Mick Harvey
Intoxicated Man / Pink Elephants

It always happens like this, at some point the old drunk sees pink elephants.

Well, the titles are spot on, they really rock...

But tell me Mick, what made you think of redoing Gainsbourg? Just the issue with the voice would have discouraged anyone. That lived-in, hyper-sensual tone, come on...

Yet you pulled it off. And Anita pulled it off in the roles of the various Brigitte, Anne, Jane...

The thing is, you're not pretentious. You're someone who works in the shadows, you did it with Nick Cave, you did it with Polly. And now you're doing it with Gainsbourg.

God bless you...

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Gainsbourg is Gainsbourg, period.

He sits there with his swagger face and nothing else is needed. After all, no one ever had a face like that...

There was a Greek driver who was his spitting image. "Gainsbourg!!!" French tourists shouted at him, but the poor guy didn't understand.

The point is that physiognomy alone is not enough, you need the light, the denial, that stuff that goes through you. And anyway, Gainsbourg is an archetype. Rather, a million archetypes summed up into one.

So, picking randomly, here you have the ugly duckling, the wandering Jew, the spermatic genius, the rotten aesthete, the charmer of young girls, the maudit next door, the holy drunk at the corner bar.

Gainsbourg has a couple of secrets, the first one says that tone is much more than voice and atmosphere much more than music, the second that notes are just a curtain rising on a handful of words. Pink clouds blessed by a smirk, with the taste of sin in the mouth.

That the taste, the taste is important, those nuns know it well who make naughty kids suck on the stem of a raw artichoke, "Do you taste the guilt, do you feel it, huh!!!".

Another thing, Gainsbourg is like Bowie, quite chameleonic. He is interested in two things: writing songs and being successful. So, most of the time, he latches onto the fashion of the moment by blowing a poisonous breeze on it.

Starting from the rive gauche, he falls in love with Africa, becomes ye ye, gets psychedelic, reaches an almost punk disgust, flirts with reggae. Whatever he does, it's always Gainsbourg...

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Gainsbourg...

A half-myth and a half-mister nobody, at least until the nineties. Apart from "Je t'aime moi non plus," we were pretty much songless.

However, we sensed his murky and cursed allure and knew that sooner or later we would end up colliding with it. What was missing was a master of ceremonies.

That's why with the double "Intoxicated Man" (1995) and "Pink Elephants" (1997) Mick Harvey had the great merit of filling a void.

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Mick Harvey on the cursed knows his stuff, spend thirty years with Nick Cave, then you tell me. Stuff you start with fury and end up with a sort of quid suspended between classicism and sickness.

Thus, the post-"Kicking Against the Pricks" Cave, is both the bridge between two worlds and the sieve that filters music and words.

Nothing better to convey those nuances between murky and sweet, the elegant, hyper-lived jazz, the rive gauche melancholy, the breezy pop rock, the tribalism of the night.

"Intoxicated Man" is pure vertigo. And pure cinema too. Senses and intelligence sway between whim, instability, elegance.

You're in a movie with the film that’s always changing. Here’s the ye ye of Brigitte, here’s the toxic jazz.

Then there are mumblings surrounded by Gitanes smoke, demons like pink elephants. With excitement and aesthetics that, after a long courtship, wink at each other.

"Pink Elephants," on the other hand, veers towards a more classic singer-songwriter style. The surprise are the lesser-known tracks, those where the more melancholic and emotional side emerges. Not only "Je t'aime moi non plus" is man’s life.

The old France makes a leap forward by twenty years and a reborn Gainsbourg offers his quid to a new mystery in music.

The journey, begun with a sweet drift - the nymph, the bed, and the waves - (track 1), ends with someone whispering "Flee from happiness lest it flees from you" (track 30).

And between these two opposites, the stars light up and go out...

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Today, with the addition of some unreleased tracks, you can listen to both albums back to back. Should you like them, know that Harvey has made two more Gainsbourgian albums: "Delirium Tremens" and "Intoxicated Women." How are they? The answer in the next episode...