Glittery_Bug
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Thanks for those, 1karina1. Jane looks beautiful, as always.
Jane Birkin
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60swildchild
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Serge Gainsbourg: What A Drag
Nick Kent, The Guardian, 15 April 2006
THROUGHOUT MY CAREER as a music journalist, I've often found myself sharing the same orbit as some of the more maladjusted talents of the late 20th century, but nothing could have prepared me for the time I spent with Serge Gainsbourg, the louche, turtle-eyed genius of la chanson Française, little more than two years before his death.
In early December 1988, I was invited to be a judge at a week-long film festival being held in Val d'Isère – a small village on the snowy, mountainous borderline between France and Switzerland where holidaymakers generally go to ski. Upon my arrival, I discovered that Gainsbourg was also a judge: in fact, he was the head of the voting jury which also consisted of Julien Temple and a bunch of French video directors. I already knew who he was – up to a point. As a teenager, I'd seen him act in a couple of films – he'd reminded me then of a shorter, Russian-Jewish version of the dandy theatre critic Kenneth Tynan – and of course I was well acquainted with 'Je T'Aime Moi Non Plus', the erotically charged record he made with Jane Birkin that had been a UK No 1 back in 1969, even though the song had been banned on the radio. I was aware he was a well-loved figure in France, but was still taken aback by the reactions of his fellow country-folk gathered at this snow-capped outpost, who all seemed to regard him as their very own homegrown Bob Dylan – an untouchable and utterly unique cultural deity.
On the first evening, everyone gathered together at the local cinema to hear Gainsbourg give a speech that would kick the whole event off. We sat there patiently waiting until the air was suddenly rent with horrible screaming sounds followed by a cacophony of Gallic swearing. The owner of the cinema had just informed Gainsbourg in the lobby that he was entering a no-smoking zone and the great man had thrown a royal fit. Five minutes later he entered the room, his face lost in a dense fog of cigarette smoke – the owner was carrying a huge ashtray and stood next to him like his eunuch flunky catching the ash as it fell – and stumbled to the podium. He looked absolutely terrible – his face and body utterly polluted from alcohol abuse, his eyes ugly unfocussed slits, his voice a sneerful rasping whisper. He began to tell an obscene story involving Brigitte Bardot and a champagne bottle but he was too drunk to remember the ending so he staggered offstage, literally collapsing into a nearby seat. Everyone else gave him a standing ovation but I just sat there, stunned. I'd never seen anything quite like this: a beloved icon who'd lost all self-control and who was making an ignominious public spectacle of himself over and over again and yet his public wasn't repelled in the least. On the contrary, they couldn't seem to get enough of watching his continued self-abasement.
These days, you read a lot about Serge Gainsbourg – the genius, the subversive, the playboy lover – but the Serge Gainsbourg I had the misfortune to encounter was a raging alcoholic above all else. Alcoholism clouded his moods, actions and work to such an intense degree towards the end of his life that he became another person altogether: Gainsbarre, he called his alcoholic alter-ego – a dissolute, disgusting, death-fixated individual perilously close to clinical insanity.
I wish I could tell you I enjoyed at least one meaningful conversation with him during that week, but I'd be lying if I did. A couple of times communication was attempted but I could never understand one slurred syllable of what was coming out of his mouth. He preferred the company of his many French admirers anyway. They'd buy him drinks at the hotel bar and listen enraptured to his drunken reminiscences. Their adulation seemed to provide him with a comfort zone he could temporarily lose himself in, somewhere to escape from the looming darkness of oncoming death. He knew he was going to die soon – there was absolutely no doubt about this. One of the other judges had a hotel room directly adjacent to his suite and told us that every night he'd be awoken at around 3am by the sound of Gainsbourg screaming "I'm going blind" over and over again.
Still – to his credit – he always maintained a solid work ethic whatever his personal condition and seemed to take his duties as a judge seriously. He attended all the screenings, though I can still recall his sonorous snoring throughout a Pet Shop Boys film we both had to endure. The festival ended with the French preview of Imagine, the John Lennon documentary. When the film climaxed with the ex-Beatle's death scene – blood-stained glasses crashing to the Manhattan pavement – Gainsbourg bellowed like a wounded animal and had to be physically escorted out of the viewing theatre. Watching another icon's anguished passing was evidently far too close to home for him to comfortably endure.
