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‘It wasn’t my intention to shock!’ Jean-Claude Vannier on working with Serge Gainsbourg and setting his new album in the gutter

He has influenced everyone from Beck to De La Soul to Arctic Monkeys. As the great musical ‘disruptor’ unveils his new murder-and-mandolins epic, he looks back on his most famous collaboration

For all of these people, Vannier constructed astonishingly inventive orchestral arrangements, that occasionally touch on atonality and often bear the influence of music from the Middle East – the result, he says, of his disastrous first job, as an engineer in a Paris studio. Echoes of his dramatic Melody Nelson orchestrations can be heard everywhere from Beck’s Sea Change to the Arctic Monkeys’ Tranquility Base Hotel And Casino, and they’ve been sampled by everyone from Portishead to De La Soul. While working for a French label, the British DJ, producer and “Gainsbourg obsessive” Andy Votel heard “garbled rumours in Parisian record shops” about a mysterious “Melody Nelson follow-up” that had never been released.

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