Mick Harvey - Delirium Tremens, review: ‘loose but spirited translations’

The Bad Seeds member returns with more English-language versions of Serge Gainsbourg songs
Covers: Mick Harvey has translated more Serge Gainsbourg songs in his latest solo album
Richard Godwin24 June 2016

Way back in the Nineties, Nick Cave’s mucker Mick Harvey recorded a couple of creditable albums of English-language Serge Gainsbourg covers.

Mick Harvey - Delirium Tremens

The Australian multi-instrumentalist was a decade or so ahead of le monde anglo-saxon in reappraising the French chansonnier’s wordy compositions — whose surface kitsch conceals authentic Baudelairean genius — and as if to remind us of that fact, Harvey has returned now with a third collection, of the songs he found hardest to translate 20 years ago .

Xanthe Waite makes a fetching Anna Karina/Jane Birkin/Bridget Bardot on duets Don’t Say a Thing, The Decadance and A Day Like Any Other (exquisite melancholy!), The Man With the Cabbage Head is a gorgeously seedy curtain raiser, while Couleur Cafe is a reminder of Gainsbourg’s cross-cultural rhythmic innovation (and perving).

The translations are loose but spirited and the settings as louche as you’d hope from the long-time Bad Seed – even if it’s hard to imagine many people liking this who wouldn’t prefer to listen to Serge.

(Mute)

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