Mick Harvey - Delirium Tremens

Delirium Tremens is the eighth album by Australian musician, singer-songwriter Mick Harvey, released in June 2016 by Mute Records.

Mick Harvey isn’t finished with Serge Gainsbourg yet. The Australian musician wrestled with the Frenchman’s back catalogue for the first time in 1995 with Intoxicated Man, and then again in 1997 with Pink Elephants. Now here he is with the third volume, Delirium Tremens (better known as the DTs), and we’re told to expect a fourth, which, one assumes, will continue the now rich tradition of bibulous nomenclature. That’ll be nearly sixty covers that we know about, all of one man’s oeuvre. Four volumes is quite a body of work. What must it feel like to spend such an exhaustive amount of time as the conduit for another?

We’re told to never criticise a man until we’ve walked a mile in his moccasins; well Harvey has run a marathon in Serge’s frayed espadrilles and must have a better idea than most how his musical brain works. And yet, Gainsbourg’s back catalogue is so diverse, so clever and so full of surprises, that it makes it improbable that another person could fully comprehend or even second guess a genius. Yes, a genius, a proper one of those. Serge I mean. Perhaps this is one of the reasons Harvey keeps coming back for more.

It is the choices that are perhaps the most interesting things about this new volume. Kicking off with the prog absurdity of “The Man With The Cabbage Head” (“L'Homme à tête de chou”) - taken from the concept album of the same name where the protagonist goes mad in a hotel and beats a woman to death with a fire extinguisher - it’s a fine marker ahead of a whip through some of Gainsbourg’s more obscure moments from his three decades as a recording artist. And as a writer for others too.

“Chanson Du Forçat” for instance - called “The Convict’s Song” here - is taken from the soundtrack of La Pacha recorded with Michel Colombier; grill most Gainsbourg aficionados, and they’re unlikely to mention it among their favourites. “I Envisage” (“J’envisage”) written with Alain Bashung, is another track even the most devoted Gainsbourg fan might not know. “A Violent Poison (That’s What Love Is)” (“Un Poison Violent C’est Ça L’amour”) comes from the motion picture soundtrack for Anna - Serge’s lesser known seventh album. Even a Gainsbourg geek will find it hard to keep up here, and while these kinds of tribute collections are often a fine way to introduce newcomers to the music of another, Delirium Tremens actually throws the gauntlet down to connoisseurs and challenges them to up their game.

The other great thing about this collection is there’s a rambunctiousness and an anarchy in the way they’re recorded. Where he might have approached previous sacre monstres more gingerly in the 90s, here there is an energy that comes from the confidence of experience. In that sense, Harvey makes each song here his own. The listener must surely delight in the fact that Harvey isn’t done with Gainsbourg just yet, and after some of the gems he’s uncovered here, some of us are far from finished with him yet either.

Check out the tracks: “Deadly Tedium” and “Don’t Say A Thing”.

This LP record with printed inner sleeve and digital download is pressed in Europe on black vinyl.