Jane Birkin

[auxt]

thanks auxt! I'd love to see that show..

Hi StellaMare, here is a clip for your viewing pleasure:

http://www.divshare.com/download/2933021-7b4

You can either stream or download the file at the link.

The rest of the Paris 2007 documentary is amazing, I would upload that too but it is 2 GB of video !

 

[teza]

I'm obsessed!!!!!!

 

[StellaMare]

auxt: Thank you so much!

 

[oliverhm]

GREAT thread.

 

[sofiascarlett]

sofiascarlett: It's in Stockholm at Södra Teatern!

Sounds amazing, I didn´t even know she was coming to Sweden

 

[Glittery_Bug]

www.cinebeats.com

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com

http://digilander.libero.it/guido_1953/pics/hotpants-2/hotpants-girls-2.htm

 

[teza]

WOW thanks!

 

[Glittery_Bug]

www.ebay.fr

 

[PollyM]

Some wonderful pictures from verdeau.com








Wishing you a great year

 

[StellaMare]

PollyM: Those are wonderful! I've never seen them before, either..

 

[Glittery_Bug]

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,2200378,00.html

A charmed life

[FONT=arial,helvetica,sans-serif]Four decades after Serge Gainsbourg put aural sex at the top of the charts with 'Je t'aime', his muse remains in thrall to his memory. Here she tells Tim Adams about her wild times with Serge, the political causes she espouses, and the film she has made of her life. Then there was the day she jumped in the Seine...[/FONT]

[FONT=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]Sunday October 28, 2007

[/FONT] It's 39 years since Jane Birkin fell in love with Serge Gainsbourg, 27 years since they split up, and 16 years since Gainsbourg died, but you'd never guess. Paris has never let its most iconic couple separate - you can, Birkin says, still not get through a day in this city without hearing the immortal intimacies of 'Je t'aime... moi non plus' from somewhere - and anyway Birkin herself, at 60, has chosen to be living proof that love can survive divorce and death. She still spends most nights with Gainsbourg, singing his songs on an endless cabaret tour, breathing life into words he wrote with her, his muse, in mind. Birkin's apartment, just off the Boulevard St Germain, decked in crimson silk, cast in permanent twilight, crammed with old photographs and a collection of stuffed animals, is made for this perpetual seance. She shares it with a corpulent bulldog, Dora, who lounges on a chaise.

The original ingenue, Birkin has never given up her wide eyes, though now they peer out from behind specs. She talks in an unstoppable girlish rush, with a forced lightness, as if she fears, if she stops speaking, that everything will be revealed as messier and darker than she will allow. Things are routinely 'jolly' and 'fun'. Her mother used to tell her to stop saying 'you' and 'one' when she meant 'I', but it's a habit she can't break; she comes across, partly as a result, as both likeably self-effacing and self-obsessed.Having been world famous as a lover - 'Je t'aime' was outlawed by the BBC and the Pope - Birkin has lived alone for 15 years, since she split up with her third husband, the film director, Jacques Doillon, who could not compete with her grief for Gainsbourg. She has arranged much of her current life, she suggests, as a strategy against being by herself. Her personal organiser is the size of a phone book. When we meet she's just back from Luxembourg where she was launching her autobiographical film, Boxes, and taking the opportunity to talk about Burma and her friend Aung San Suu Kyi. (The pair met when Birkin did a clandestine concert in Rangoon in 1999; Suu Kyi gave her an abiding motto, 'be cautiously reckless', which has served her well since.)

Before Luxembourg Birkin had been in Rio, at a film festival, where she had found some Buddhist monks to share her platform. And prior to that she had met President Sarkozy to persuade him, with partial success, to impose sanctions on the Burmese junta. For the first half hour of our interview, as she explains all this without pause, I'm wondering if we are going to get beyond the hypocrisy of Total Oil, and the merits of energy sanctions in Chad before she has to dash off to an appointment with Hermès, to talk about Birkin handbags.

One of the reasons that Parisians have loved Birkin is her passion for causes - she has always been a marcher. She arrived in Paris just after the Événements of May 1968, but she has made sure she has hardly missed a protest since: anti-capital punishment ('we were pelted with vegetables on la République'), pro-abortion ('Serge was not convinced, though I knew of at least two girls he had made get rid of pregnancies'), anti-Le Pen, Vietnam, Nicaragua, Bosnia, Chechnya, Iraq. The Burma march she helped to organise had been a disappointment. 'There were only a hundred of us,' she says, wounded by the thought.

