This was published 2 years ago
‘I take my hat off to them’: Jane Birkin on plastic surgery, orgasms and Je T’Aime
In 1969, singer and Hermès bag muse Jane Birkin whispered her way through a song considered so suggestive it was banned by the Vatican. Fifty years later she is still performing it on stage.
By Susannah Butter
At 75, Birkin has released a new album and is preparing to go on tour.Credit: Patrick Swirc/modds/Headpress
Jane Birkin has been performing since 1969, when she and her then 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 London (she grew up in Chelsea).
It’s a collaboration with French pop star Etienne Daho and producer Jean-Louis Piérot and they encouraged her to “be provocative”. The result is a mix of beguiling songs such as F.R.U.I.T., in which she mocks herself for not being able to say the word (“the reason I can’t must be sexual”) and Cigarettes, which 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,” Jane 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.”
Jane Birkin, the supermodel who inspired the Hermès Birkin bag, pictured in 1976.Credit: Daily Mirror
Jane is preparing to go to London to perform Oh! Pardon Tu Dormais and 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,” says the 75-year-old, “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. Jane says she’s “always liked being in hospital”, although this time the food was another matter. She wrote a letter to the French 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.
“Jane isn’t the only seventy-something currently on tour: the Rolling Stones just made their way around Europe and ABBA are wowing London audiences as “Abbatars”, digital re-creations of themselves at their 1970s peak. Jane had not heard of this and is aghast.
“A hologram? I wouldn’t have thought that was interesting. I’ve seen the French politician Jean-Luc 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, Birkin’s new album is the first time she has written songs in English rather than French.Credit: Patrick Swirc/modds/Headpress
Ageing doesn’t faze her. “I just hope one is enough fun to be around,” she says. “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 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 Jane brings him up early on in our conversation. They separated in 1980 and he died in 1991, aged 62, but Jane says they “still come as a bundle; it’s difficult to know what people feel for him and what they feel for me”.
“I’ve left it too late to do plastic surgery, but if people decide they want to do it, I take my hat off to them.”
JANE BIRKIN
She says she’s forgiven him for the fights they had and that she likes “seeing people’s joy at having more time with him” when she sings his songs. 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 into the female orgasm at Ottawa University made headlines in June, saying the groans in her song and others like it do not necessarily denote pleasure. “I don’t know,” Jane 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. 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, Jane’s daughter with Serge, is turning her father’s house into a museum, which is due to open soon. Jane says: “There’s lots of black; it’s like a magic box.”
Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin were once one of France’s most famous couples.Credit: Getty
Charlotte has made a film about her mother, Jane by Charlotte. “When we started filming, Charlotte had this huge bundle of notes and I panicked. She started 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.” (Singer, actor and model Lou Doillon, Jane’s third daughter, had her second child, Jane’s sixth grandchild, in July.) Jane evades questions about aspects of her relationship with Gainsbourg 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, including her grandchildren and niece Emily. 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.
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