Interview: Charlotte Gainsbourg on her new album, Beck and T in the Park

Published on Friday 12 February 2010 16:23

I LOVE T in the Park, I really do, but among the things it possibly lacks are Gallic poise, elegance, sophistication – oh, and chic too. Scotland's annual rockfest shouldn't feel bad about any of this, however. There will be corners of Paris – since they've been Starbucked – which are also deficient in these areas.

So I'm on a mission to persuade Charlotte Gainsbourg to come to Balado in July. She's just released a highly seductive album where she sings/murmurs over the snaky musical arrangements of Beck.

It's been rave-reviewed and people want to see her perform the songs in a live setting. So why should that not be a cowfield under canvas the colour of Rangers blue, in front of lager-swilling aesthetes who've spent too long in the sun or more likely the rain?

"Well, it sounds like a lot of fun," she says when we finally chat after a pursuit lasting more than a month. Is she being polite, or ironic? In Paris today her English is certainly good enough.

And she seems courageous enough to take on the challenge. As an actress, Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin's wee lassie has proved pretty much unshockable. Ah, but singing is different.

"This is scary for me, very scary," she says. "It's not the same as movies or even theatre, which I haven't done much. And it's not the same as singing in a studio. In front of an audience you're bare."

This last statement may strike you as odd if you saw the 38-year-old Gainsbourg in Antichrist. That was the Lars Von Trier shocker in which she played a mother who goes mad in the woods, maiming her husband and herself after the death of her infant son. I recently rented it from my local Blockbuster and the assistant said he was obliged to warn me, in front of kids whose small hands were gripping the latest Disney spectacular, of its ultra-explicit content. For some reason, he didn't mention Antichrist's talking fox.

"But movies are collaborations," continues Gainsbourg, "and the same with this album. You feel the other person's strength. On my own I'd miss that. It's risky but, you know, I want to try. I've just played some shows in New York, small ones. They went OK so maybe I'll do more. Challenges are important."

Waterskiing used to be Gainsbourg's idea of challenging recreation between acting roles; not any more. After an accident in 2007 she suffered a life-threatening cerebral haemorrhage. "My brain had been pushed to the side of my head and was filled with blood," she says. "The doctor was totally shocked. He told me I should be dead or paralysed."

Her album is called IRM, French for MRI, and Gainsbourg ended up oddly addicted to scanners. "That was a shattering time. The emergency surgery – basically, I had a hole drilled in my head – was successful, but it was many months before I could feel better again. And when I went to Los Angeles to record with Beck, it was still very heavy in my mind."

Why Beck? "Because he's the person I most admire in music. I imagined we wouldn't say much in the studio, that it would be instinctive, and it was. He came up with the line 'Drill my head full of holes' without knowing I had a hole in mine. He was like 'I'm so sorry!' but it was funny, and it helped the relationship."

Beck is a long-time admirer of Gainsbourg's old man, just as before him were Air and Jarvis Cocker, collaborators on her previous album 5:55. Did he ask lots of Serge-related questions? "No, I think he could feel how sensitive I am about that. I've lived with my father's songs all my life but when he died I had to stop listening to them, they made me too sad."

Sensitive she may be, but Gainsbourg, a mother of two herself, gives up a few more details of life avec Serge and Jane, France's president and first lady of sex and daring, who defined their country for a generation when they heavy-breathed through Je t'aime... moi non plus together. She says: "My parents lived in a very easy way. We had a tiny house in Paris and a very simple country house in Normandy. My father was brought up with no money and told us that it was incredible to stay in a hotel. But, of course, they did go off to nightclubs every evening. And they'd get back just as we were going to school."

What are her earliest musical memories? "Chopin, Bach, Georges Brassens, Elvis and Ian Dury. I remember, when I'd saved up enough money, asking my father what record I should buy and he told me (Bob Dylan's] Lay Lady Lay so I did.

"Of course, his music was always played in the house. I say that, as if every musician does this, but it struck me as really pretentious. And he always played his songs the loudest so the neighbours would complain. But I grew up always admiring his music although I chose the wrong songs to love the most, like L'Ami Caouette, which he hated. He'd be very upset today that I'm still mentioning it."

When Gainsbourg was 12, Serge wrote a song for her and called it Lemon Incest. For the first time in our conversation, she struggles for the right English word, but it's not out of embarrassment. "That song had so much, how you say, tenderness. It was my first experience of singing with my father and I loved that song, so beautiful and pure. And, of course, provocative. It caused a great scandal so it was good for me by then to be at boarding school in Switzerland."

Gainsbourg says she was irresistibly drawn to her great scandal, Antichrist, which has been praised and damned ever since its unveiling at Cannes. "I'd never had the chance to do something that powerful before. Of course, it was embarrassing having to masturbate in front of the film crew but this was a movie I was really compelled to do.

"It was like a dream and a nightmare and even the nasty bits were thrilling. But it influenced my record, which I did straight after. I felt empty, lost, like all my blood had gone. I was very moody and didn't try to hide that."

Gainsbourg talks a bit about her mother, who she's just visited on her return from the States – "a very daring lady" she says of the first woman to appear on screen full-frontal. Birkin remarked recently that her daughter's accident had made her want to "go for it, go for life" and you wonder if lots of the things Gainsbourg is offered, post-Antichrist, must seem safe and a bit boring.

Bare-chested, hard-to-please T in the Park wouldn't be that, I say. She laughs in her cool French way, which makes the possibility even more tantalising. v

IRM (Because/Electra) is out now www.charlottegainsbourg.com

&#149 This article was first published in Scotland on Sunday, February 14, 2010.