Sortie le 30 juin aux Etats-Unis. Je participerai à des rencontres-signatures le 17 juillet à Los Angeles et le 24 à San Francisco (cette dernière organisée par City Lights - librairie mythique !). Je n'en reviens toujours pas...

Prochain rendez-vous californien à propos de Gainsbourg : mardi 24 juillet à 7:00 PM au Tosca Café à San Francisco, à côté du City Lights Bookstore (et organisé par eux). Si je suis fier ? Très en-dessous de la réalité...

Gilles Verlant : Ma bio de Gainsbourg sortira en juillet chez Tam Tam Books à Los Angeles, traduite par Paul Knobloch, qui a traduit Boris Vian en américain... Je vais tellement me la péter dans les mois qui viennent, je sens déjà que ça monte ! En avant-première mondialissime, voici la couverture.

When Serge Gainsbourg died in 1991, France went into mourning: François Mitterand himself proclaimed him “our Baudelaire, our Apollinaire.” Gainsbourg redefined French pop, from his beginnings as cynical chansonnier and mambo-influenced jazz artist to the ironic “yé-yé” beat and lush orchestration of his 1960s work to his launching of French reggae in the 1970s to the electric funk and disco of his last albums. But mourned as much as his music was Gainsbourg the man: the self-proclaimed ugly lover of such beauties as Brigitte Bardot and Jane Birkin, the iconic provocateur whose heavy-breathing “Je t’aime moi non plus” was banned from airwaves throughout Europe and whose reggae version of the “Marseillais” earned him death threats from the right, and the dirty-old-boy wordsmith who could slip double-entendres about oral sex into the lyrics of a teenybopper ditty and make a crude sexual proposition to Whitney Houston on live television.
Gilles Verlant’s biography of Gainsbourg is the best and most authoritative in any language. Drawing from numerous interviews and their own friendship, Verlant provides a fascinating look at the inner workings of 1950s–1990s French pop culture and the conflicted and driven songwriter, actor, director and author that emerged from it: the young boy wearing a yellow star during the German Occupation; the young art student trying to woo Tolstoy’s granddaughter; the musical collaborator of Petula Clark, Juliette Greco and Sly and Robbie; the seasoned composer of the Lolita of pop albums, Histoire de Melody Nelson; the cultural icon who transformed scandal and song into a new form of delirium.