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directly quoted in suicide notes. Bodies washed ashore
from the Danube with the sheet music in their pockets,
corpses were reputedly found hanging or with a bullet
to the head or overdosed on barbiturates with the record
still revolving on the player. One elderly pianist, having
finished playing the tune, casually stepped out of his
seventh-floor window. When people began shooting
themselves in dancehalls as it played, it was banned
from radio stations (including the BBC), nightclubs and
eventually nationwide in Hungary. Associated deaths
were reported in Rome, Berlin, Paris and New York. It
had become, in a curious sense, fashion.
Gradually the curse of Gloomy Sunday spread to
those who performed the song. The songwriter Seress
narrowly escaped the Holocaust, surviving a forced labour
camp in the Ukraine. Many of his family, including his
mother, were not spared. He committed suicide in 1968
by garrotting himself after an earlier defenestration from
an upper-floor window had failed. The ex-lover for whom
the song had been partially written supposedly killed
herself within a week of its initial release. Later inter-
preters fared little better. Billie Holiday drank herself
to death at the age of 44. Paul Robeson was hounded by
the authorities and lost his mind. Hal Kemp died after a
head-on car crash at the age of 36. The curse, of course,
is an illusion. Wait long enough and everyone who sang
any song will come to an unfortunate end. In so much
as it did exist, it was as an example of human credulity
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HI S TOI RE DE MELODY NELS ON
and copycat hysteria. It was also falsely interpreted as
the cause rather than the focus of many unhappy people.
In the Blue Note, Paris, in the winter of 1954,
Gainsbourg had witnessed Billie Holiday singing Gloomy
Sunday . He was mesmerized by the song and its singer.
When he came to record what would be his last album
You re Under Arrest in 1987, he chose to cover the song. It
would seem a foreboding choice. Gainsbourg would have
been well aware of how ill he was becoming. His heart
attack was an abrupt reminder. Doctors had diagnosed
cirrhosis of the liver and signs of cancer. He recorded
a song for his young son Lulu, Hey Man Amen , that
was a plea, effectively from beyond the grave, to forget
about him and live his life fully (with some braggadocio
thrown in). To avoid facing his mortality, he drank
more thus accelerating it. His video for the song finds
him in a sordid neon-lit bedroom. After a desultorily
mimed line or two, he lights a cigarette and begins to
silently weep. He reads a note, the writing too small and
scrawled to be discerned as a suicide note or a final love
letter. The tears seem real, as they do in an indescribably
odd intervention attempted on television with a choir of
schoolboys dressed as Gainsbarre, complete with Gitane
and whiskey, serenading/pleading to an authentically
devastated Serge with their version of Je suis venu te
dire que je m en vais . In his live performance of Gloomy
Sunday at Zénith the following year, his pained perfor-
mance of barely contained rage and remorse belies the
inane muzak accompaniment. At the opposite end of the
spectrum is his performance of La Javanaise , which cuts
through the risible 1980s backing in a truly magical and
intensely poignant moment when the crowd begins to
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DA R R A N A NDE R S ON
sing along to the waltz. A note of caution to his canoni-
zation and the romanticization of his decline has been
voiced by the music writer Nick Kent, who recalled to
the Guardian how he d been told Serge in the depths
of alcoholism was heard screaming at night, I m going
blind . The sun was as gone and the darkness as total as
Valse de Melody .
To label his cover of Gloomy Sunday a suicide
note would be presumptuous though. Every serious
work of art inevitably contains a note of mortality,
consciously or not. It would also discount the fact he
was a seasoned actor and this a play of sorts. Yet it seems
genuine, as if, this late on, he has tired of word-play
and masks. Despite his inconsolable earnestness, it s
important not to rule out the possibility of a mischievous
delight in spreading the curse of Gloomy Sunday , like
some aurally transmitted virus, to his listeners. And it
ignores a defiance. Discovering there was a cursed song
that brought destruction, Gainsbourg records it. He is
mocking the gods. The artist, after all, is an agent of
free will in the face of all that is deterministic, even if
that free will is ultimately an illusion. The act is every-
thing. Gainsbourg would live for another four years and
work prodigiously. His may have been a sinking ship
but the band would play on, somehow, until the end. An
old black and white photograph of graffiti from Paris,
his city, from May 1968 says it best: La vie vite . The
fast life. A life lived. A week before he was due to go
to record with the Neville Brothers in New Orleans, a
new direction, and a day after buying Jane a diamond,
he was found dead, lying on his bed. He was buried with
his parents in Montparnasse Cemetery, near Huysmans,
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HI S TOI RE DE MELODY NELS ON
Lhote, Tzara and his beloved Baudelaire. He was buried
with Jane s cherished childhood toy Monkey , which she
had clutched on the cover of Histoire de Melody Nelson.
What would Gainsbourg have made of the resurrection
of Histoire de Melody Nelson, now that time is beginning
to catch up with it? What would he have made of the
many artists influenced by the work, each notably utterly
different from the last? Or that he shares the honour,
like his hero Oscar Wilde, of having a monument, 5 bis,
Rue de Verneuil, continually festooned with graffiti from
admirers, many of them not even born when he died,
who through the miracle of recorded sound and vision,
are able to resurrect the dead and travel back in time
and listen to those who will never entirely die as long
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