Jean-Pierre Decerf

Space Oddities 1975-1978 Jean-Pierre Decerf

Jean-Pierre Decerf, born in Neuilly (a western suburb of Paris) in 1948, lived in Paris until 2003. From the early 70s to the mid-80s, this self-taught musician composed about twenty albums of production and library music with generic cover art and titles (Out of the Way, Magical Ring, Keys of the Future, Pulsations, More and More, etc.) that evoke interstellar travel. These experimental discs, made with love, humility and rudimentary means, had no ambition other than to accompany other peoples' images. By exhuming these obscurities from the dustbin of history, BORN BAD have decided otherwise. Archaeologists with an agenda, they seek to give Jean Pierre Decerf the renown he deserves: that of an innovator whose rhythmic, synthetic compositions inspired the harbingers of the French Touch (Air comes to mind), not to mention some East Coast rappers. On a warm Indian summer day, we visited him at home in a remote village in Touraine (central France), where he lives as a hermit. Sometimes he runs into Mick Jagger, who has a castle nearby, at the local supermarket. Most of the time, he speaks English with his British neighbors. [Many small villages in rural France have numerous British residents, in particular retirees.] That day, he made an exception for us and discussed his past