Birkin, the daughter of a war hero, has always had a mortal fear of not doing enough. 'I try not to lie awake with that awful thought, "I could have helped",' she says. 'For me, the worst words in the world are, "****, I could have been there."' Her father David, a naval commander in special operations, won the Légion d'honneur for his role in saving British airmen from the Normandy coast on Christmas Day 1943; on his return from war he became an artist and married Noel Coward's leading lady, Judy Campbell. Jane was the middle of three children, in thrall to her elder brother Andrew, who became a film director and part-time Peter Pan obsessive. When I ask her what she thinks of as home, she says that home is her childhood, 'a land that I can never verify', though she has, in some respects, apparently never left it.

Her parents gave her that aristocratic English fear of convention: she was, at all costs, to lead a charmed life, and she took them at their word. At 17 she married John 'James Bond theme' Barry and had her first daughter, Kate, with him. A year later she appeared in Antonioni's seminal Sixties film Blow-Up, where she gained a certain notoriety as the first actress to show pubic hair in mainstream cinema. By the time she met Gainsbourg, on the set of the film Slogan in Paris, she was divorced, a refugee from the King's Road.

To Parisians, Gainsbourg was a kind of native hybrid of Woody Allen and Bob Dylan; when he died, Paris came to a halt. President Mitterand called him 'our Baudelaire'. Like many homegrown French cultural heroes, however, Gainsbourg never really made it as an export. Another reason the French loved Birkin was, you suspect, that she was the first foreigner not only to get the point of Gainsbourg, but to fall in love with him. In 1968, when she was 21 and Gainsbourg 40, she had the nerve to take Brigitte Bardot's place in his life and his bed. (Gainsbourg explained to her that he was afraid of Bardot's breasts.)

Nothing in Birkin's life has matched their courtship. She shows me the leather-bound book of his songs that he gave her, inscribed in red ink: 'To Jane, A few Chansons Cruelle, Je t'aime moi non plus, Serge'. She talks about their first night out together as if she has just returned home from it: 'Serge sweetly doesn't know how to dance but we go to Regine's, then to a Russian club, and Serge pushes 100-franc notes into the musicians' violins so they will play the "Valse triste" of Sibelius as we get into a taxi; after that we went to an amazing place where Mexican singers Serge knew were playing with Joe Turner, the great jazz man; from there to Madame Arthur, a transvestite club, where Serge's father played the piano before the war. These gentlemen dressed up as ladies, who I had never seen the like of, come and sit on Serge's knee; after that, at dawn, we went to have a croissant on the Pigalle and all the prostitutes said hello to Serge. I just thought, "Wow." He had the keys to the city, or to all of the cities of Paris.'

That all-night party lasted throughout the 1970s; Paris was the film set for Birkin and Gainsbourg's hopelessly turbulent marriage. She was in love with the doomed romance that her ageing alcoholic husband represented. 'If I was bought flowers I used to let them die in the wrapping because I thought it looked romantic,' she recalls. 'Now I cut the stalks and put them in a vase. I want things to live now; I didn't always.'

I wonder if it's possible for her to separate her idea of Serge from her idea of Paris?

 

[Glittery_Bug]

'Not at all,' she says. 'Like Paris, sometimes Serge had the virtue of political incorrectness, or at least he never stood where you thought he would. For example, for all his provocation, he had a love of the police; he gave a great deal of money to the police widows' fund. At four in the morning no one else would be awake, so he went down to the police station at the bottom of the road with bottles of Krug champagne and sat up drinking with the night officers, telling Belgian jokes. He would come back with the gendarmes at incredible hours of the night, because he thought they should taste my Lancashire hotpot.'

Family life must have been quite challenging?

'What we didn't realise was that it might be difficult for the children to be at school with their parents being on the radio like that, with "Je t'aime", and so on,' she says brightly. 'Serge did have a habit of chaining me up to radiators for photos, so that might have been quite hard for them, too. For us, though, it was very jolly.'

By the time he died, Gainsbourg had had two heart attacks and had lost a portion of his liver, though he continued to drink and chainsmoke Gauloises as before. Does she believe she could have saved him from himself?
'I don't think I could,' she says. 'Everywhere he went in Paris people said, "Hey Serge, this round is on me." And he could not refuse. Someone called him a suicidaire optimiste, and that is very accurate. I don't think he thought he would die at 63, though. He thought he would have two or three chances at redemption first.'

The great dislocation in Birkin's life occurred that week in 1991. When she was on her way to Gainsbourg's funeral, she heard that her father had died in England. She could not imagine a shock of pain like it. Sometimes, these days, she thinks of them together, the two men she wanted most to please. 'They used to take their Mandrax together like two old owls,' she recalls. 'I'd say, "Have you taken your sleeping drug?" and they would answer, "No, non, non", nodding off.'

