JEAN-CLAUDE VANNIER
JEAN-CLAUDE VANNIER WAS THE MOST ORIGINAL WRITER AND ARRANGER OF THE åGE DÕOR OF FRENCH POP – RIGHT-HAND MAN TO SERGE GAINSBOURG AND BRIGITTE FONTAINE. BUT HIS NAME WAS NEAR-BURIED ’TIL 21ST CENTURY FANS – BECK, ALEX TURNER, AND NOW MIKE PATTON – DRAGGED
The unsung musical genius behind Serge Gainsbourg’s greatest records has his day in le soleil, with an unexpected role for Faith No More’s Mike Patton.
IT’S A BLUE-SKIED AFTERNOON IN Paris. On the terrace of Ma Bourgogne cafe, beneath the 17th century arcades of Place des Vosges, Jean-Claude Vannier has finished his steak tartare, and is telling stories, impressionistic tales of a remarkable life, from his late-’60s work as arranger, composer and songwriter for Serge Gainsbourg – the supreme poet and provocateur of French pop – via his underrated ’70s solo albums of rough-edged chanson, to his most recent and unexpected work, Corpse Flower.
Assembled with Faith No More singer and
Cali-gothic renaissance man Mike Patton, these 12 stygian ballades rework many of the songs from Vannier’s past. Translated and adapted by Patton, his six-octave growl prowling over Vannier’s spare and intricate arrangements, the album draws you into a noir cityscape, populated by immigrants, criminals and fugitives, figures Vannier has always written about, even when he knew his songs wouldn’t be sung.
“It’s true,” he says. “When I worked for [French choreographer] Roland Petit, I’d spend time with Nureyev and Yves-Saint Laurent on Rue Saint Anne, a whole street full of gay bars. I’m not gay myself but I was really struck by how colourful these lives were. These songs I wrote, about prisoners, transvestites, I knew I couldn’t place them with any French singers. Then, when I sent Mike Patton my songs, he liked them immediately. It was like sailing in a boat without a rudder. Finally, nothing was off limits.”
JEAN-CLAUDE VANNIER WAS BORN IN PARIS IN 1943, IN the middle of a bombing raid, into a family that detested music. “My parents were devout Protestants,” Vannier explains, “so drinking, smoking, music, women, all was superfluous. We did have a record player, because my father loved technology. He bought it to study the turntable motor.”
Despite a lack of music, young Vannier began composing tunes in his
head, assembled from the mechanical noises in and around the house. “I’ve always loved noises,” he says. “I’d compose melodies with my favourite sounds, cars, typewriters, church bells…”
Discouraged from creating his own music, Vannier found a job at Pathé Marconi recording studios as a technician. “I secretly taught myself piano there,” he says, “but kept making mistakes as an engineer. I was demoted from yé-yé girls to accordions. Bollocks day and night. Then they put me in the studio with an Algerian musician. This was during the war, so it was considered the ultimate punishment, but I was delighted.”
At 18 Vannier took a job as a bar pianist at the Aletty Hotel, in Algiers’ Casbah. “The only blond with blue eyes there,” he says, laughing, “I fell in love with that sensual music.”
Back in Paris, now educated in the ways of north African and Oriental modal progressions, Vannier was recruited by the film composer Michel Magne to work in his Château d’Hérouville recording studio – future home-from-home to Bowie, Bolan and Elton John – writing film scores. “I worked like a factor y worker,” he says. “Write in the morning and in the afternoon hear the orchestra play what you’d written. It was better than a conservatoire, because you could spot the bullshit straight away.”
It was during the intense Hérouville sessions that Vannier learned to use silence as a composing tool.
“I wrote a trumpet solo that was way too long,” he explains. “The trumpet player went red and passed out. That’s how I understood that silence is a way of letting people breathe: the musicians, and the people listening.”
In 1967 he met chansonnier Brigitte Fontaine, the Situationist Piaf of the radical Rive Droite. Their subsequent 1968 collaboration, Brigitte Fontaine Est…Folle can be considered Vannier’s first major work, a calling-card of influences from roma and Algerian musics to Weimar cabaret, lunatic xylophone and peculiar mechanical noises, all in the service of songs well suited to Vannier’s love of outsiders, and a discordant, melancholy world-view, perfectly appropriate to the subsequent events of May ’68.
“Things fell into place naturally with Brigitte,” he says, “I’m always interested in songs where someone has ever ything they want, then one day it goes to shit. That spanner in the works.”
