Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin. Photo / Getty Images
Actor and singer Jane Birkin has died at the age of 76. This article was originally published in July 2022.
The singer, songwriter and actress was half of France’s most famous couple. She talks about Je t’aime, orgasms and why she would never do an Abba and become a hologram.
Jane Birkin has been performing since 1969, when she and her partner Serge Gainsbourg embodied the spirit of the 60s with their song Je t'aime . . . moi non plus (it was so explicit that it was banned by the Vatican. "That was a giggle," she says now). Yet her latest album, Oh! Pardon tu dormais . . ., is the first time she has written songs in English rather than French. "I was pushed into being adventurous," she says from Paris, where she moved when she was with Gainsbourg, still sounding like she is from West London (she grew up in Chelsea).
It's a collaboration with the French pop star Etienne Daho and the producer Jean-Louis Piérot and they encouraged her to "be provocative". The result is a beguiling mix of songs such as F.R.U.I.T, on which she mocks herself for not being able to say the word ("the reason I can't must be sexual") and Cigarettes, where she mourns her daughter Kate Barry, the photographer who died in 2013, aged 46, after falling from a window in her Paris flat.
"It is probably the most important thing that has happened in my life," Birkin says slowly. "Anyone who has lost someone will know you just keep them all with you — and you panic at losing the sound of their voice."
Birkin is about to come to London to perform Oh! Pardon tu dormais ... at the Barbican. She is thrilled to be singing to a live audience again.
This is her first tour since a minor stroke in September last year. After three months in hospital she is raring to "have fun, my life has been on pause, like a resting computer". It was a friend who spotted that she'd had a stroke. "I wouldn't have known there was anything wrong but I was with my friend at a spa and she thought I looked odd and sounded bizarre. I thought I was treating her to luxury, whereas she had to witness me not doing frightfully well." She sounds apologetic.
Birkin has "always liked being in hospital", although the food was another matter. She wrote a letter to the minister of health, complaining: "Why can't we have a French Jamie Oliver? It is a scandal that they are giving frozen burgers to nurses who work all night long. Hospital food is one thing that England does better."
The singer is not the only 70-something on tour — the Rolling Stones are making their way around Europe and Abba are electrifying audiences in London as "Abbatars", digital recreations of themselves at their 1970s peak.
Birkin had not heard of this and is aghast. "A hologram?" she asks, unsure if she has heard correctly. "I wouldn't have thought that was interesting. I've seen the French politician Mélenchon as a hologram in his election campaign and I didn't see the point. I like it when you can see that people are vulnerable on stage and it's unpredictable. But if people are happier with a hologram than nothing at all ..."
At 75, ageing doesn't faze her. "I just hope one is enough fun to be around. Etienne tells me what to wear on stage: jeans, a jacket and straight hair like in the 60s. I've left it too late to do anything like plastic surgery, but if people decide they want to do it I take my hat off to them. My favourite actresses, Catherine Deneuve and Fanny Ardant, are about my age and they knock you over they are so gorgeous."
Gainsbourg's songs feature in the concert and Birkin brings him up early on in our conversation. They separated in 1980 and he died in 1991 aged 62, but Birkin says they "still come as a bundle. It is difficult to know what people feel for him and what they feel for me." She has forgiven him for the fights they had and, when she sings his songs to an audience, "I like seeing people's joy at having more time with him."
The songs they sung together thrum with sexual tension. In Je t'aime ... moi non plus, she sings "Je t'aime, je t'aime", mimicking the breathy sound of an orgasm. "Serge orchestrated that, moving his hand to direct me — he was concerned I would get carried away and not make the top note." Researchers at Ottawa University into the female orgasm made headlines last month, saying that groans, as in her song, do not necessarily denote pleasure. "I don't know," Birkin says. "It's like tennis — some people make a noise, some don't."
She speaks fondly of Gainsbourg. They met after her marriage to the James Bond composer John Barry (Kate's father) had ended ("we had a complicated life, I lived alone"). Her mother approved of Gainsbourg. "She thought it was wonderful I was with someone so clever, devoted and funny."
They would go out all night and return at dawn to take the children to school. "I don't know how easy it was for the children to have a mother who was naked in magazines and a father burning 500 franc notes. I hope one did some things right. Charlotte said it was the fun she would remember."
Charlotte Gainsbourg, Birkin's daughter with Serge, is turning her father's house into a museum, which is due to open in autumn. Birkin says: "There's lots of black; it's like a magic box." Charlotte has made a film about her mother, Jane by Charlotte, which will be shown at the Barbican before her concert. "When we started filming Charlotte had this huge bundle of notes and I panicked," Birkin says.
"She started off with difficult questions and I thought it would be like a Bergman film, so we stopped for two years. But we picked up when I realised she was just being curious and trying to find her place — is it the same as her older or younger sister? Kate died, which puts Charlotte in a different dimension. I was closer to Lou — your last little one is cosy and easy to be with and I was so surprised to have her at 40." Lou Doillon, Birkin's third daughter, a singer, actress and model, is about to have a baby "any second now, it's lovely".
Birkin evades questions about the aspects of hers and Gainsbourg's relationship that have dated less well, such as the 18-year age gap between them and his sexualisation of Charlotte in the video Lemon Incest. Instead she talks generally about "how the way we treat women has changed . Boys are brought up to know when no means no. People used to blame women when things went wrong; now we are more likely to believe them."
After her tour she will be back in Paris and might do a play there, "if I don't get frightened". She refers to her family a lot; grandchildren and niece Emily (she took a picture of an Emily in Paris advert to send to her without knowing what it was). With that, she realises she has to go to have lunch with them: "Everything is more fun when you are with somebody."
Oh! Pardon Tu Dormais ... is out now (Universal).
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