Her pain allows Birkin to forgive Gainsbourg anything, in retrospect. She left him after 12 years, pregnant with Jacques Doillon's child, and there is something unsettling about her subservience to his memory. 'He was a permanent adolescent,' she says at one point, as if this were the mark of his genius. Wasn't that hard to bear? 'It was impertinent of me to try to change him,' she suggests.

This meekness extends to the troubling films Gainsbourg made with their daughter, the actress Charlotte. Charlotte Forever, a home movie of sorts, and Lemon Incest, a record and video, applied some of the atmosphere of 'Je t'aime' to father and daughter. Gainsbourg's fans saw these films as further evidence of his taboo-breaking provocation, though it is hard to watch them now - Gainsbourg and his 12-year-old daughter dancing half undressed, he clutching her chin with a leather gloved hand, or entwined in a bed with silk sheets - without considerable unease. Was Birkin disturbed by them?

'No, I was the one who persuaded her to do it, you see,' she says, with her spry innocence. 'Therefore I felt responsible for the pain she felt in doing it.'

But why did she want to put her daughter through that pain?

'I thought she should do it for her father. He loved her so much but the only way he could express it was by record and film. I thought she would regret it if she didn't and I knew he would be mortified if she refused him.'

Wasn't it a strange way of showing fatherly affection?

'Lemon Incest was divine, I thought. There was never anyone as shy as Serge, he was tormented by his shyness. None of the children ever saw him with his clothes off, or in the bath. He would not have known how to embrace his children, hold them tight unless there was a camera. He wouldn't have wanted to embarrass Charlotte, his only way of saying he loved her was on record.'

Birkin has lately had a go at telling her side of the story on film in Boxes, which she has written and directed based on her own compartmentalised lives: three husbands and three daughters. The girls were involved with the film, and she gave them final approval. Charlotte cried all through it, but then wrote a note saying 'Don't change a word'. With Kate [her daughter with Barry] she talked about childhood into the night, and Louie [her daughter with Doillon] had grown up with most of it anyway. Birkin clearly gives her daughters the kind of intense support you imagine she was given herself, and also the same pressure: to be something extraordinary. She will only countenance their genius. 'There's a huge melancholy in Kate, she is a great artist, a photographer; no doubt she will make wonderful films,' she says. 'Charlotte should be Katharine Hepburn, she has that elegance and funniness and a tragedy when her face is inert. She can make you cry without moving a muscle. Lou will go on the road and sing her songs in a caravan with a guitar. She should have at least four children, and save her husband from the guillotine and get back to England and shake up her relations like Madame de la Tour du Pin [diarist of the Revolution].'

It's touching this, but also a little unnerving, born of the prime force in Birkin's life, which she continues to live in fear of. 'Next week I am doing the montage of a documentary I made three weeks ago about a puppeteer in Palestine,' she says, 'and in the afternoon I am rehearsing for the new show that will be on the road in Europe. Why do I do this? I don't want to be a bore.'

Having lived such a vivid early life, Birkin says she has no fear of mortality, welcomes it, as long as she can go before her children. In the meantime she has a desperation to avoid settling into old age. 'I sometimes fear I am like that other undersea creature who spends its whole life searching for the perfect rock and when it finds it, it eats the one thing it does not need any more, its brain. The motto is: never find your rock.'

She moved into this flat seven years ago, and she is in a moving mood again, she suggests. 'I think it would be nice to have a garden to draw in like Serge and I had, or an attic where you can have coffee on the roof.' Packing would be an issue. Before she rushes out she talks me through some of the objects that fill every inch of surface and wall: her father's pipe, a naked woman in a shell her younger sister made ('I should just like to touch her all the time'), all the children's old birthday cards, Charlotte's tooth box for the tooth fairies.

She pauses over more photographs of Serge, and traces her hand on the framed manuscript of some of his lyrics, wine stained and ash burned.

Does she miss the fights as well, I wonder?

'Oh,' she says, 'I miss them most of all.'

What was her favourite?

She thinks for a moment. 'One time we were in a bar and Serge had turned my basket, my famous basket, upside down and gone through the contents to the amusement of everybody because there were some very sordid things in the bottom. I was vowing vengeance and there was a custard pie on the table and before I could think twice my fingers were under the pie and the pie had been launched at Serge.' She laughs. 'He walked out, and with pieces of pie falling off him he walked down Boulevard St Germain. At this point I thought desperate measures were needed, so I dashed in front of him, ran down some steps to the Seine, and I threw myself into the river. There was a kind of whirlpool, which made it tricky.'
What happened next?