As fate would have it, I met the woman who is now my wife on the last night of the film festival and, a month later, moved to Paris. As the time passed, I began to attain a greater understanding of Gainsbourg's true worth as a ground-breaking artist. I came to appreciate his gift for elegant, lyrical wordplay and saw him as the direct, though more gleefully perverse heir to Cole Porter. I admired his ruthless need for self-transformation and his daringly eclectic taste in musical arrangements but remained somewhat wary of his "provocateur" side, which usually became ignited when too much liquor was coursing through his bloodstream.
These days, people talk about the televised incident from the 1980s when a drunken Gainsbourg informed Whitney Houston that he wanted to "f*ck" her – like it was some sort of epiphany. Watch the thing again, however, and it just looks sordid and silly. No one comes out looking good: neither the haughty, flustered Houston, not the slobbering, barely coherent "Gainsbarre". Meanwhile, the French host looks on impotently as though a rhinoceros had just stampeded into the studio. A far more powerful example of the delinquent Gainsbarre's ability to disgust occurred not long before his death, when he appeared on yet another talkshow alongside Catherine Ringer, the gifted singer in Rita Mitsouko, a popular French duo of the time. Before becoming a professional musician, Ringer had appeared in several p*rn films and, for some mad reason, this did not sit well with Gainsbourg at all. "You're nothing but a filthy wh*re," he suddenly spat out at her. "A filthy, f*cking wh*re." Ringer gave back as good as she got. "Look at you, you're just a bitter old alcoholic," she scolded back. "I used to admire you but these days you've become a disgusting old parasite." Finally, someone in France had the temerity to challenge the country's crumbling deity in public. It was great television.
Fifteen years after Serge Gainsbourg's death, the alcoholism is starting to be subtly airbrushed out of the portrait of the man that is being handed down the ages. A recent two-hour TV homage to him brought forth a cavalcade of UK and French musicians – many of whom participated in the new Monsieur Gainsbourg Revisited tribute album – to sing his songs and talk about his life and influence. Everyone spoke glowingly of Gainsbourg's unique aesthetic sensibility, but no one broached the subject of what he became at the end of his life. Like magpies, the Brit rock young bucks hear something suave in this crazy French guy's music and want to appropriate it into their own work. Good luck to them – Gainsbourg would have been utterly delighted – but there's still the sense that they're too young and wet behind the ears to have got the full measure of his often depraved but always profoundly human artistic vision.
© Nick Kent, 2006
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Glittery_Bug
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Same source as before:
Glittery_Bug
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Sorry if this has already been posted. From www.telegraph.co.uk
In another life, she would have clumped around in green wellies. Instead, Jane Birkin met Serge Gainsbourg – and the rest is history.
She talks to Mark Hudson
It was a grey lunchtime in 1974 when I first heard Jane Birkin's voice – her gasps of pleasure floating through the sixth-form common room of my Surrey grammar school over the swirling, celestial organ of Je t'aime, moi non plus. Written by Birkin's husband and co-groaner Serge Gainsbourg, this heavy-breathing paean to the sublimation of the self through physical love was banned by the BBC and the Vatican when first released in 1968. It became one of the biggest selling and most notorious records of its time, putting Birkin up there with such 1970s p*rn sirens as Sylvia Emmanuelle Kristel and Linda Deep Throat Lovelace. It's an image the British-born actress and singer has spent much of the past 35 years trying to live down.
On stage at London's Barbican Centre earlier this year, clad in an existentialist-black pyjama suit, trilling Gainsbourg's bittersweet love songs over undulating North African rhythms, her image could hardly have been further from that of sleaze queen. In France, she's known as an accomplished actress, a supporter of good causes and as the wife and prime interpreter of the late Gainsbourg, whose darkly alliterative way with the French language has seen him compared to great poets such as Rimbaud and Apollinaire. Her current, and rather brilliant, Maghrebian take on his songbook has added a dimension of world chic to this already classy image. But the British, it seems, just can't get beyond Je t'aime.
"The moment I get off the train," she groans, "it's always, `When are you going to make another dirty record, Jane?'" Now 55, she is tall and still rangy with a dazzlingly toothy smile, and when we meet the day after her Barbican show, she peppers the conversation with names that make her early life a positive gazetteer of 1960s glamour.
