Initials B.B. – Orchestral pop between London and Paris

Orchestral pop, London to Paris

Initials B.B. landed on Philips in June 1968 as a Serge Gainsbourg studio album built from sessions spanning 1965 to May 1968. Claude Dejacques produced. The rooms changed: Fontana and Chappell in London, Hoche in Paris. Arthur Greenslade, David Whitaker and Michel Colombier took turns arranging. Andre Decamp drew the cover. The title track opens the set with Dvorak’s New World symphony quoted in the brass and Edgar Allan Poe’s raven in the first lines, aimed at Brigitte Bardot. In 1968 France those initials were enough to name Brigitte Bardot.

The album collects Gainsbourg’s mid-sixties English experiments. Comic Strip, Torrey Canyon and Hold Up come from the June 1967 Chappell dates. Earlier Fontana cuts (Docteur Jekyll et Monsieur Hyde, Qui est in qui est out, Shu Ba Du Ba Loo Ba, Marilu) had already existed as EP material. May 1968 at Chappell added Initials B.B., Bloody Jack, Ford Mustang and Black and White. Sitting in the middle is Bonnie and Clyde, cut at Hoche with Bardot on 11-12 December 1967: a spoken crime report over Michel Colombier’s arrangement, two voices on the same story, said plainly.

The label that fits is orchestral pop. Brass punches, comic onomatopoeia, American car names, oil-spill reportage on Torrey Canyon. Gainsbourg’s spoken-sung French sits against London session players who treat the charts like soundtrack cues. Pitchfork later slotted the album at 117 on its 200 best of the 1960s; French Rolling Stone ranked it among the great French rock LPs. It is not a concept suite like Histoire de Melody Nelson. It is a compilation of English studio work, recorded in London and Paris, put behind the French scandal.