'Well for one thing my top, which was St Laurent, hand made, shrunk to nothing and Serge of course was absolutely delighted. Anyhow, I clambered out and we gaily walked home arm in arm.' She pauses, thinks of strolling down the river bank, soaking wet. 'Serge was, you might say, a fan of the grand gesture.'

Vie en Rose: Plainly Jane

Born 14 December 1946 in London.

Career Caused a stir by revealing pubic hair in the film Blow-Up (1966). Took lead role in the French film Slogan (1968). In 1969, the song 'Je t'aime... moi non plus', released with Serge Gainsbourg, was banned in most of Europe but reached No 1 in the UK. Starred opposite Brigitte Bardot in Don Juan (1973). In 1992, after releasing nine albums, won Female Artist of the Year in the French Victoires de la Musique awards. She has recently writted and directed an autobiographical film, Boxes.

Personal life Marriages to John Barry, Serge Gainsbourg and Jacques Doillon produced daughters Kate Barry (a photographer), Charlotte Gainsbourg (actress) and Lou Doillon (actress).

She says 'I was very boring. I got married. I had a baby at 19, I went to France, fell in love with the main actor, Serge - very conventional. We stayed together for 13 years, then I walked out - that's conventional too.'

They say 'She used to play with her bum now she plays with her brain. She has become an honourable performer, taken very seriously.' Film critic Derek Malcolm.

 

[Glittery_Bug]

www.cnn.com

The Scene meets English actress and singer Jane Birkin in Paris to discuss her new album, falling in love with Serge Gainsbourg and the most infamous duet in pop history and why Parisians have such a reputation for rudeness.
The Scene: You're from England and you grew up in London. How did you end up living in Paris?
Jane Birkin: I came to Paris in 1968 to do a movie called "Slogan" and I fell in love with the leading man, who was Serge Gainsbourg. After that he gave me "Je t'aime... moi non plus," the song that was banned by the Vatican, banned by the BBC and was therefore a worldwide success. He and I became the most famous of couples in that strange way because of "Je t'aime" and because we stuck together for 13 years and he went on being my friend until the day he died. Who could ask for more? So Paris became my home. I've been adopted here. They like my accent, when I came here the skirts were shorter than anyone else's. Everyone at home was wearing just the same as me. I was the lucky one because I got here first so they thought it was my fashion.
TS: Where do you feel most at home these days?
JB: I left London for Paris when I was 20, so I've been here for 39 years. So really it's Paris if you had to measure it by what it would be like if you were blind -- I'd know it door to door. Now I've come back to where I started out which is Saint Germain. Although it's changed quite a bit I can remember things here. Like when I threw myself into the Seine to get Serge to forgive me for throwing a custard pie in his face. They'd always be these legendary fights we'd have in nightclubs because we were pretty plastered both he and I. Luckily all the people I've ever loved have always fallen in love with England because of the letter boxes, the pubs, those sorts of things. I've always been rather proud that they always thought it was so extravagant and so completely foreign. Serge always used to say, 'How can it be so strange and so close?' And now of course with the tunnel it's become much easier to come and go so I don't really know where home is anymore. My children are all here in Paris. I've put myself at the exact axis between my three girls. For the moment that's just exactly where I want to be and with a suitcase to hand so that I can shoot off somewhere else.
TS: Tell us more about the incident when you threw yourself into the Seine?
JB: We were in a nightclub and I was with a lot of silly friends who were all extremely drunk and Serge had done something that seemed highly offensive to me at the time. I think he had turned my handbag upside down which isn't such a great offence but it had wounded me because everyone had seen the contents scattered on the dancefloor and as I was picking up my bits and pieces I vowed revenge. There was a custard pie on the table and a few silly people were urging me to do it so that before I knew it the pie had left the table and hit Serge so completely in the face that I couldn't believe I'd managed it so beautifully right, like in a cartoon or something. And he got up, very dignified, and he walked towards the exit. I ran after him and I realised I'd done the worst thing which was showing him up in public. He just continued his walk down the rue la Reine with great crusts of custard pie falling off his face. And I thought, "What to do? How might I possibly be forgiven?" And I realised my only chance was to run past him and intrigue him in some way so that he would follow me. And it worked just perfectly. I got to the Seine and Serge said I was crouching behind a tree waiting to see if he came down the steps as I hoped he would. He came down and then I threw myself into the Seine and Serge was taking off his watch because it was a Cartier and it wasn't waterproof. They had to get the pompiers to help me, it's not a very sensible thing to do. But there I was in Serge's arms and he forgave me. It was very childish but he was very sweet.
TS: Do you think you'll stay in Paris forever?
JB: I don't know that you can ever say that you'll be anywhere forever. But I can't imagine being anywhere other than Paris because I've got so used to the French. I've got used to the things that other people might think of as failings but I find attractive. The qualities and faults I love in a bundle, in the way you do when you love a person. Perhaps you love the faults just as much as the qualities in actual fact. I just remember falling in love here and thinking it was so free and I could spend hours taking a coffee. I suppose I was free because I wasn't under my parents' eye. I knew that I could actually make up my past. The great thing about crossing to another country is that you can exaggerate wildly and you don't wound anybody. So I was free to do exactly as I wanted and probably with the most attractive man in France. I do think about going away but the French have adopted me. Would I be brave enough to go somewhere where I'd be totally unknown? I don't know. You can have weeks or months doing that but not forever.
TS: Parisians sometimes have a reputation for being difficult. Is that fair?
JB: I do encourage people to come here. They mustn't be put off by people being bolshie. You just need to learn to say one thing and that is, "Pardon, Je ne parle pas francais." And then it's fine; everything is ok side and you'll find people every bit as gentle and kind as they are anywhere else. What they get upset about is when foreigners just come bursting into shops and expect everyone to speak English. There's the whole thing about Paris being beautiful. But the people are too. I hate it when people just talk about monuments. What does one really care about monuments? I love the way the English are so polite and cheery but in France it's different. Whatever people say, they open their arms to so many strangers. There are a great many foreign people in France and perhaps I was always meant to be a foreigner -- when you actually appreciate another culture, when you find it such fun. I just find everything else more exciting and I like learning about people. For the history and for the beauty and for the funny French -- they don't obey rules and they're all so individual. You can't muck around with the French and that's something I've come to admire.
TS: Tell us about your new album, "Fictions"
JB: The original idea behind doing the record was the idea of coming home, which in my case was England and I wanted to sing in English for the first time, or practically the first time. The first song on the album called "Home" is by Neil Hannon of The Divine Comedy and he wrote lyrics about childhood because perhaps that's the home that you really want to get back to and you know you never can. It's kind of him to hand over such a pretty song. And then there is song about a phantom photograph falling off a chimney piece and coming to your feet and that was from a poem by Hervé Guibert which we set to "Pavane Pour Une Enfante Defunte" by Ravel. That finishes the record and you can think of the phantom you want, or whatever ghost, probably in my case Serge Gainsbourg.

