The anthem, slowed to a Kingston one-drop
In January 1979, at Dynamic Sounds in Kingston, Serge Gainsbourg does not so much sing La Marseillaise as ride it. Sly Dunbar’s drums sit back. Robbie Shakespeare’s bass states the changes. Rouget de Lisle’s call to arms arrives as a chant, not a march. The sessions run from 12 to 24 January. Philippe Lerichomme produces. Geoffrey Chung engineers, with Philip Ziadie assisting. The title they take home is Aux armes et caetera.
The room is a reggae band, not a French orchestra. With Dunbar and Shakespeare come Michael “Mao” Chung on guitar and piano, Radcliffe “Dougie” Bryan on rhythm guitar, Uzziah “Sticky” Thompson on percussion, Ansel Collins on organ and Robbie Lyn on piano. The backing voices are the I-Threes: Rita Marley, Marcia Griffiths and Judy Mowatt. Philips releases the album, Gainsbourg’s thirteenth studio record, in the early spring of 1979. It is the first time a white singer records a full reggae album in Jamaica, after single tracks such as Paul Simon’s Mother and Child Reunion and Peter Tosh with Mick Jagger. Gainsbourg wanted a dread, dub-minded session and hired the people who could play it. His vocal works because it is closer to a chant than to the orchestral chanson he was known for.
The title track keeps Rouget de Lisle’s lyric and replaces the military step with Gainsbourg’s reggae arrangement. The “et caetera” is the shrug in the name: to arms, and the rest left hanging. In France the record does not stay a studio curiosity. Michel Droit, in Le Figaro, attacks it as a profanation and pushes the argument toward Gainsbourg’s Jewishness. The noise helps. The album goes platinum within months. By 1991 it has sold about 650,000 copies in France. Years later the French edition of Rolling Stone places it among the great French rock albums.
I am a rebel who has given La Marseillaise back its original meaning.
(Serge Gainsbourg, Hall Rhénus, Strasbourg, 4 January 1980)
The line above belongs to the night the tour meets the backlash. On 4 January 1980, at the Hall Rhénus in Strasbourg, a bomb scare empties the hotel where the Jamaican musicians are staying. Paratroopers in red berets fill the front rows with tracts against the reggae anthem. Jane Birkin wants the show cancelled. The musicians, already rattled, will not play. Promoter Harry Lapp later recalls Gainsbourg saying he is not about to fold in front of drunken soldiers. He listens to Birkin anyway, sends the band on toward Brussels, walks out alone and sings the original Marseillaise a cappella, fist raised. The paras stand to attention. He finishes with an obscene gesture and leaves. The concert as billed does not happen. The a cappella does, and French television carries it.
What you hear on the record is the opposite of that bare voice: a Kingston rhythm section treating a national march as a groove. The I-Threes answer him. The bass does not march. If Strasbourg makes the scandal visible, the album is the musical bet, cut in under two weeks and still the disc people reach for when they argue about Gainsbourg and France. Play the title track for the one-drop. Stay for Lola Rastaquouère if you want the same band in a less ceremonial mood.
