Lou Doillon: French, frank and funny
All but royalty in France, Lou Doillon came late to music but her sound has struck a chord among listeners at home
Lou Doillon hopes Byron is still waiting for her. They met three years ago when Doillon last visited Australia, and she keeps a framed photo of him in her room in Paris. “Sadly I don’t think Byron will remember me, because he has had many girls in his arms.”
This paramour is a koala the French-English singer-actor-artist met at a wildlife sanctuary near Sydney when she last toured as part of So Frenchy, So Chic, the annual French music festival. She’s back again this month to headline the event once again, and is hoping to follow up on her furry friend.
Normally, Doillon only permits poets in that particular corner of her bedroom but, given the koala’s name, he gets a pass into the inner sanctum. “And now when I read Lord Byron I do associate him to koalas. It’s slightly disturbing. Keats would have seen the humour, but I’m not sure Byron would.”
This is the sort of tangential discussion that courses over a 40-minute phone call with Doillon as she munches toast and takes a taxi to an appointment on the other side of Paris. She’s frank, funny and whimsical, also forthright and philosophical. She’s excited to be heading back to Australia, to do “the best show I can, which will be something beautiful and unique for us”.
Doillon’s family history is well documented, and she is virtual royalty in France. She is the daughter of British actor-singer-style icon Jane Birkin and writer-director Jacques Doillon; one of her older sisters, actor-singer Charlotte Gainsbourg, is the daughter of Birkin and iconic French singer-poet-provocateur Serge Gainsbourg. That’s a lot of hyphens for one family. Despite acting from a young age — her screen debut was in Agnes Varda’s Le Petit Amour aged five, alongside her mother and Charlotte — Doillon came to music and songwriting relatively late. “All of my cousins in England, they were all in bands,” Doillon tells The Australian. “And I was constantly in love with their friends, so I was the groupie of many an English band. I was a marvellous roadie, by the age of 16 I could carry an amp and clear up any guitar. Like a 17th-century woman it never entered my mind that I could pick up a guitar (to play myself).”
It was only after having her son, aged 19, that Doillon started to channel her angst into music. “My tremendous luck was having my son when I was 19, and his papa is a great singer and writer and guitarist and we were very, very intense — teenagers and rock ’n’ roll. We had many an argument, he would disappear as any good rock star should, and I was left very depressed and alone with a young child. And there it was, his acoustic guitar on the stand when no one else was.”
Over the next 10 years, a depression brought out those musical leanings, while her mother became “very worried” about her and her solitary state, until telling some producers her daughter was making music. When one came over to hear her work: “I played him songs getting very drunk. He said, ‘You played them very, very fast and very, very quietly and very, very drunk. Can I come back again and can you play them less quickly and less drunk?’.” That second performance led to a demo, a three-song EP, “and blimey, six months later I was the No 1 song in France. I’ve been on the road for the past seven years”.
Her third album, Soliloquy, was released at the beginning of last year, and it’s a departure in the sense that she has taken more control on the production side of things, which she feels she largely handed over to other producers for her first two outings, 2012’s Places and 2015’s Lay Low. This time she collaborated with four different producers, including Dan Levy of The Do and Chan Marshall (aka Cat Power), with whom she also performs on It’s You. The two met via Instagram.
“To my embarrassment, when I reached out to Chan, in half an hour we were talking. Sadly I’m of a generation you can write to a manager or agent and they’ll come back to you 60 years later. Now we just skip everyone and go straight to the person who most of the time answers much more quickly. There’s something quite moving in that concept, even if (social media) will be the downfall of humanity.” (If you want a taste of Doillon’s artistic talents, check out the video of this track, where she sketches enormous lifelike hands.)
She has been pleased with the response to the album, which has variously had people say “it’s absolutely pop, it’s totally rock ’n’ roll, it’s back to the blues — maybe it’s a bit of all that. I didn’t want it to be disjointed, but I didn’t want it to settle anywhere. I’m a restless kind of person and it’s a restless kind of album”.
As for her live performances, Doillon “tries to follow in the steps of great people”, the performers she most admires, including Jimi Hendrix, Nina Simone, Janis Joplin, Alice Cooper or Metallica. “I was raised old-school — I love people to either do a dramatic show or a physical show or invest themselves. I’m not bluffed by dancing and lights. I’m too old for that shit. I’ve got the 14th of July to see horse parades and fireworks.”
She’ll be suitably attired for the shows by longtime collaborator Alessandro Michele of Gucci, in a selection of “wonderful tuxedos” and metallic dresses. “I’m being wrapped up like a sweet at the end of it, and Alessandro understands the humour of that. It’s a wonderful mixture of Pierrot and Commedia dell’Arte, beautiful and pathetic at the same time. And extremely light-reflective and showstopper in a way.”
While she has long been a fashion muse and collaborator to various brands, she seems to have found a sort of simpatico with Michele and Gucci. “It’s lovely to be part of the Gucci family. It’s a very wonderful, modern family where we’re all weird creatures from one world or another and all we have in common is that we would have nothing in common except an extreme singularity.”
If Doillon has any message through her various creative talents, it’s simply connection and reassurance that we’re all fundamentally alike in this world. “We are wonderful, crooked gems,” she says. “We are all living the same downs. We are empathetic creatures and there are loads of ways to be able to connect to our subconscious, our souls. I think that it’s a quest. That’s my passion, that’s my study — I will draw it, write it, sing it, touch it, taste it and will do everything to try and understand it.”
Lou Doillon is at So Frenchy So Chic in Melbourne on January 12 and in Sydney on January 18, as well as in Perth on January 14.