 

[Glittery_Bug]

www.madisonmag.com.au

"I used to be sorry that I didn’t have a son, but now I realise from this fellowship of girls – my mother, my sisters and my daughters [Kate Barry, Charlotte Gainsbourg and Lou Doillon] – that when it comes to the crunch, girls always know what to do. I say this with the admiration that I have, without limit, for my father and brother.

"When my mother died last year, my three girls knew exactly what to do. They have intuition – you don’t have to ask them to come, they are by your side. It was my eldest daughter, Kate, who said to me, ‘You must let [your mother] go.’ She taught me how to let go. And at that moment I thought, ‘I am so lucky to have these girls.’ Charlotte understood that to have her children there for my mother’s last weekend would make all the difference.

"Now I’m taking on my mother’s role – trying to be as brave and as strong as she was for all of us. She used to say, ‘Smile and the world smiles with you, cry and you cry alone.’ And she was right. I did quite a lot of crying at one time and she said, ‘Snap out of it.’ She had no self-indulgence. And perhaps that’s something that I will now try and learn from her."

 

[Glittery_Bug]

I think this has been negatively twisted by the reporter, given her absolute devotion to Gainsbourg both during his life and after his death, but here it is nonetheless.

www.telegraph.co.uk

Jane Birkin 'didn't like Je t'aime'

By Tony Paterson in Berlin

Last Updated: 8:04pm GMT 05/01/2008

Her steamy Sixties hit Je t'aime made Jane Birkin a sex icon for a whole generation, but now the British-born actress has admitted that she never liked the song.

Birkin felt used by her husbandIn an unusually candid interview the 61-year-old has revealed that she felt used by her then husband, Serge Gainsbourg, the film director and artist who wrote the song for her - and that she would have far preferred a career as a nurse.

When it was first released in 1969, the chart-topping hit's copious use of passionate heavy breathing was deemed so offensive that it was condemned by the Pope, and cut from BBC playlists.

But Ms Birkin, who still sings and will bring a European tour to Britain in March, told the German magazine Die Zeit that she was treated like "a puppet" by Gainsbourg, and viewed their song as evidence she was being used as a sex object.

