A wartime yellow star haunted France’s pop provocateur
Lucien Ginsburg, later Serge Gainsbourg, arrived in Paris on 2 April 1928 and left more than 550 songs that other artists have covered over a thousand times. His death in March 1991, after a second heart attack, ended a career that split France and then turned him into a legend.
He was born Lucien Ginsburg in Paris on 2 April 1928, a twin, to Russian Jewish parents who had fled the revolution via Istanbul: a mezzo-soprano mother and a conservatory-trained father who played piano in bars and cabarets. The family became French in 1932. Under the German occupation he had to wear the yellow star. His father, barred from working, slipped to Limoges in 1942, and the rest followed on forged papers in 1944. Hidden at a boarding school under a false name, Lucien once spent a night alone in the forest with an axe while the Gestapo searched.
After the war he dropped out of the Lycée Condorcet and studied painting, with Fernand Léger among his teachers at the Académie de Montmartre. Conscription in 1948, he said, made him an alcoholic. He then taught at a school for orphans of murdered deportees, whose stories later fed his songs. Playing piano at the drag club Madame Arthur, he renamed himself Serge, since Lucien sounded like a hairdresser’s assistant, and took Gainsbourg in homage to the painter Gainsborough.
Inspired by Boris Vian, he debuted with the song Le Poinçonneur des Lilas, about a bored Métro ticket-puncher. His 1958 first album flopped despite Vian comparing him to Cole Porter; L’Eau à la bouche gave him a hit in 1960, and he wrote La Javanaise for Juliette Gréco. For France Gall he wrote Poupée de cire, poupée de son, which won Eurovision for Luxembourg in 1965, and later Les sucettes, whose double meaning she missed at 18.
He wrote more than 550 songs, covered over 1,000 times, and died after a second heart attack on 2 March 1991, now one of France’s best-loved figures.
Source: Serge Gainsbourg
