France. I loved working with them. I was happy, because I loved Arab music.'
But it's Gainsbourg who remains his most celebrated client. Vannier worked with him on the lauded soundtracks for the films Cannabis, La Horse, and Les Chemins de Katmandou and, most lauded of all, on 1971 record Histoire de Melody Nelson. A flop on release, it's now acclaimed not just as Gainsbourg's masterpiece, but one of the greatest French-language albums in pop history.
Its belated rediscovery by crate-digging sample hunters and musicians in the 90s also seemed to spark a broader shift in anglophone listeners' traditionally snobbish, dismissive attitude to French pop: if something as extraordinary as this had escaped widespread attention, what else had the country's musicians produced?
'I think you're right,' says Vannier. 'When I first started receiving emails from kids in the UK that went on about how amazing this record was, I thought they were laughing at me – I know the British are very big on sarcasm. But then Mojo magazine called my daughter saying they wanted to do a big spread on me. I was astonished. I think that, quite simply, they just didn't have access to these records before. They accepted me with open arms and more. I realised I had influenced a lot of people.'
You can say that again. Echoes of his dramatic Melody Nelson orchestrations can be heard everywhere from Beck's Sea Change to the Arctic Monkeys' Tranquility Base Hotel And Casino, and they've been sampled by everyone from Portishead to De La Soul. In recent years, Vannier has conducted huge, star-studded concerts of the music in London, Paris and LA.
Yet his relationship with Melody Nelson is a tricky one. Vannier says he wrote most of the music – 'Sometimes Gainsbourg would come and see me with a melody, but more and more he would turn up with absolutely nothing and I would have free rein' – but Gainsbourg declined to give him a writing credit. They remained friends until the French singer's death in 1991, but Vannier seems to have found Gainsbourg's penchant for provocation a little trying.
'He pretended to be a shit-stirrer,' he says, 'because it was profitable for him financially. He wasn't really interested in politics or philosophy or psychology – he was just prompted by whatever his press people told him to do. Before TV appearances, he'd run his hands through his hair so he looked more dishevelled. At the start, he actually pretended to be an alcoholic when he wasn't – he was trying to shock on purpose to amuse his audience. At the end of his career, he genuinely was an alcoholic, but at the beginning that was a pose as well.'
Melody Nelson had another belated effect. While working for a French label, the British DJ, producer and 'Gainsbourg obsessive' Andy Votel heard 'garbled rumours in Parisian record shops' about a mysterious 'Melody Nelson follow-up' that had never been released. Some of the rumours were pretty lurid: it was based on Lord of the Flies, it had an 'X-rated cover', it had been banned.
It turned out they were talking about L'Enfant Assassin des Mouches. 'The guy who produced it worked with a guy called Mike Brandt, a really kitsch singer who was big in the 70s, although Eminem later sampled elements of arrangements I had created for him.' This was on 2009's Crack a Bottle. 'I'd made a few hits with this guy, so to thank me, his producer said he'd make a record with me and I could do exactly what I wanted. It was very, very expensive to make. I don't think anyone today would throw so much money at such a strange project.'
The results were astonishing, if deeply weird: a melange of funk, free jazz, hard rock, musique concrète and stunning orchestrations. His label was so horrified, it refused to press more than a handful of copies. If Vannier was surprised by the belated interest in Melody Nelson, it was nothing compared to his bafflement when Votel contacted him, asking to rerelease it, which he did in 2005 to vast acclaim.
It's been quite a career. At 82, Vannier 'doesn't do much work' nowadays, but doesn't give much outward impression of slowing down, with another soundtrack coming up. Perhaps he can't stop. 'When you love music,' he says, 'there's absolutely nothing that can prevent you from making your own music. My parents were devout Protestants. They absolutely hated artists. There was absolutely no way I was going to pursue a career in music. But once I turned 18, I had the right to do so. When your real passion is music, it's like a tide that absolutely nothing can stop.'
Jean-Claude Vannier et Son Orchestre de Mandolines is out now on Ipecac.