Raised in Chelsea and the Isle of Wight by bohemian aristo parents – her mother the actress Judy Campbell, her father a naval officer turned painter – she married James Bond composer John Barry at 17 and a brief appearance in Antonioni's Blow-Up made her the first full-frontal nude to appear on a British cinema screen. But if she hadn't turned up for a French film audition in the King's Road – "along with the Charlotte Ramplings and the Jacqueline Bissets" – she would probably never have gone to live in France or sung professionally.
Pierre Grimblat's justly forgotten film Slogan brought her together with a man 20 years her senior, who was to be the central figure in her life. Singer, actor, painter, film director, novelist, but first and foremost a songwriter, Serge Gainsbourg (real name Lucien Ginzburg) was the sort of paradoxical figure that perhaps only France could produce – an erotomane so prudish he couldn't bear the sight of his own genitals, a social revolutionary who only ever voted for Right-winger Valérie Giscard D'Estaing, a self-styled surrealist who won the Eurovision Song Contest. Their first meeting was not auspicious: Gainsbourg had just split up with Brigitte Bardot; Birkin couldn't speak a word of French.
But as love blossomed, Gainsbourg began writing songs for her, as, she says, "he did for everyone he loved". The list of women to whom he paid this compliment – including Bardot, Isabelle Adjani and Catherine Deneuve – is an indication not just of Gainsbourg's predilection for a certain kind of iconic beauty, but of the peculiarly French idea that actresses should sing. It's the sort of thing that has given French pop a bad name. But while Birkin may not be a great singer per se – indeed, at the Barbican, the violinist had to help her out on the high notes – she inhabits the songs' emotional predicaments, bringing them to life in a way from which our ghastly Pop Idols and celebrity karaoke merchants could learn a great deal.
"I think it's because words are so important to the French," she says, "even in what might seem just a trivial pop song. That's why Serge could be on a chat show at 8.30 in the evening and then on a culture programme at midnight, the way nobody ever is in Britain."
Big-nosed, big-eared, joli-laid – pretty-ugly – as the French put it, Gainsbourg was both massively egotistical and chronically insecure. As he retreated into alcoholism, he took ever greater delight in outraging his mainstream audience – offering to f*ck Whitney Houston on France's equivalent of Parkinson, recording a reggae version of La Marseillaise (for which he received death threats), and releasing a bizarrely incestuous duet with his daughter Charlotte – before his death from a heart attack in 1991.
Birkin had left him 10 years earlier, defeated by his nocturnal lifestyle, chainsmoking and anomalous, but obsessive tidiness, but she remains his most passionate advocate. And the middle-of-the-road French audience that he made such efforts to offend, still reveres him.
"He made things fun," says Birkin. "People would turn on the TV just to see what he would do next. But they knew it was all from the heart. There was a generosity about him and, of course, he did such beautiful things with the French language." And this love affair was entirely reciprocal. "He was so insecure, he had to see himself in the papers to know he existed. He desperately wanted to be loved, and he had the satisfaction of dying, knowing he was the most adored man in France."
But the place Gainsbourg most wanted to be loved was, ironically, Britain. "He loved Tommy Cooper, Morecambe and Wise, pantomime conjurors and London taxis. It would have meant so much to him if a major British artist – like his idols the Stones – had covered just one of his songs. But it never happened."
Not in his lifetime, at least; but there's now a generation of much younger Anglo-American artists – from Beck and the Divine Comedy to St Etienne – for whom Gainsbourg's mixture of dark lyricism and easy-listening prettiness, mumbled vocals and eclectic walls of sound, are the apogee of cool. His quirkily perverse early-1970s concept albums, The Ballad of Melody Nelson and The Man With the Cabbage Head, though ignored at the time, are now seen as classics of pop's golden age.
Birkin, even more ironically, has become a sort of icon of Frenchness. "There's nothing the French love more than a foreigner," she says. "Serge was a Russian Jew. My musicians are all North African. None of my friends in Paris are more than one generation French. But France has a way of absorbing all that – of making it French."
Birkin has a slightly scatty effusiveness in conversation, but there's a steely professionalism just below the surface. She has no trouble getting the Barbican audience to its feet, many of them in tears. She doesn't appear to have bothered much with facelifts, but she retains an air of the gamine, 1960s child-woman. Yet she is equally palpably the sort of upper-middle-class English woman who clumps around in green wellies with a Range Rover full of dogs.
"If I'd stayed in England, I'd have ended up being just someone's wife, and I often think how nice it would be to have a cottage in Kent and someone to pour me a glass of sherry in the evening. But I think the life we have reflects who we are, and that just wasn't for me."
