At least once a day I drift into a blissful daydream about Serge Gainsbourg where we re-enact scenes from Histoire De Melody Nelson and generally jump around having fun and doing suitably Gallic 60′s things like smoking Gitanes and running along cobbled streets while breathlessly laughing.

Most people who I tell about my Serge love do a double take. “Serge? Gainsbourg? The ‘Je t’aime’ guy?” then they screw up their faces and tell me how perverted he was or about the Whitney Houston incident. Once or twice I’ve even been told how he evilly coerced France Gall into singing a song about blow jobs, which she innocently thought was about lollipops. On the latter count all I have to say is really, France? Really? Pull the other one. Fair enough, the guy made some pretty tasteless photo shoot choices with Jane Birkin (his then wife) and he did make that really creepy song ‘Lemon Incest’ with his daughter, but the overall impression one gets of Gainsbourg is a highly sexed man who loved women, and his family, who’s work ranged from the classic, to the sublime, the surreal, and beyond. Unlike most modern pop stars who hide behind a façade of respectability Gainsbourg was honest, painfully so and saw no reason to sugar coat his preferences. No matter what I hear about him, listening to the raw passion in his voice as he sings Ballade De Melody Nelson smoothes away any of his rough edges, and makes it so easy to retreat back into my black and white dream.

Of course I have crushes other than Serge and his knee shakingly beautiful voice: in fact one of my other long-term loves is Slash from Guns N’Roses, specifically during G’n'R’s 1987 Ritz gig. The thing is Slash now, and Slash at any time after 1987, has mutated into a bit of jerk. He writes self-indulgent biographies detailing what a prick he was, and how much he hates Axl Rose, as the two of them frequently argue in public about the most mindlessly petty things.

While I’m happy to point out that Gainsbourg was a very different person to the shambling greasy perv he is made out to be I have no desire to do the same with Slash. Its because I don’t care about Slash now; I have no interest in how he’s matured as a person, what he did after Use Your Illusion, how he feels about being in any of his subsequent bands, none of that crap. It’s also because Serge is dead so it’s easier to idolise him.

1987 Slash was a the perfect pin-up, the pinnacle of everything he’d ever be in public at least, so if I Doc Brown from came whizzing by in his DeLorean and asked me where I wanted to go it’d be to the Ritz, to stand right at the front, in a leopard print bodystocking, frantically swiping at Slash as he leant over the crowd. After he’d picked me out for some one on one post show backstage treatment, I’d hop in the DeLorian and be happy to wake up back in 2010. Obviously I’m hoping that this has no major repercussions on the world’s time line, although even if it did affect Slash in some profound way G’n'R had already written and recorded Appetite for Destruction so I think everything would work out fine. Who really needs November Rain anyway?

Time paradoxes aside, having Slash and Serge as my top two crushes creates awkward conversations when these sorts of subjects come up, those typical late night ‘guilty pleasures’ conversations. Other people’s secret crushes are people like the mild mannered Zachary Quinto, or wooden Stephen Moyer; people so nice and evenly mannered that my choices make me seem like an unstable masochist. However I’m unlikely to change my allegiances soon, and even if Slash came out with a bizarre Mel Gibson style rant I’d still fantasize about that half hour spent with sweaty top-hatted Slash in a backstage room in 1987.

You see it’s a fantasy, I don’t know anything about either of them; Serge could have been a puppy kicking maniac in his spare time, Slash could be personally doling out soup to street orphans every night, it’s all academic. Their politics, their views on women’s lib, bleh, I couldn’t give a toss. I just want to dream about fun, French accents, and deft fingers. And why not? Why make it realistic? Why can’t we in our fantasies seperate the real from the imaginary and give the people we find beautiful every attribute we’d like them to have in real life?

Do any of you have a genuinely guilty pleasure of a crush? If so tell! To those of you who can’t make the quantum leap, I say try, or at least make your dreamboats less mundane!

Further Reading:
Serge Gainsbourg: A Fistful of Gitanes by Sylvie Simmons
Slash: The Autobiography by Slash and Anthony Bozza

Further Listening:
Histoire De Melody Nelson by Serge Gainsbourg – Spotify
Appetite For Destruction by Guns N’Roses   – Spotify
A brief Serge Gainsbourg sampler I made on Spotify, otherwise look for the Initials S.G compliation.