Description

Tony Frank, who had met Serge Gainsbourg in a Paris nightclub in 1962 and had already shot covers for him, arrived at the session for Histoire de Melody Nelson with almost no brief. "All I know is Jane will be wearing jeans," he recalled, "so I decide to set up a light blue background while waiting for her to arrive." The backdrop became known as "Melody Blue".

Gainsbourg was late. When he arrived he produced an auburn wig, "red, really", as a joke to make Jane Birkin laugh. She put it on and became Melody, the teenage girl at the centre of the album's story, and the red hair became part of the character. Birkin was in the early stages of pregnancy with their daughter Charlotte, and her jeans are pulled down slightly at the waist to accommodate it. Against her bare chest she holds a toy monkey, a childhood gift she called "Monkey", which she picked up on a whim to cover herself. Frank says he believes the legend that the monkey was later buried with Gainsbourg.

The album, released by Philips on 24 March 1971, is a short concept record about a chance meeting between a middle-aged narrator and Melody, and the cover gives that fiction a face. Frank later documented the shoot in his book Bleu Melody.

Credit

Cover photograph by Tony Frank.