Serge Gainsbourg’s favourite drink
It’s icons like Serge Gainsbourg that make people think having a drink constantly in your hand makes you cool.
All it takes to match the sheer charisma and charm of L’Homme à tête de chou is to thank your liver for its years of service and then kiss it fondly goodbye in a decades-long burst of amber glory. Perhaps, secretly, those people know it’s the easy option. A shortcut to feeling like the most magnetic soul in the room, accessible from any off licence and most corner shops in the country.
One also can’t really think about what you’re doing when you’re blotto. That right there is what separates Gainsbourg from your mate Clive, who thought that getting into whiskey at 19 would get him laid and now can’t tie his shoelaces anymore. For the great man, the Gallic Leonard Cohen, the charm was there despite the booze. Nothing that he did came because of his voracious drinking habits.
I’m not blind though, the man did make being sozzled look like the ultimate way of experiencing life. Thanks to the magic of YouTube we now also have the key to his drink of choice, the Gibson. Considering this gin cocktail was as often in his hand as a Gitanes cigarette, it’s no wonder the way he talks makes Captain Jack Sparrow look like Ned Flanders. Dubbed a cousin of the Martini, the Gibson is all but identical but garnished with a pickled onion rather than an olive.
In his inimitable style, though, Gainsbourg details his particular way of mixing one in the video to a slightly wary bartender. The key, he demonstrates, is to soak the ice in the vermouth rather than mix it with the rest of the cocktail. Then add not one but three pickled onions. Trust ol’ Gainsbarre to find a way of making a drink that’s essentially gin and have even more gin.
That is the man in a nutshell, though. His creativity and wit found a way of showing up even in the most sordid and unlikely circumstances. This was a man who was conscripted into the French army in the immediate aftermath of World War Two and spent his entire service learning an extended Springsteen set’s worth of bawdy drinking songs. That may just be what the French have instead of boot camp, though.
In all seriousness, though, the Second World War shaped the young Serge in ways he’d carry for the rest of his life. He came of age in Nazi-occupied Paris, and the suffering he saw all around him fundamentally changed him. His military service was, by all accounts a total doss, but after it was finished he found work in a school set up for children orphaned by the war. Not to go all armchair psychiatrist on the man, but growing up surrounded by that kind of hardship would make anyone want to blot it all out.
This is, more or less, what the man born Lucien Ginsburg built his life around. On the constructive side, he used his one-of-a-kind talent to entertain others, making them laugh or cry despite everything else around them. On the destructive side, he used alcohol, cigarettes, and destructive relationships with the women in his life to blot out everything he grew up with. As with everyone we look up to, it’s always best to look a little under the surface and find the complex individual within.
