Serge Gainsbourg is 35 years old, his most famous songs

We can also start from a small anecdote, just to lighten things up: if you believe that people like Keith Richards or Lemmy Kilmister has seen and done (above all done) everything, how about someone who started his career with the yellow six-pointed star pinned to his chest in occupied France, to make his name in the decades to come some of the most beautiful pages of pop (and rock, and funk, and songwriting) ever written, being with the most beautiful women in the world, winning a Eurofestival (with “Poupée de Cire, Poupée de Son”sung by France Gall), forcing a Pope (Paul VI) to issue an excommunication (addressed to the producer of “Je t’aime, moi non plus”), having a heart attack at forty without giving up Gitanes without a filter to die at sixty-two, on March 2, 1991, 35 years ago, consumed by cirrhosis?

The bohemian image was one of many masks that Serge Gainsbourg he loved to wear to enchant the public. A sort of trademark, more functional to his career as an entertainer than to the construction of his myth, because Lucien Ginsburg – this is his real name – he didn’t need doping to fuel his legend, not even when he was alive. An eclectic and extremely versatile author and musician, a trendsetter, a superb artist, Gainsbourg, despite having every reason to do so, never fell into the trap of falling in love with himself and becoming a cliché, striving – even when, by now, the disease had practically annihilated him – to perpetually question himself, escaping every label, indeed having fun like crazy mixing the sacred (jazz, Boris Vian, Paul Klee, Chopin) to the layman (The B-series cinema, advertising, effective jokes). Below are some of his most famous songs.

“L’hôtel particulier” (“Histoire de Melody Nelson”, 1971)