CHARLOTTE GAINSBOURG
Serge’s daughter brings thoughts of writing the worst song ever, and help from Macca and Daft Punk.
The Gallic pop and screen inheritor talks about her impending, luminary-packed new long-player.
It is 33 years since Charlotte Gainsbourg and her late dad Serge scandalised France with Lemon Incest; since then she has made her name primarily as an actress, most notoriously in Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist and Nymphomaniac. She’s also managed to record three studio albums: Charlotte For Ever (1986), with Serge writing and producing; 5:55 (2006), with Jarvis Cocker and Air; and IRM (2009), with Beck. Now, however, she’s decided to take control. “On the previous albums, I was there to say what I wanted to sing and add a few words,” she says. “In my mind, though, it was not enough, I was not a proper writer. Beck said you have to try to write the worst song ever, and that’s how you start. Well, I didn’t try to do that, but it did get me going.” A move from France to New York allowed her to focus on music and underlined how that differs from making films. “I’d been working with [producer] Sebastian Akchoté in his personal studio and other spaces in Paris for four years, and he was willing to wait on me. Films became the priority because directors can’t wait for you. And writing your own songs is more personal, you can say what you want, but there’s no hiding.” For material, Gainsbourg raided her diaries – she has kept a journal since the 1980s (“Not very interesting things but melodrama and insights”) – and explored her feelings about the death in 2013 of her sister, the photographer Kate Barry. She then wrote the results down as poetry and wrestled with making them fit the music Akchoté was sending across the Atlantic, before recording vocals in Electric Lady in New York – a new experience for someone accustomed to a script. “I didn’t think I had it in me to play with words because it’s not only putting your guts into words, it’s also trying to have a kind of fun with it, and I really wasn’t sure of myself. I got the confidence very, very slowly in the end.” She had help from Daft Punk’s Guy-Manuel De Homem-Christo helped on the title track; another, Songbird In A Cage, was written by Paul McCartney after a lunch together six years ago: “I asked him, and he sent this song. It was so generous and I didn’t even have an album to put it on.” Next up is another film, director Eric Barbier’s adaption of the Romain Gary novel Promise At Dawn, but it doesn’t feel as if she will be putting music on the back-burner for very long. “I want to release the album now and try to do some live shows,” she says. “You won’t have to wait six years
for the next album. I really want to get working now.” David Hutcheon