Delirium Tremens

Vinyl LP pressing. It was a mixtape made by a Frenchman and handed to Mick Harvey (Bad Seeds, The Birthday Party, Crime & The City Solution) in reunified Berlin that first alerted him to the oeuvre of Serge Gainsbourg. Like the rest of us, he'd heard 'Je T'aime (Moi Non Plus)', but the variety and depth of Gainsbourg's genius took him aback - so much so that he set about fastidiously translating the lyrics into English and disseminating the chansons to the anglophone world with a missionary zeal. The scope of the project he undertook was breathtaking. Mick Harvey explains, "Translating a great writer is like walking through a minefield and I set myself the difficult task of attempting to keep the places of rhyming, metre and meaning accurate to the originals. One or more of these elements is usually dispensed with in the translating of poetry and lyrics, but I did not want to iron out any of Gainbourg's more aberrant angles or lose any of his especially perverse and peculair touches." With this, Mute is proud to announce the third volume in Harvey's Gainsbourg series entitled Delirium Tremens.