Music

Mick Harvey and a Conversation with a Legend

Serge Gainsbourg inhabits a peculiar place in the cultural conscious. Beloved equally by neo-mods, perfume ad executives, and skeevy older dudes looking to date young, Gainsbourg is also easily one of the most influential pop singers of the second half of the 20th century. A survivor of WW2 occupied France, a rock provocateur before the word became shorthand for “dickhead,” and the man most single handedly responsible for Jarvis Cocker’s very existence, it’s hard to do him justice. And, up until the mid 1990s, when Mick Harvey recorded his first of what is now a four-volume collection of Serge Gainsbourg covers translated into English, few English speakers tried. But here we are, 20 years later, and Mick Harvey (ex-Birthday Party, ex-Bad Seed, ex-Crime and ex- City Solution, currently PJ—no relation, lol—Harvey collaborator) has just released the third LP in his absurd and wonderful venture, Delirium Tremens.

The first two Gainsbourg albums Harvey did (Intoxicated Man in 1995 and Pink Elephants in 1997) covered what would most easily be considered the French pop star’s hits (Bonnie and Clyde, etc.). With Delirium Tremens, Harvey, himself a well-regarded songwriter and reasonably revered arranger and sideman, delves into Gainsbourg lesser known TV soundtrack work, 70s concept rock, and assorted oddities. The album’s tone, however, is maintained through Harvey’s, at this point probably patented, slow burn noir theatrics. Cool as word and concept has (probably thankfully) lost any meaning, but it occasionally still applies; this is music to smoke cigarettes and dress like an adult to.

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Mick Harvey was kind enough to talk on the phone from a hotel in Portugal, while beginning his tour for the new PJ Harvey album, to discuss songwriting, process, and the perils and/or newfound ease of translation. I appreciate him taking the time. Delirium Tremens is available now from Mute.

Noisey: I don’t know if you were being self-effacing, but I was reading an older interview and if you were you said you don’t consider yourself a songwriter. Was that an accurate statement?
Mick Harvey: That’s not really the main thing that I do. As a musician, as someone who works in music, my main things that I contribute to are other people’s recordings. My own recordings, mostly as an arranger—a musician and an arranger, sometimes a producer. I work on the whole body of music, the song writing—they happen, but they’re not really what I do as my main thrust. The way I look at the way I am about songwriting, it’s quite different to the way people I know who are committed songwriters it’s quite different to the way they are about the whole thrust. So, I think there is a…people find it hard to understand the distinction and ride, But I think people who are songwriters understand what I’m talking about.

You’re working both as an interpreter of Serge Gainsbourg songs and you’re working as a translator. Do you find the process more difficult or easier than songwriting? Or is it just a different beast?
Well I don’t think I find songwriting difficult when I get to it because it’s something about which I can feel, you know, unburdened. I don’t really have any point of comparison. I just entered into the recent project with a view to do another volume. Which seemed like such a stupidly bad idea at the time and now it seem like the perfect thing to do in a way. I guess if you’re going to do another volume of Gainsbourg it should be almost a bad idea in a way…. but the idea of doing two new volumes of Gainsbourg sounded like fun. The last time—I think because I was 20 years younger and it hadn’t really been done properly. I hadn’t really ever done a solo album so I felt I suppose there was a lot of pressure then to get a lot of certain things right. It was a very big undertaking for me to do the recordings. Twenty years on coming back to the project I felt quite a unburdened. It felt like it should be a lot of fun and we had a really enjoyable time doing them actually. The whole translating process was so much simpler. There are a lot of translated versions online. Twenty years ago, I had to go to a French University and collaborate with someone to get that thing going. So it was like a completely different job to get into because I was able to use the resources on the internet and just set about doing the translations myself.