Ms Birkin, who now lives alone in Paris, had daughters to both Gainsbourg and her first husband, the composer John Barry, as well as the director Jacques Doillon.
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After Gainsbourg's death in 1991 she dedicated a concert to him, but his pleasure in exposing her to risque publicity still rankles.

Recalling an incident when she was bound naked to a radiator for a now-infamous photo shoot, she said: "It was Serge who tied me up for this photograph. I didn't like it. I didn't even like the song Je t'aime."

The pictures were not her first brush with notoriety.

Three years before recording Je t'aime, Ms Birkin hit the headlines by appearing naked in Michaelangelo Antonioni's scandalous cult film Blow Up, set in the swinging London scene which she came to exemplify.

Her job interview with the radical Italian director demonstrated both the naive vulnerability and Sixties sexuality that made her a European star.

"I wasn't an actress, I was simply a little girl," she said. "But I went there wearing a very short skirt."

When he started asking her questions, she said she broke down in tears and "wanted to disappear immediately".

Then married to Mr Barry, who composed the James Bond theme music, she confessed in the interview to feeling goaded into stripping for the role when her husband dismissingly said: "You of all people! You put all the lights out when we go to bed. You'll never do it!"

And for all her status as a sex goddess, the actress's own experience of the sexual revolution was far from liberating.

While Mr Barry worked in America, the pregnant Ms Birkin was left in Paris, where student protesters were rocking the city. "I waited for him with my huge stomach. That was my sexual revolution," she said.

 

[Glittery_Bug]

http://www.theparistimes.com/content/The-English-Artist-French-Style

The English Artist, French Style
By Julie Pecheur - April 1, 2006 - 9:00am.

• Profiles

The instructions were clear: “She talks a lot; ask all your important questions first; you may want to interrupt her sometimes; ask no more than one question about Serge Gainsbourg at the end; you have half an hour.” Interviewing the most famous English woman living in France isn’t exactly an impromptu experience. When the door of the hotel room, rented for successive interviews, closes behind you as the PR person checks his watch, you are almost surprised to be faced with a human being.
Yes, Jane Birkin talks a lot. But her voice is a gentle murmur, a melody written by a genuine and chaotic brain. She surfs from one topic to the other, without apparent transitions. In one outflow she combines the courtesy of the British people, the fates of the Chechens and of dolphins caught in tuna nets. Yet, she manages to do so with a certain profundity and absolute sincerity. She seems to have emerged undefended and unprotected from almost sixty years of life (she is 59), more than half as a star and twenty as the partner, lover, and muse of Serge
Gainsbourg, France’s venerated musician and poet.
“Another round of interviews”: these are the very first lyrics on Jane Birkin’s new album, Fictions, which was released last month. The team of songwriters, among which are Neil Hannon, Magic Numbers, Beth Gibbons, Rufus Wainwright, and Arthur H, under the direction of Renaud Letang and Gonzales, has harmonized her delicate, fragile emotions with Johnny Marr’s guitar (the former Smiths front-man). Birkin also recaptured a few timeless pieces like “Harvest Moon” by Neil Young and Tom Waits’s “Alice.” One of the songs, “Living in Limbo,” besides outlining the singer’s life (“Oh packing unpacking memories linger”), is a gem.
The skinny, eccentric English girl moved to France in 1967 to make a movie. She never returned. At 20, she left a “wonderful” childhood; her parents, Major David Birkin and actress/singer Judy Campbell; her first husband, composer John Barry with whom she had a daughter, Kate; and her first scandal: appearing completely naked in the movie, Blow Up, Antonioni’s Palme d’Or winner at Cannes (1966). It was love at first sight with Gainsbourg, her partner in that movie, who was twice her age and already a famous artist.

As she speaks incessantly, she seems to be in a constant hurry to disappear.
​

“The minute I touched the French soil I felt free and happy,” she remembers. “I felt like I was running away, and I was running away.” She was fleeing from what she calls “the eye,” not knowing she could ever completely escape from that lingering fear of not doing the right thing, of hurting people she loved. She mentions the photographs she can’t take down, still staring at her from the walls of her apartment. “Do you feel so worthless without them?” she questions herself. “Yes, is the answer.” As she speaks incessantly, she seems to be in a constant hurry to disappear.

