How I Fell in Love With Serge Gainsbourg

Serge Gainsbourg was a certain kind of Englishman’s worst nightmare of a Frenchman: rude, alcoholic and extravagantly addicted to cigarettes (five packs of unfiltered Gitanes a day . . . five! . . . unfiltered!). This, of course, is the secret of the great man’s charm. To anybody who has ever regretted being born on the pallid and puritanical side of the Channel, he offers an exotic vision of what might have been: semi-permanent drunkenness, a bohemian contempt for all shirt buttons above the navel, a career of chaotic offence-giving rewarded with public adulation.