Was there a particular source that you found yourself returning to?
No. I can manage a certain amount of French so I could get a translator going and see if it was getting things wrong. I’m going on to the online sources and seeing what they did. You can get an idea because people will talk about word play in different songs. Then I had to figure out what I wanted to do. A lot of the basic understanding of the meaning behind of the song—once you got that basically in place it’s really just the task of getting the rhyming scheme and making it fit to the music. You know you have to make the meter right and the rhyming scheme is really important and the musicality. You have to start working on shaping the rhyming and what it’s about so that it works musically. That’s really the main task.

Are you singing from a perspective that changes with each song depending on what the subject matter or the artist you’re covering?
Yeah. You know, the interesting twist here is that I would have chosen songs through how strong the lyrical content is in conjunction with the atmosphere of music. I think this it’s a very personal choice so I would just want to express those words in the way I feel them, whereas with Gainsbourg it’s probably a different thing because I end up with a lot of songs that I find that are interesting or there are different things that attract them to me, as subject matter to translate and to use, and you know they have quite a different function in a way. Which is something I discovered more when I finally did some shows. I think my approach—it’s very depersonalized. You don’t have to be as personally engaged with the material, I don’t think. Somehow it seems to have an arm’s length. I’m not quite sure why that is. It just seems to work that way.

You said something about the function of the songs. Without giving a shortcut we weren’t allowed to take what do you mean by that?
For me, the whole project is about translating French songs into English. [The function of that] as a project is quite different than me working with a singer writing original material or even in the odd case when I’ve written my own original material, or even when I’m doing interpretations of other people songs. The Gainsbourg project is quite different undertaking. Its function for me as an artist, I’ve discovered quite a different one than the other material that I work on. I don’t know why that is, it just ended up being that way. I suppose taking on the job is like, “If I hone down Gainsbourg to be these dozen songs that I do have a strong personal connection with lyrically or whatever, then that’ll be the end of the project,” but obviously I’ve done four volumes now [laughs], so it had to be doing a big cross section of this material to represent him—to represent the work, in translation.

So I’ve ended up with a lot of songs that I don’t necessarily have a personal relationship with and working with a lot of material that’s… funny , you know? Or quite flippant or quite provocative. It’s not that I don’t like things like that—I just don’t normally work in those areas. So I find myself in quite different zones. I suppose the function is quite different for me than other work.

I was totally unaware of Alain Bashung (who co-wrote “I Envisage” with Gainsbourg)…
He’s an interesting cool guy. He put out a few good things in the 70s. A lot of these French musicians come along and they do go under the radar that are popular in France. Quite a few of them are missed.

Was he a contemporary back in 1982? I know your sound back in 1982 was considerably more insane—for lack of a better way of putting it.
Actually I didn’t really know much about him either. I had heard his name and I’d come across a couple of things down through the years, I was aware of his connections with a couple of people I know didn’t know much about his music. I still don’t really; I know he did a version of… one of the Melody Nelson songs—one of the really long ones that I was also thinking of covering, which is actually pretty good.

Your curation is really great—you’re picking stuff, from hits and than deeper cuts from different eras, stuff Serge wrote for himself or other artists. The fun as a listener is the interpretations musically, lyrically, and the connected dots of this man’s behemoth career and influence.
Oh yeah, and there’s actually a couple of really obscure tracks on the next volume that I’m not sure have ever been released. One of them is recorded as a song called “Le Noire” which translates to “The Drowned One” which is a duet I do with Jess Ribeiro—I think Carla Bruni has done an English translation too or a French one—I’m not sure.

Does doing these records, even the process, revitalize your own creative juices?
I don’t know. There were other projects I could have been doing but I decided to do these Gainsbourg albums and they tend to shut everything out. There’s no time. Maybe it’s really good and when I get to the other stuff I’ll feel all fresh and ready to approach it in a different way but it swamped everything and now I’m on the PJ Harvey tour so I have no idea. There are only so many hours in the day, but I’m happy to have completed this bizarre project and I think people will really enjoy it and it’s good to keep putting these things out and to keep busy and keep being challenged and enjoying what I’m doing.

It’s unclear whether or not Zachary Lipez can speak French. Follow him on Twitter.