Je T’Aime … Moi Non Plus was the succès de scandale of 1969 – but Jane Birkin’s music was far more than that
In her collaborations with Serge Gainsbourg, Birkin left a permanent mark on pop - and her underrated solo albums of dark, strange songs are ripe for rediscovery
Serge Gainsbourg frequently had what you might charitably describe as complicated relationships with his female collaborators. There always seemed to be a problem: a joke or a satire on Gainsbourg's part to which they weren't entirely party, a level of controversy that Gainsbourg was willing to provoke but they were not. There was the 18-year-old France Gall, who he duped into singing a song that was evidently - to all but the innocent Gall herself - about oral sex, causing her to temporarily retreat from public life in mortification, and furnished with a succession of other songs that appeared to be viciously mocking their singer as she sang them (the Eurovision-winning Poupee de Cire, Poupee de Son, depicted her as a hopelessly naive puppet, whose fans didn't have a clue what they were doing). There was Brigitte Bardot, with whom he had a passionate affair, who first recorded the scandalous duet Je T'Aime ... Moi Non Plus, then refused to allow it to be released, fearful of precisely how scandalous it was going to be. There was his daughter Charlotte, whom he corralled into recording a duet called Lemon Incest, then cast in a film, Charlotte for Ever, in which he played her father, reducing her to tears on the set during a scene in which he undressed her. And there was Vanessa Paradis, their working relationship so fraught that Gainsbourg took to calling her Vanessa L'Enfer.
But that never happened with Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin. They were a couple for 12 years: their working partnership outlived their separation in 1980, lasting until Gainsbourg's death in 1991. The standard line is to call her his muse on account of the songs he wrote for her - Jane B, Ma Cherie Jane, La Fille aux Claquettes, Ballade de Johnny-Jane, Lost Song, Depressive - or the songs she inspired: Birkin performed the role of, and was clearly the model for, the titular heroine in Gainsbourg's masterpiece, the 1971 concept album Histoire de Melody Nelson. But the word muse" implies a certain passivity that sells Birkin hopelessly short: she felt far more like Gainsbourg's co-conspirator. 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. Singing the song that Bardot had refused to release, and riding out the resultant scandal, which grew far bigger than even Bardot had feared, encompassing not just radio bans, but condemnation from the Vatican. Demonstrating La Decadanse, Gainsbourg's attempt at instituting a dance craze that involved the male lead grasping his female partner's breasts. Being photographed naked and chained to a radiator for Lui magazine, complete with accompanying text by Gainsbourg describing her as his little hermaphrodite". Starring in the 1976 film that shared Je T'Aime ... Moi Non Plus' title, which explored the doomed relationship between a boyish girl and a homosexual trucker, involved a great deal of anal sex, and effectively scuppered Birkin's acting career for the next couple of years. Singing the astonishing Vie Mort et Resurrection d'un Amour Passion, a 1978 song that seemed to lay their crumbling relationship bare in the starkest terms imaginable: We are fucked ... I told you kill me, kill me if you're a man', but you're just a mug, because you never could."
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