INTERVIEW:Jane Birkin's whispered vocals to Serge Gainsbourg on 'Je t'Aime' quickly became the stuff of pop music legend, but she has strived ever since to be identified more for her own artistic expressions than those of her former lover, writes KEVIN COURTNEY.
IT'S HARD TO IMAGINE that the voice on the other end of the phone is the same voice that used to whisper in my adolescent ear every weekend, declaring her love in a breathy French lilt. The voice still dances, but it sounds older and more lived-in than the fevered voice that soundtracked my Saturday nights at the school disco: every time the languid organ refrain of Je t'Aime . . . Moi Non Plusoozed out of the PA system, signalling the start of the slow-dance set, it set my teenage hormones racing to be the first across the floor to tap a girl on the shoulder. Parents complain about Britney Spears – 35 years ago, we'd bump and grind to the strains of a young woman having an orgasm, and no one batted an eyelid.
Jane Birkin is still using her voice to seduce and beguile, but she’s no longer trying to set teenage libidos a-flutter. These days, she sings songs with a more mature outlook on life, and if there’s still the slight trill of the youthful pleasure-seeker in her voice, it’s tempered by the timbre of a woman who’s lived a few lifetimes, and is still awake with the possibilities of living a few more.
Now 62, the former foil for Serge Gainsbourg’s lascivious pop fantasies is still making records, still acting in films, still directing, still writing plays, still open to new ideas and fresh collaborations, but still – deep down inside – an insecure little girl seeking approval and affirmation.
It is 18 years since Serge Gainsbourg died, yet Birkin feels she’s only now beginning to emerge from his long, raincoat-clad shadow.
She’s currently touring the world, performing songs from her new album, Enfants d’Hiver, the first for which she’s written all her own lyrics. In the years following Gainsbourg’s death, she has been able to fall back on the considerable body of work he’s left behind, or call on a stable of well-known fans and admirers – including Manu Chao, Bryan Ferry, Beck, Neil Hannon and Johnny Marr – to provide her with fresh material to perform. But now, she feels she’s finally standing on her own bare feet, although there will always be the bestubbled visage of France’s most iconic pop star looking down from the gods.
“I knew that people came to the concerts as a prolongation of him,” she says. “It was like yes, I was singing his songs, and it made him live for that little bit longer, it gave him some extra time. But on the other hand, if I hadn’t lived with him, I wouldn’t be asked around the world, I wouldn’t be where I am now. I suppose it was a tiny bit pleasing to be able to stand up on my own, but writing my own play, it wasn’t a vast success, writing my own film, it wasn’t a vast success, I don’t expect the record will be a vast success, it’s just a great chance one has if you want to be able to express yourself, just to be able to do it at all. These days, it’s even more difficult, so to actually have a record company put it out.
“But I can’t complain, because I’ve done three things I’ve wanted to do, exactly in the way I wanted to do them,” she says. “There were no compromises, which is pretty good. Even if it’s not going to make me into a millionaire, it’s not going to bust the box offices, it doesn’t matter, because it’s been given a chance to live. It exists. There’s a great satisfaction in it. It’s more than just singing something prettily – it’s when someone says it was well written. Even if it’s only a few people who say it, it’s very nice.”
To the young English girl who arrived in France in 1968 without a word of la langue Françaiseor any idea of what she was going to do, Gainsbourg became teacher, mentor, lover and father-figure. She was born in London to actor Judy Campbell and Royal Navy officer David Birkin; at 17, she married the film composer John Barry and had her first child, Kate.
This was at the height of the Swinging Sixties, but while the party went on in London, Birkin was playing the part of a housewife and mother, waiting for her husband to come home from another exotic location, and feeling increasingly envious of the beautiful, talented, self-assured people who were part of Barry’s social circle. When the marriage ended, Birkin fled to France, not just to distance herself from her divorce, but to get out from under the shadow of her own mother.