As her new album is released, Jane Birkin, Gainsbourg’s muse, talks about ghosts, music, and love.© Carole Bellaïche / H & K
Nowadays, when she does need to disappear, she goes back to England, where people don’t recognize her in the streets, even though she is an Officer of the Order of the British Empire for her acting. Recently, she played Gertrude in Hamlet at the Royal Theater in Northampton. But England isn’t her home anymore, especially since her mother’s death two years ago. “I don’t even know what is home anyway,” she says. In fact, she changed the lyrics of the album’s first song, “Home.” “I got chicken,” she confesses. “The end of Neil Hannon’s lyrics was something like ‘It’s time to go home, everybody say come home.’ I nipped it and said: ‘No one said, come back to me/ Back where you belong.’”
France claims she belongs to its national heritage (Hermès named and designed a handbag for her in 1984). She has made about 60 feature films, many unmemorable, and her bad French grammar—she still says “le” grammaire or “le” télévision instead of “la”—exasperates many, but her voice conveys the soul of Gainsbourg. Since “Je t’aime moi non plus” (1969), probably the most erotic song recorded, and even after their break-up in 1980, they made half a dozen albums together, all hits. People still cry when she performs them on stage.

“It’s quite nice to be a muse. But muses are quickly forgotten.”
​

Since his death in 1991, she has never stopped bringing his lyrics and memory to life. In 2002, she released Arabesque, a successful album that instilled Arabic arrangements into a few of Gainsbourg’s songs. She toured around the globe with this tribute until last year. “I made Serge live for me for three years,” she says. “The only thing that keeps people alive is to talk about them. Talking about them and singing their songs is getting as close as you can.” That’s why she was glad when young English musicians, among them Franz Ferdinand, Cat Power, Portishead, Feist, Placebo, and Michael Stipe, paid homage to him with 14 beautifully translated songs in an album entitled Monsieur Gainsbourg Revisited.
While Birkin talks about Serge’s charm, genius, kindness, and beauty all the time—not just at the end of an interview—she also works “like a devil.” She has to fight loneliness; she talks about “the children” having all left her house—Kate, Charlotte whom she had with Gainsbourg, and Lou, with filmmaker Jacques Doillon. (“You can’t just sit there longing for the grandchildren to turn up on a Friday.”) She mentions “ghosts and shadows,” money issues. But above all, it is time for her to exist as an artist on her own. Once her album is launched, she will perform in a new play and direct Boxes, her first feature film. “Actors are going to say my words,” she says. “I can understand why authors like to hear other people saying their words.” With a gentle smile she adds: “It’s quite nice to be a muse. But muses are quickly forgotten. Therefore it is just as well to do you own things too.”

 

[PollyM]

from corbis

 

[Glittery_Bug]

http://www.maryellenmark.com/text/magazines/look/904R-000-007.html

 

[MARLOWE TIGER]

Jane reveals the NAKED thruth about being a Sixties icon

Jane Birkin reveals the naked truth about being a Sixties icon

Sitting beside me in the Roundhouse theatre in North London, Jane Birkin says: "All that moaning I did was to ensure people knew it was about sex."
Birkin, our most famous export to the continent, is the original Sixties wild child with skinny limbs and long brown hair, whose love affair with the French icon Serge Gainsbourg electrified the world and resulted in the song Je T'Aime Moi Non Plus.
Now world famous - in France it is the soundtrack to television footage of President Sarkozy and his equally skinny, long-haired lover Carla Bruni - the song caused a furore when Birkin and Gainsbourg recorded it in 1969.

Icon: Wild-child Birkin was famous for her love-affair with Serge Gainsbourg
This is because the climax, as it were, featured a series of orgasmic sounds from La Birkin which made her the most famous heavy breather in history.
Je T'Aime was condemned by the Vatican and banned by the BBC, so naturally it reached No 1 in the UK charts.
Birkin, only daughter of the distinguished British war hero David Birkin and actress Judy Campbell, gained instant notoriety.
Now she is 60, with the same pale face which is an alluring genetic hybrid of the Venus de Milo and Mick Jagger.
There is an exhilarating ripple to her wispy, flutey voice which has never matured.
Dressed in combat trousers and a black top, she has an exaggerated air of innocence which she seems to be daring me to challenge.
Disconcertingly, her accent - especially when she talks about sex - is that of a pre-war debutante.
"I never thought that song would shock," she insists.
I soon discover that Birkin says this about all the shocking things she has done.
In the cult 1966 film Blow Up, she caused a stir when she became the first actress to show her pubic hair in mainstream cinema.
"I never thought that would shock, either," she says. I look at her with incredulity and wonder if she has repented her wayward past and is seeking excuses for it.
"Nonsense," she smiles. "I did all those things for the reason I have always done things."
"For the money?" I suggest helpfully.
Birkin's smile vanishes.
"That is insulting. The truth is I did all those things to please the men I liked at the time. I always did what they wanted, as I was scared of losing them."
Birkin, perhaps surprisingly, is no feminist.
She was only 17 when she met and married John Barry, composer of the James Bond theme, and bore him a daughter, Kate.
He was 13 years Birkin's senior and twice divorced.
"I was besotted with John," she says. "I was offered a role in Blow Up and he said I wouldn't have the courage to go naked, so I thought: 'Well, I'll do it and that will thrill him.'"
It was the same with that song. Gainsbourg had originally written it for Brigitte Bardot.
But she decided not to record it, and according to Birkin, who was by then divorced from Barry: "All these beautiful actresses were begging him to do it, so when he asked me I thought I'd better say yes, or he'd drop me."
For a woman regarded as a goddess, who started a fashion for boyish figures, unkempt hair and high living, Birkin is a strange amalgam of insecurity and arrogance.
When she moved to Paris in 1968, the French fell for her instantly, charmed by her air of complexity.
"Oh, I don't know it was so much me," she says, self-effacingly.
"I was a Brit at the perfect time. It was the British renaissance. David Bailey. Mini-skirts. The King's Road."

