Born in London, Jane Birkin moved to Paris in her 20s and never left. While she’s remembered outside France primarily as the woman doing the moaning on an erotic duet with Serge Gainsbourg, over the span of a 50-year career she threw herself into the French musical tradition and carved out a unique space within la chanson française.
“Of course people remember ‘Je t’aime’ and it’s good to be remembered for something,” Birkin said of her biggest international hit.
“I know that, when I die, on the news that’s the record they’ll play as you go out feet first.”
This week she was proved right, as broadcasters around the world – RFI included – soundtracked their coverage of her death with those evocative opening notes: da-dun-dun-da-duuun...
The music was Gainsbourg’s, but it was Birkin’s breathy performance that gave “Je t’aime... moi non plus” (“I love you... me neither”) its power to shock, even today.
Banned by the BBC and deplored by the Vatican, the 1968 record made the duo – partners in life as well as music – notorious around the world.
But while music critics devoted at least as much attention to Gainsbourg’s other achievements, for many, Birkin would remain synonymous with her very first song.
“It was like having a criminal record,” Birkin would tell RFI years later. “From then on, I was Jane ‘Je t’aime’ Birkin.”
France's favourite anglaise
Her musical career was, in fact, far more than that – not to mention her career in film, which saw her work with directors including Michelangelo Antonioni, Michel Audiard, Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Doillon and Agnès Varda, as well as directing herself.
She was also a stage actor, dramatist and, especially as she got older, a humanitarian activist.
Interactive timeline: Jane Birkin, a life in song
But she was first and foremost a French celebrity – as the newspapers were fond of calling her, “France’s favourite Englishwoman”. Speaking to British newspaper The Independent in 2013, Birkin described herself as “part of the furniture” in France, and “absolutely not part of even the garden furniture in England”.
It wasn’t that Birkin was a natural fit in France, at least not initially. In a 1978 interview with RFI English, she describes being reprimanded by Parisians in the street for wearing short skirts or daring to take her baby daughter out without gloves on. (Charlotte Gainsbourg apparently refused to wear them.)
She also spoke of her frustration at not being able to express herself spontaneously in French: “I miss speaking English,” she told the two journalists RFI sent to interview her, one British, one Irish. “I speak sort of French-English – anyone who can’t speak French thinks it’s marvellous, anyone who speaks French, they realise it’s pretty rotten.”
Being somewhat out of place, though, was also part of the appeal. “I love living in Paris. But also I couldn’t take Serge anywhere else because he’s so French... I couldn’t suddenly cart him off to England and expect him to live there because he’d feel sort of ill at ease, whereas I rather like being taken out of places,” said Birkin, then in her early 30s and still in a relationship with Gainsbourg.
“I’ve always liked being in trains before arriving at the destination, just the journey. And so I like it, I like having the excuse of not being in my own country. You feel much freer. I like it very much.”
A voice all her own
For the French too, Birkin’s charm lay in her foreignness. The short skirts and tousled hair may have shocked some prim Parisians, but for others they symbolised Swinging London. And in an era when the British capital was the epicentre of the new pop culture, here was a Brit who had chosen France.
You see it in the fixation with Birkin’s English accent when she spoke French – which, alongside Gainsbourg and “Je t’aime...”, was the other subject guaranteed to come up in interviews.
“It’s absolutely not that bad,” she replied with good humour when yet another French interviewer asked if she wasn’t perhaps putting it on, just a little. “Haven’t you noticed my Rs? My throat’s sore from doing them. Frankly, I think I’ve made remarkable progress.”
She could have been forgiven for putting it on, given that it was part of what made her voice so recognisable – soft-spoken, girlish, a little fragile, and with that particular accent that doesn’t really resemble the way Londoners speak today, seemingly frozen in well-to-do west London of the 1960s.
For music critic Bertrand Dicale, Birkin had a way of turning what some would see as faults into defining characteristics.
“She had this extremely rare capacity to not appear to be a singer,” he told RFI this week. As they had with Edith Piaf and Charles Aznavour, he said, “people would say, ‘Birkin isn’t a singer, she’s out of tune, she’s not really singing, she’s just whispering...’ So her singing is questioned at the start, when in fact it’s one of the most unique and fruitful singing techniques around.”
'Gainsbourg's co-conspirator'
Gainsbourg saw something similar in her. He was the one who encouraged the young actor to take up singing, and who wrote album after album of material for her.
“I always had the good fortune to meet people who were more ambitious for me than I was for myself,” Birkin told RFI in 2021. “And I made the most of that. Serge thought I could sing, that I had a fragility that carried his words in a way that he couldn’t, and he gave me some of the most wonderful lyrics.”
Birkin is inevitably described as Gainsbourg’s muse, and she may have begun that way – playing the “baby doll” to perfection on “Je t’aime...” and its accompanying album, then inspiring Gainsbourg’s darkly beautiful concept album “Histoire de Melody Nelson”, on which she was given little more to do than sing choruses and pose for the cover art.
But by the time she released her first solo album “Di doo dah” in 1973, a creative collaboration was taking shape. Gainsbourg wrote all the songs, yet they clearly draw on Birkin’s own experiences and are sung with an intimacy and naturalness that makes it hard to imagine anyone else giving them voice – even Gainsbourg himself.
The pair would go on to make five more albums together during Gainsbourg’s lifetime, as well as several rearrangements of his material that Birkin released after his death in 1991.
“The word ‘muse’ implies a certain passivity that sells Birkin hopelessly short: she felt far more like Gainsbourg’s co-conspirator,” British music critic Alexis Petridis wrote this week. “It was Birkin who modelled Gainsbourg’s iconic latterday image. There seemed to be nothing he could come up with that she would baulk at.”
Varied collaborations
Birkin’s later years saw her collaborate with other artists from France and around the world, including Alain Souchon, Françoise Hardy, Manu Chao, Bryan Ferry, Yosui Inoue, Beth Gibbons and Feist.
“She was such a sensitive, tender woman,” remembers singer-songwriter Alain Chamfort, who worked with Birkin as she was first venturing beyond Gainsbourg in the 1990s. “She interpreted songs with such delicacy and precision, such subtlety.”
While her English-language collaborations led her to experiment with different musical styles, Birkin seemed most at home in la chanson française – poetic, theatrical, bittersweet pop.
It was this tradition she returned to when she began writing her own songs. She penned the lyrics for her final two studio albums, “Enfants d’hiver” (“Winter children”) in 2008 and “Oh! Pardon tu dormais…” (“Oh sorry, you were sleeping”) in 2020, with French composers such as Étienne Daho providing the music.
Some marvelled that the eternal petite anglaise had written directly in French. “I think in French by now, probably,” Birkin told RFI in 2004.
She’d come a long way from missing the chance to speak English, and from being pegged as “just” Gainsbourg’s partner.
When another RFI interviewer asked her if writing the songs on “Enfants d’hiver” was her way of grieving Gainsbourg, Birkin replied: “No, because first off I don’t want to grieve anybody. For me, people are still there – really very present. He’s sat there, on the beach, and my father and my mother too. I imagine them everywhere.”
Her answer sounds all the more poignant today: “I don’t want to stick people in holes and say it’s over.”
A private funeral will be held at the Saint-Roch church in Paris on Monday 24 July. The ceremony will be broadcast live on a giant screen at the corner of rue Saint-Honoré and rue des Pyramides.
