Orchestral pop, London to Paris
Initials B.B. landed on Philips in June 1968 as a Serge Gainsbourg studio album stitched 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 echoing in the first lines, all aimed at Brigitte Bardot, whose initials were enough branding in 1968 France.
The album plays like a dossier of 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: spoken crime report over Michel Colombier’s arrangement, two voices sharing the myth without softening it.
Orchestral pop is the useful label. 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, but a compilation with a thesis: English studio craft in service of French scandal.
Brigitte, elle est trop belle, elle est trop belle pour moi…
(Serge Gainsbourg, Initials B.B., 1968)
Play the INA clip of Bonnie and Clyde and you see why the album still travels: Bardot and Gainsbourg in a barn set, guns as props, the duo already treating pop as cinema. The title song’s pop video stitches Bardot photo shoots into the lyric’s aftermath. Between those images and the London brass, Initials B.B. freezes the year Gainsbourg turned private obsession into catalogue.
What lasts is the craft under the gossip. Session charts, borrowed classical motifs, EP leftovers rebuilt into an LP order. Bardot is the headline; the arrangements are the reason the headline still sounds expensive.