“England frightened me, and that’s probably why I left,” Birkin recalls. “Perhaps I didn’t feel like I was up to it. Perhaps I was afraid that I wouldn’t be as good as my mother. Stupid things like that. I knew that if I put my foot on the theatre stage in England that I’d have a lot to live up to. But I found courage in France, I could do my own thing in France. I felt safe because I was foreign and abroad, and I loved that. And now France has become my home, I’m much more frightened of playing at the Palace, and I find that the streets of London are much more cheerful, and if I keep well away from memories of my mother, then I’m in a different country.”
From playing a tiny role in Michaelangelo Antonioni's film, Blowup, Birkin went on to take centre stage in France's most celebrated coupling. Gainsbourg had just broken up with Brigitte Bardot, and this feisty English gamine was just what he needed to get over a broken heart. He had originally recorded Je t'Aimewith Bardot, but she got cold feet and that version was never released.
Gainsbourg then recorded a new version with Birkin, which, despite being banned in various countries and being condemned by the Vatican, went on to become a massive worldwide hit. The couple set about gleefully scandalising France, she strutting out with her new beau in see-through outfits, he the middle-aged lothario with a willing love slave. They had a child, Charlotte (now a successful actor and singer), but behind the sensuous lyrics of such songs as Jane Band 69 Année Erotique, things were not always rosy in the love nest; the couple separated in 1980.
"When we met at the beginning he taught me everything – every photo and every little thing that he wanted me to do, I was perfectly pleased to apply. Then afterwards, I suppose cruelly, really, after some years I grew out of the Pygmalionthing, I was no longer that person. He was a very patient teacher, but he was very difficult to live with. And when I left it was like leaving home the second time. I left his house, and just started walking, with my handbag, and I just walked and walked and walked, and the children were in Ireland on their summer holidays. And I just walked and walked, and finally I thought, I won't go back. It was very turbulent in the end, and it was mostly turbulent for a very long time."
To Birkin’s relief, the French public forgave her for walking out on their crumpled national treasure, and she went on to enjoy a rewarding solo career in her adopted country. She met and fell in love with film-maker Jacques Doillon, starring in two of his films, and worked with another respected French director, Jacques Rivette. She also recorded solo albums, many of them featuring songs written for her by Gainsbourg, including Baby Alone in Babylone. And in 1984, just to confirm her style-icon status, Hermès designed the Birkin bag, which became a must-have accessory for fashionable French women.
Birkin’s films and records generally don’t make much of an impact outside French-speaking parts, but she enjoys fame and affection in France, and has a strong fan base in such countries as Portugal, Spain, Italy, Canada and Japan. She has also noticed a surge of interest in her birth country for her new album. Last week, she performed a successful concert at London’s Barbican, and says she no longer finds England a frightening place.
She’s also found a whole new palette of passions through her humanitarian work with Amnesty International. The mother-of-three works hard to help children from Chechnya, Bosnia, Rwanda and Palestine, and her tireless travelling and activism has earned her an OBE in the UK, and an Ordre National du Mérite in France. She is most vociferous about the plight of Burma’s imprisoned democratic leader Aung San Suu Kyi, dedicating a song in English to her.
“I have met her, and it’s something I don’t take lightly,” says Birkin, a tinge of controlled anger in that voice now. “With that regime, they could just say she had an accident, and it would be done. So it’s a miracle that nothing’s happened to her so far, but if we don’t get our act together . . . I don’t know if Obama will do any better, I don’t know what will change in Burma. But it’s all so sinister and frightening; it’s a scandal that the world didn’t make more of a fuss about it.”
In her travels, she has come across France's current couple du jour, French president Nicolas Sarkozy and chanteuse Carla Bruni. In 2004, Birkin interviewed the former model for Interviewmagazine – does she feel an affinity with France's first lady?
“I saw her a lot in the old days, but not so much now. She’s off doing something for Unicef in Africa from what I heard. I admired her very much when she did a song by Serge, which was called La Noyée, and it wasn’t flash, it was very nice, she sang it beautifully. So I admire her – I think he’s jolly lucky.”
L'Enfants d'Hiveris available through Amazon.co.uk and iTunes. www.janebirkin.net