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I know that the end of his career was more doubtful. I wish someone had had the courage to tell him at a certain point that he was becoming slightly ridiculous. I know that a lot of people found it amusing, this character falling apart at the seams; the media and the public loved it. There was nothing funny about such a gifted man squandering his talent. ()

Alex Kapranos, Franz Ferdinand

I’d never heard anything like it: a dark, authoritarian voice with melodies that weren’t like anything a small-time rock fan knew. It doesn’t happen often in the life of a music fan, but I started to find out everything I could about him.

Even that odd look of his was consistent with his music. His voice possessed a beautiful ugliness. Or rather, a savage beauty. There was nothing pretty, nothing redundant in his look, just like in his songs.

He was manly without being macho. I can’t think of any other artist capable of singing about women’s orgasms in this way. He didn’t give a damn about appearances and was therefore much more of a rock’n’roll character than most rock stars. His sense of humour was also very sexy.

He held on to his notoriety throughout the generations, like Baudelaire, because he was consistent. Even though he was interested in trends, his fierce independence rang through.

Too many musicians believe in the rock’n’roll mythology that you can be talented and relevant only when you’re young. The older Gainsbourg grew, the more risks he took and the more he p***** people off.

Geoff Barrow, Portishead

Melody Nelson literally transformed my life. My certainties about production, writing, how it all plays together — all that just shattered. I was floored by the record. I’ve just listened to him ever since.

Matthew Swinnerton, the Rakes

An English artist could never have got away with singing such lyrics. He was the ultimate Frenchman for many Brits: his fags, his nonchalance, his sexy detachment.

The only guy I could compare him to is Leonard Cohen, who’s also famous for his poetry, his ability to express very dark things with humour.

The more I read about him and the more I see him on screen, the more I realise that I am a huge fan of Gainsbourg’s. I visited his tomb recently in Paris and I even left (pardon the cliché) a guitar plectrum. I wanted it to give us luck with our remake. And it worked.

Jarvis Cocker

On a practical level I did a song for the album because someone asked me — it was just about as soon as I’d arrived to live in Paris. I thought, maybe I’ll meet some French people I can be friends with. I suppose they’ve done it to let English-speaking people know what a good lyricist he was, but the translation for the song I did was awful, like something out of an airline magazine. So I got my wife to help me translate it. I don’t know if it needs translating: you can tell what his songs are about without them being in English. The sexy ones haven’t weathered translation so well.

Brian Molko, Placebo

The first time I heard Gainsbourg was on TV on Michel Drucker’s show with Whitney Houston. It was ridiculous, absurd and very funny, that scandal, “I want to f*** you”. I thought that was great.

I relate to him, especially his lack of confidence. We find a way to express ourselves in music — it offers the possibility of becoming someone else, of overcoming your ugliness.

Jane Birkin

Along with Coluche, he was the most loved man in France and it was something he needed terribly. He was very lucky indeed to have been so famous and loved in his lifetime, he who had so little love for himself.

If you play three notes from Je t’aime (Moi Non Plus), everyone in the UK will recall the scandal caused by that Frenchman who was banned from the airwaves. Records like this may make the UK public want to return to the original and find out who this weird Frenchman was. They will finally discover his entire output, although the UK branch of his label refused to release his records at the time. They didn’t understand why he was such a phenomenon in France. What a comeback today.

Monsieur Gainsbourg Revisited is out on May 1 on Universal; a photographic exhibition, Monsieur Gainsbourg Revisited, is at Libertys, W1 (020-7734 1234), April 17 to May 31