Gainsbarre (French Tickler)

This was written for the second Petomane album "The Rock Machine Turns You On". Petomane are myself, the painter Christopher Kasch and Martin Kent Smith; the only other person i know who is as loose with his musical favours as I am. We are bikes; no foolin':bikes! Petomane is the reason I got back into creating music after not doing anything from my mid-twenties to my early thirties. It was initially a lot of fun as neither of us could work Reason or Cubase and some of the original songs like "My Little Vampire" and "Hulk Sadness" were both magnificent and astoundingly stupid. We hit an early groove with a song called "The Dark Night of David Soul"*, from which point it be came far, far less enjoyable but a lot more artistically satisfying. On a lot of the early recordings you can hear Kasch's fishtank gurgling away in the background: our version of the jug played constantly throughout the 13th Floor Elevators records.

This is a song about, duh, Serge Gainsbourg, a universal constant in the Petomane world and the cornerstone of any equations formulated there. He is one of the building blocks of our life; a washed out, listless loop in our DNA strand. Gainsbarre is the latter dissipated Serge and the song is a fairly straight forward biography of the great man. I sing it in a rumbling monotone that sounds almost exactly unlike Serge Gainsbourg. Though possibly a bit Serge Danot.

Fact: an early incarnation of petomane was called Serge. That first e.p. released under that name (The Drinking Classes)is now a collector's item. Potentially.

*and by general consensus still the best thing we have ever done. I'll pop the lyrics up here at some point.

Gainsbarre (French Tickler)

I’m understudied and I’m ill prepared,
Hope you don’t notice that the words are slurred,
My fingers tremble as I flick the catch,
And Marie Curie turns to ash,
I’m always shivering though it’s hardly cold,
How’d an enfant terrible get so very old?
Looking out the windows at ticket punchers and English girls,
I pull my pants down and the tricolour unfurls,
My house is all black like Goya’s dining room,
I find I’m thinking dirty thoughts and waiting for the blue of noon,

One Pastis and one Gitane,
Again and again and again and again,

They call me lulu though I don’t like to shout about it,
I love the ladies but I’m never quite devout about it,
In the movies I never come up trumps,
Who casts heavy wearing women’s ballet pumps?
I am for Apollinaire and Stephane Mallarme,
I am for Rimbaud, the one that got away,
Baudelaire, Jacques Vache and Boris Vian,
Mine’s a slower suicide than Thomas Chatterton’s,

One Pastis and one Gitane,
Verlaine, Verlaine, Verlaine, Verlaine,

Guarding my modesty and girding my loins,
The kind of profile that you see on Roman coins,
A Jewish Russian Frenchman but you can’t see the joins,
Everybody knows me – from Descartes to Desmoines,
I staged a little riff on Bach called Je t’aimes moi non plus,
The Vatican then banned it and that was quite a coup,
In terms of sales specifically, cause between me and you,
Anywhere outside of France they think that’s all I do!

One Pastis and one Gitane,
Again and again and again and again

I am of the infinite in the Champs Elysees,
Plucking on a harp and drinking holy wine all day,
The women here are beautiful but lack certain grist,
I find I’m more a gourmet than an ornithologist,
You would think a cannon was a pretty heavy thing,
But my cannon moves the angels, god wants me up with him,
So while I serenade the seraphim with my celestial song,
They all know that down below is where I belong

One Pastis and one Gitane,
Amen, amen, amen, amen









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