So how does she feel now about Je t'aime, that strange erotic dirge with its untranslatable title (it means something like "I love you, me neither"), with which millions round the world still associate her? "For years I hated it. But I suppose if you've got be remembered for one thing, a song about love isn't so bad."
Birkin: 'Serge did such beautiful things with the French language'
In another life, she would have clumped around in green wellies. Instead, Jane Birkin met Serge Gainsbourg – and the rest is history.
She talks to Mark Hudson
It was a grey lunchtime in 1974 when I first heard Jane Birkin's voice – her gasps of pleasure floating through the sixth-form common room of my Surrey grammar school over the swirling, celestial organ of Je t'aime, moi non plus. Written by Birkin's husband and co-groaner Serge Gainsbourg, this heavy-breathing paean to the sublimation of the self through physical love was banned by the BBC and the Vatican when first released in 1968. It became one of the biggest selling and most notorious records of its time, putting Birkin up there with such 1970s p*rn sirens as Sylvia Emmanuelle Kristel and Linda Deep Throat Lovelace. It's an image the British-born actress and singer has spent much of the past 35 years trying to live down.
On stage at London's Barbican Centre earlier this year, clad in an existentialist-black pyjama suit, trilling Gainsbourg's bittersweet love songs over undulating North African rhythms, her image could hardly have been further from that of sleaze queen. In France, she's known as an accomplished actress, a supporter of good causes and as the wife and prime interpreter of the late Gainsbourg, whose darkly alliterative way with the French language has seen him compared to great poets such as Rimbaud and Apollinaire. Her current, and rather brilliant, Maghrebian take on his songbook has added a dimension of world chic to this already classy image. But the British, it seems, just can't get beyond Je t'aime.
"The moment I get off the train," she groans, "it's always, `When are you going to make another dirty record, Jane?'" Now 55, she is tall and still rangy with a dazzlingly toothy smile, and when we meet the day after her Barbican show, she peppers the conversation with names that make her early life a positive gazetteer of 1960s glamour.
Raised in Chelsea and the Isle of Wight by bohemian aristo parents – her mother the actress Judy Campbell, her father a naval officer turned painter – she married James Bond composer John Barry at 17 and a brief appearance in Antonioni's Blow-Up made her the first full-frontal nude to appear on a British cinema screen. But if she hadn't turned up for a French film audition in the King's Road – "along with the Charlotte Ramplings and the Jacqueline Bissets" – she would probably never have gone to live in France or sung professionally.
Pierre Grimblat's justly forgotten film Slogan brought her together with a man 20 years her senior, who was to be the central figure in her life. Singer, actor, painter, film director, novelist, but first and foremost a songwriter, Serge Gainsbourg (real name Lucien Ginzburg) was the sort of paradoxical figure that perhaps only France could produce – an erotomane so prudish he couldn't bear the sight of his own genitals, a social revolutionary who only ever voted for Right-winger Valérie Giscard D'Estaing, a self-styled surrealist who won the Eurovision Song Contest. Their first meeting was not auspicious: Gainsbourg had just split up with Brigitte Bardot; Birkin couldn't speak a word of French.
But as love blossomed, Gainsbourg began writing songs for her, as, she says, "he did for everyone he loved". The list of women to whom he paid this compliment – including Bardot, Isabelle Adjani and Catherine Deneuve – is an indication not just of Gainsbourg's predilection for a certain kind of iconic beauty, but of the peculiarly French idea that actresses should sing. It's the sort of thing that has given French pop a bad name. But while Birkin may not be a great singer per se – indeed, at the Barbican, the violinist had to help her out on the high notes – she inhabits the songs' emotional predicaments, bringing them to life in a way from which our ghastly Pop Idols and celebrity karaoke merchants could learn a great deal.
"I think it's because words are so important to the French," she says, "even in what might seem just a trivial pop song. That's why Serge could be on a chat show at 8.30 in the evening and then on a culture programme at midnight, the way nobody ever is in Britain."
Big-nosed, big-eared, joli-laid – pretty-ugly – as the French put it, Gainsbourg was both massively egotistical and chronically insecure. As he retreated into alcoholism, he took ever greater delight in outraging his mainstream audience – offering to f*ck Whitney Houston on France's equivalent of Parkinson, recording a reggae version of La Marseillaise (for which he received death threats), and releasing a bizarrely incestuous duet with his daughter Charlotte – before his death from a heart attack in 1991.
