ASK a set of designers to create a Bohemian Paris apartment and they probably come up with something that looks like Jean-Claude Vannier’s: books everywhere, Vintage Bauhaus Armchair, Art in every bit of space in the space in the space wall. You will say that the living room is dominated by its grand piano, but your eye continues to get a commodity of piano toys sitting and around it. In the closer inspection, there are piano toys on the shelves, crammed in books. “I have a lot in the other rooms,” Vannier repeated, speaking by a translator, “and I have a house in the country that is also full of them. I take them to concerts and play a note or two.
Relating an orchestra performance by playing a toy piano or kicking a guitar seems to be characteristic: Vannier, now in his early 80s, has become a disturbing presence in French pop for 60 years . His latest project is quite unique: a song cycle conducted by a broad Mandolin orchestra, accompanied by a story written by Vannier that involves a broken romance, alcoholism, homelessness and murder.
“All the good love stories are sad,” he said, “because if people live happily ever after and many children, there is little to say.” Being fair, certainly not less unique than the most popular co -coasting of Vannier Serge Gainsbourg, came for his 1972 album L’Efant Assassin Des Mouches (The Child Fly Killer). It was involved with a little boy who was persecuted by a fly before that was smothered to death by a lot of insects.
If Jean-Claude Vannier et son Orchester de Mandolines seemed unlikely to be varied, it was no different than Vannier’s 2019 album Corpse Flower, a partnership with Faith No More vocalist Mike Patton (a Vannier Superfan who releases his Mandolin album on his Ipecac label) featured songs about the hope of monkeys and the risk of avoiding one’s intestines when drunk. Neither Vannier’s own career as a singer-songwriter in the 70s, which happened, said, because no one else wanted to sing his songs inspired by Chanson.
It is meant to be without refining the quality of the albums to say that you can see why: Vannier’s idea of a single is a song called Merde, V’la le printemps, or Shit, here’s spring. “I don’t intend to surprise anyone,” he said. “I just want to talk about what I saw around me. I have a song called Mon Beau Travelo – my beautiful transvestite. I do music for a ballet with Roland Petit. After performance, he’ll take me In the streets of the Old Paris Opera. Surprisingly.
Vannier’s reputation, however, really depends on his organization and soundtrack work. David Holmes, DJ and creator of soundtracks for a host of Steven Soderbergh films, called Vannier “the greatest soundtrack composer to all of them, a true genius”. Vannier worked with everyone from the singer Françoise Hardy to the literature provocateur Michel Houellebecq. He wrote and recorded the songs with the latter, Houellebecq even taking singing lessons to get his voice to the beginning.
Mentioning his name prompting a frowning from Vannier: “It is true that I have worked with him, but he is a man who will never be my friend. I met one of his publishers in an antique store near it And they are [joked]’Houellebecq is worse than a gangster!’ He had a scratched reputation, so I would never relate to him. But I’m a big fan of his actual writing. “
For all these people, Vannier built the surprisingly organizing the orchestra’s orchestra, which occasionally hold the payment -back and often bring the influence of music from the Middle East -the result, he says he says , of his harmful first job, as an engineer in a Paris studio.
“I started with Yé-yé singers, girls and boys, and I made a mistake. So they started me with the Akordionists, who at that time was seen as very Bulgar: Their music was for In the dancing on Saturday night I was a bit of a jerk. There is a lot of fear of Arab people, they are not famous for all of France.
But this is Gainsbourg who remains his most popular client. Vannier cooperated with him in praised soundtracks for the films of Cannabis, La Horse, and Les Chemins de Katmandou and, most praised by all, in the 1971 Record Histoire de Melody Nelson. A discharge, has now been acclaimed not only as Gainsbourg’s masterpiece, but one of the greatest French language albums in pop history.
Its belated rediscovery by crate-digging sample hunters and musicians in the 90s seemed to spark a broader move to anglophone’s traditional snobbish listeners, dismissal attitude to French pop: If something Rarely as This Has escaped extensive attention, what else did the country’s musicians do?
“I think you’re right,” Vannier said. “When I first started receiving emails from the UK kids who went on about how surprising this note was, I thought they were laughing at me – I knew the British was overwhelming. But then Mojo called Magazine my daughter says they want to make a big spread to me. yet.
You can say that again. The echo of his dramatic melody Nelson Orchestrations can be heard everywhere from Beck’s sea change to the Arctic Monkeys’ Tranquility Base Hotel and Casino, and that they are all from Portishead to De La Soul. In recent years, Vannier has conducted massive, star-studded music concerts in London, Paris and LA.
But his relationship with Melody Nelson was a tricky. Vannier says he wrote most of the music – “Sometimes Gainsbourg will come and see me with a melody, but more and more he will be absolutely and I will have free re -hope” – but he refused Gainsbourg to give him credit for writing. They remained friends until the death of the French singer in 1991, but Vannier seemed to have found the Gainsbourg penchant for encouraging a little trial.
“He pretended to be a shit -stirrer,” he said, “because it earns for him financially. He is not really interested in politics or philosophy or psychology – he simply motioned for whatever his people had told him. Before the TV shows, he runs his hands with his hair so he looks more. Racing, he was truly an alcoholic, but at first it was a pose too.
Melody Nelson has another belated effect. While working for a French label, the British DJ, manufacturer and “Gainsbourg obsessive” Andy Votel heard “garbled rumors in Parisian Record Shop” about a mysterious “Melody Nelson follow-up” that has not been released. Some of the rumors are a bit fuzzy: it is based on the Lord of the Flies, it has an “X-rated cover”, forbidden it.
This is what they are talking about about L’ENFANT ASSASSIN des mouches. “The person who did this cooperated with a man called Mike Brandt, a real Kitsch singer that was large in the 70s, though eventually sample elements of organizing the elements of organizations which I created for him. ” It was to crack a bottle of 2009. “I made some hits this year, so to thank me, his manufacture to do it.
The results are surprising, if deeply unique: a melange of funk, free jazz, hard rock, musique concracters and stunning orchestra. His label was very scared, refusing to hit more than a small copy. If Vannier was surprised by the belated interest in Melody Nelson, it would have been nothing compared to his bafflement when Votel was in contact with him, asking to reinstate it, which he did in 2005 to climb.
It’s a bit of a career. At 82, Vannier “does not do much work” today, but does not provide many external impression of slowing down, along with another soundtrack. He probably couldn’t control it. “When you love music,” he says, “There is nothing completely that nothing can stop you from making your own music. My parents are loyal Protestants. They really hate artists. There’s no absolute way I’m going To pursue a career in the music.
