Serge Gainsbourg may have been sophisticated, in a grubby sort of way, but he was never bothered about good taste. Here, after all, was an artist whose biggest hit, Je T’Aime...Moi Non Plus, featured his girlfriend, Jane Birkin, simulating an orgasm. And one who, by the mid-1980s, thought that it was appropriate to duet with Charlotte, their 13-year- old daughter, on a song entitled Lemon Incest.

The musical comeback of Charlotte is not so provocative, not least because she now seems determined to flaunt her good taste. For her first album in two decades, Gainsbourg has assembled a hip supporting cast. Tunes are provided by Air, while the lyrics come from the suitably louche Jarvis Cocker, currently resident in Paris, and Neil Hannon. The producer is Nigel Godrich, favourite of Radiohead and Beck. Beck’s father, David Campbell, contributes genteel string arrangements.

The list is so impressive that it tends to detract from Gainsbourg herself, a likeable actress who is excellent in Michel Gondry’s new film The Science of Sleep. But what all the players share is a certain fascination with the Gainsbourg dynasty, so that 5:55 is a hygienised, but still highly seductive, version of the old family sound. Air and Campbell reconstruct the late-night, low-light atmosphere — the churning strings on The Songs That We Sing are uncannily similar to those on Serge’s Bonnie and Clyde. Cocker’s lyrics for The Operation use an extended surgical metaphor to examine the vagaries of love — fairly tame stuff by her father’s standards, though the way that Gainsbourg breathes “nothing is taboo” would have made him proud.

Like her mother, Charlotte is not much of a singer. But she shares her attractive dreaminess, resembling a prim girl from the Home Counties who spends her gap year in Paris’s Latin Quarter tentatively learning to be bohemian. It’s rather appealing — to dirty old men such as Serge with corruption on their mind, and to those who harbour arty, romantic fantasies of La Vie Parisienne.

Gainsbourg may have grown up with French sleaze, but on this understated album, her triumph — an actress’s gift, perhaps — is to sound convincingly like an innocent abroad.

(Atlantic)

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