Birkin had left him 10 years earlier, defeated by his nocturnal lifestyle, chainsmoking and anomalous, but obsessive tidiness, but she remains his most passionate advocate. And the middle-of-the-road French audience that he made such efforts to offend, still reveres him.
"He made things fun," says Birkin. "People would turn on the TV just to see what he would do next. But they knew it was all from the heart. There was a generosity about him and, of course, he did such beautiful things with the French language." And this love affair was entirely reciprocal. "He was so insecure, he had to see himself in the papers to know he existed. He desperately wanted to be loved, and he had the satisfaction of dying, knowing he was the most adored man in France."
But the place Gainsbourg most wanted to be loved was, ironically, Britain. "He loved Tommy Cooper, Morecambe and Wise, pantomime conjurors and London taxis. It would have meant so much to him if a major British artist – like his idols the Stones – had covered just one of his songs. But it never happened."
Not in his lifetime, at least; but there's now a generation of much younger Anglo-American artists – from Beck and the Divine Comedy to St Etienne – for whom Gainsbourg's mixture of dark lyricism and easy-listening prettiness, mumbled vocals and eclectic walls of sound, are the apogee of cool. His quirkily perverse early-1970s concept albums, The Ballad of Melody Nelson and The Man With the Cabbage Head, though ignored at the time, are now seen as classics of pop's golden age.
Birkin, even more ironically, has become a sort of icon of Frenchness. "There's nothing the French love more than a foreigner," she says. "Serge was a Russian Jew. My musicians are all North African. None of my friends in Paris are more than one generation French. But France has a way of absorbing all that – of making it French."
Birkin has a slightly scatty effusiveness in conversation, but there's a steely professionalism just below the surface. She has no trouble getting the Barbican audience to its feet, many of them in tears. She doesn't appear to have bothered much with facelifts, but she retains an air of the gamine, 1960s child-woman. Yet she is equally palpably the sort of upper-middle-class English woman who clumps around in green wellies with a Range Rover full of dogs.
"If I'd stayed in England, I'd have ended up being just someone's wife, and I often think how nice it would be to have a cottage in Kent and someone to pour me a glass of sherry in the evening. But I think the life we have reflects who we are, and that just wasn't for me."
So how does she feel now about Je t'aime, that strange erotic dirge with its untranslatable title (it means something like "I love you, me neither"), with which millions round the world still associate her? "For years I hated it. But I suppose if you've got be remembered for one thing, a song about love isn't so bad."
Birkin: 'Serge did such beautiful things with the French language'
Glittery_Bug
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Those are gorgeous! Thank you so much, PollyM and laisla!
Glittery_Bug
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polkaa_dot
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thanks, Glittery_Bug! you've been adding such great pictures to the thread! karma!
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I agree, wonderful job, glittery!. 
Glittery_Bug
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You're welcome, and thank you! 
http://skunkeye.blogs.com
www.musicclub.it
www.npg.org.uk
www.davidvecchiato.com (I hope this applies, even if it is art!)
http://skunkeye.blogs.com
www.musicclub.it
www.npg.org.uk
www.davidvecchiato.com (I hope this applies, even if it is art!)
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Glittery_Bug
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Attachment from www.silverbeauties.com
actrices.blogspot.com
sheruinsyou.vox.com
www.micrec.lv
http://www.geocities.com/MadisonAvenue/4430/chaprongallery.html
cnn.com
http://www32.ocn.ne.jp/~whitewine/unknowninfomationalaindelonrelationanythingscribble.htm
www.peter-bastian.net
http://www.movieactors.com/actors/janebirkin.htm
www.downtownexpress.com
www.janebirkin.net
(Sorry for the small size) www.dispenser.rai.it
kikidalesia.musicblog.fr
actrices.blogspot.com
sheruinsyou.vox.com
www.micrec.lv
http://www.geocities.com/MadisonAvenue/4430/chaprongallery.html
cnn.com
http://www32.ocn.ne.jp/~whitewine/unknowninfomationalaindelonrelationanythingscribble.htm
www.peter-bastian.net
http://www.movieactors.com/actors/janebirkin.htm
www.downtownexpress.com
www.janebirkin.net
(Sorry for the small size) www.dispenser.rai.it
kikidalesia.musicblog.fr
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