Les Sucettes by France Gall (1966)

Gainsbourg wrote Les Sucettes for France Gall in 1966, a year after she had won Eurovision with his Poupée de cire, poupée de son, and gave it to her as an innocent song about a girl and her sweets. She sang it that way. Everyone else heard the second reading, which describes fellatio in every line, and Gainsbourg later called it the most daring song of the century, meaning his own daring in letting a teenager sing it on television, a boast that has aged like milk left in the sun.

It reached number nine in France and number 14 in Belgium, and it has never left the Gainsbourg legend. Gall said she had not understood the song when she recorded it; when she did, she hid herself away for weeks, and she later spoke of feeling betrayed by the adults around her. The episode is the one every profile of either of them returns to.

Its afterlife is as the textbook. Les Sucettes is the French double entendre taught as an example, the one Lio's Banana Split repeated in 1979, and the record that made the "lollipop" a phallic standard decades before 50 Cent opened his "candy shop". Gainsbourg recorded it himself in 1969; Kim Kay in 2000 and the metal band Therion in 2012 covered it, which suggests the joke travels.