The Golden Past: Marianne Faithfull's Favourite Albums | Page 5 of 14 | The Quietus

Baker's Dozen

Artists discuss the 13 records that shaped their lives

4. Serge GainsbourgMelody Nelson

I listened to this a lot when it came out, because I was a friend of Serge and I loved his work. I miss him terribly. He was brilliant, and very strange in some ways, and I had a feeling that he really knew what he was doing. He knew he was laying down a new thing and a whole new register of music. I just wish he hadn’t died so young: I would love to have seen what he was doing as he got older. Was I a bit like Melody Nelson myself? Yes, I do relate to her a lot. I was a teenager, a little girl, and I did a lot of what I did on intuition. I didn’t really know what I was doing. Theatre was where I learned my craft, I suppose, while not really conscious yet, and I needed that to learn how to make records, of course.

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