Gainsbourg
All the man and the likkle pickney dem know about "L'Histoire de Melody Nelson". Weirdly the default Movabletype username is "Melody" and the default password is, you guessed it. What you mean you don't know it! My my, even David Holmes is hip to that record. Amusingly in France it's accorded something like the stature of Lloyd Weber's "Joseph and his Technicolour Dreamcoat", the schoolkids knew and loved it. That's something special for a record so sparse and powerful, so undeniably funky. This is probably Gainsbourg's other great long-playing achievement, crewed with the same gang of UK Library music hotshots (the Alans: Hawkshaw and Parker) and like Melody Nelson recorded in the UK.
Taughter and more presciently Nouvelle-Vague than MN's loping grooves which have been sampled by hundred of dudes wielding Akais, including Massive Attack, "L'Homme A Tete de Chou" (1976), the man with the Cauliflower Head (named after a sculpure Serge owned), is a song suite centred around a mythical "chick", Marilou. The instrumentation sunk relatively deep in the sound-scape, Gainsbourg's own erotic rasp riding roughshod on top, spouting poetry "cool". Highlights include the fantastic "Lunatic Asylum" with its jew's harp loop, tympani and aboriginal precussion. Simon was remarking recently of the ignored pre-genealogy of reggae interfusion present in things like Eric Clapton's cover-version of "I Shot The Sherriff" and the Eagles' cod-Reggae of "Hotel California", well add to that selection: Gainsbourg's "Aux Armes et Caetera" recorded in Jamaica in 1978 with Marley's Wailers and the i-Threes, notable for Gainsbourg's Reggae cover-version of "La Marseillaise". What was it he said to a shocked Whitney Houston on that talk show before millions of viewers? "I want to ferk you"? Burning money years before the KLF.
And this, which I posted last year at Dissensus (excuse the repetition). Jean-Claude Vannier orchestrated "Melody Nelson" and then went on to make this impossibly barmy piece, truly a one-off, too bizarre to be either a Progressive Rock record, a Jazz record or a Library record. Vannier here most appropriately viewed (perhaps) as a Gallic David Axelrod, with a Bollywood string quartet in tow, "L'Enfant Assasin des Mouches" comprised in part of off-cuts from the Melody Nelson sessions. I bought a copy of this from a dealer a few years back for an absolutely exorbitant sum. In fairness in those days we were certain a reissue would never materialise, but now thanks to Finders Keepers it's available on vinyl and CD once more. Don't pass it up.