After hearing the Fontaine LP, singer Claude Nougaro’s A&R man suggested Vannier work with Serge Gainsbourg – already notorious as yé-yé pop’s scandaliser-in-chief. As with many of Gainsbourg’s interviews, it was conducted after dark.
“He took us round all the Paris bars,” says Vannier. “I was in a terrible state. The next day I had to meet him again in London. I was sick on the plane. Such a mess. I met him at the hotel and the first thing he said was, ‘What happened to you?’”
Simultaneously stripped down and complex, artful and groovesome, the soundtracks Vannier composed for Gainsbourg, for such relatively minor films as La Horse, Cannabis, and the recently rediscovered Les Chemins De Katmandou, are some of the most startling instrumental works of the ’60s, with a masterly use of such unlikely lead instruments as clavinet, banjo, sitar and xylophone. All the more remarkable when you consider they were written blind.
“Bad movies,” explains Vannier. “I never saw them. Obviously, if it was a love scene or chase scene Serge would tell me, but I never saw them and I was never credited. Serge was terrified someone would see my name and steal his arranger off him.”
“SERGE WAS TERRIFIED SOMEONE WOULD SEE MY NAME AND STEAL HIS ARRANGER OFF HIM.” JEAN-CLAUDE VANNIER
Vannier also worked on the arrangements for the many pop songs Gainsbourg wrote for French actresses and starlets, an experience he eventually found dispiriting.
“We were writing for Michèle Mercier,” he remembers. “The worst actress in France. I told Serge, I don’t want this. He said, ‘Hang on,’ and took me out to a place near the Champs-Élysées with a small window in a door. The last of the Paris brothels. It was all French TV presenters and government ministers in there. Serge was saying, ‘This is who these people are.’ That became the song L’Hôtel Particulier, on Histoire De Melody Nelson.”
Recorded in London and Paris, between 1970 and 1971, Histoire… is rightly acknowledged as Gainsbourg and Vannier’s masterpiece. But an equally extraordinary collaboration – the weird and beautiful L’Enfant Assassin Des Mouches – followed in short order. Originally conceived as a ballet for Roland Petit, with an accompanying story by Gainsbourg about a cruel young child lured into an underground kingdom of flies, …Mouches is a brilliantly bizarre scrapbook of Vannier’s wild ideas. Only ever available as a promotional disc, the album was eventually reissued in 2005 as the debut release of Andy Votel’s Finders Keepers label. The reissue revived interest in Vannier’s career, but there remains a sadness attached to its failure and that of …Melody Nelson.
“They weren’t successful, and people lost interest,” says Vannier. “I don’t care about success. It doesn’t bother me [but] I wanted to do something surprising. The main problem is financial. You don’t always have enough money. Sometimes you just fall back on piano.”
Between 1975 and 1981 Vannier produced a series of four solo chanson LPs, inspired by the simplicity and complexity of Eric Satie: “Voice, lyrics, music, everything stripped back. I was the guinea-pig, Satie was the straw, the hay and the stable.”
MOJO says there is a dark vein of melancholy running through his work that’s all the more visible with everything stripped away. “Ah, haha!” he laughs. “Regrets! They have always been there. I don’t know why. It’s difficult to describe the feeling. I can’t always speak about my music.”
“HE’S THE MOTHERFUCKER,” SAYS MIKE PATTON, with a growling laugh, talking about Vannier from his San Francisco studio. “His arrangements are subtle, yet brutal. Refined and nasty. His string writing is insane, but he can do it pared down. He could do it with a jazz trio, solo piano. There’s something that’s in all his work, and it’s serious stuff.”
Mike Patton has no difficulty speaking about Vannier’s music. The pair first met at a Gainsbourg retrospective at the Hollywood Bowl in 2011, in what Patton refers to as a “timid clusterfuck” of famous fans – Beck, Sean Lennon, Beach House, Grizzly Bear – and stayed friends afterward. The ideas they later shared grew into Corpse Flower. “He’d send me these beautiful songs,” says Patton. “Some I had to rewrite, some didn’t have lyrics, some written just for me. We had Paris sessions, LA sessions, and he was totally pushing me to new places. He’d bust my balls, like you have no idea.”
Back at Ma Bourgogne, MOJO asks Vannier if the discipline to hold back and strip away is still the key to the best music. He thinks about this for a moment. “I write music with paper, pencil and a rubber,” he says. “The rubber is the most important.”
After our interview is over, Vannier will head back to his house in the south of France and have a day away from music, tending to his English roses, and possibly cooking a sausage and lentil stew. And after that? He shrugs. “I live.”
Thanks to Claire Taita.