Notorious: Birkin was famous after recording Je T'Aime Moi Non Plus with her lover
Gainsbourg, writer, composer, director, actor, French cultural hero and sex symbol, eventually died in 1991 after a lifetime of too much gin and cigarettes.
Now, Birkin is at the Roundhouse to rehearse for a concert she is giving there in March, during which she will perform six songs.
She refers to him as "the most missed man in France" and assumes everyone is obsessed with him.
It is true that when he died, Paris came to a halt and the then President Mitterrand called him "our Baudelaire" - a reference to the 19th-century literary idol.
Others refer to him as France's Woody Allen or Bob Dylan.
Meeting him on the set of the film Slogan, Birkin recalls: "My first impression was that he was arrogant. I asked him why he didn't ask how I was and he replied: 'Because frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn.'"
Birkin, hoping to win Gainsbourg over, persuaded the film's director to arrange a dinner at which they were left alone. She asked Gainsbourg to dance and he refused.
At this point, most sensible women would have called a cab. But Birkin persisted.
"I eventually got him to dance and he stepped on my feet all the time, which really hurt. It was then that I realised with a lurch in my heart that his showing off actually hid a man who was endearingly gauche."
I wonder what was endearing about being insulted and given blisters? Gainsbourg was an exhibitionist of the type only France can produce.
He would make scenes in restaurants, burn 50-franc notes on television, dress in snakeskin and go down to his local police station at 3am with Krug for the gendarmes and invite them back to sample Birkin's hot pot.
Birkin, on the other hand, thinks differently. "He was so much fun. Our affair started after he took me to a club called Rasputin and the musicians followed us.
"Then we went to a transvestite club and I realised that I was with a man whom everyone loved, because the transvestites kept hugging him."
I remark that, at this point, I would have run for it. An expression of bewilderment crosses her face.
"But it was lovely. When he asked me if I wanted to be dropped back at my hotel and I said 'No', he took me to the Hilton, where my virtue was saved."
"Oh, so he behaved like a gent, after all?" I inquire.
"No, he collapsed in a drunken stupor and was out cold for the night."
After confessing to Birkin that he had been scared of Bardot's breasts, Gainsbourg married the flat-chested English ingenue - she was 19, he was 36 - launching the Serge-Birkin show.
What does she think of the current Sarko-Bruni show, which is titillating the world almost as much as her own great romance?
"Actually, I have met Sarkozy," she tells me. Is he sexy? "No, but he has the knack of making you feel you are the most important person in the world."
And what of man-eating Carla, who like Jane is also a songstress?
"Ah, she is very clever." I think I know what Birkin is going to say next. I am right.
"She is obsessed with Serge. She has sung many of his songs. I have noticed that Sarkozy has been looking more attractive lately because she has given him a Serge make-over."
I feel a surge of irritation. Did Serge have no faults? Didn't she mind his cajoling her into posing for erotic magazines?
For the Christmas issue of one, she was photographed chained to a radiator wearing suspenders.
They had a daughter together, Charlotte (now a 36-year-old actress), but Gainsbourg continued his hedonistic life.

Fun: Birkin, now 60, remembers the Sixties and her life with Gainsbourg as fun
Then there were the rows that seemed like theatrical gestures.
On one occasion, Gainsbourg turned her handbag upside down in a restaurant. Jane threw a pie at him.
He marched out and she followed, throwing herself into the river Seine.
"I clambered out and we then walked home arm in arm."
"It can't have been a very relaxing marriage," I remark.
"It was jolly good fun," she says, now sounding like Joyce Grenfell describing a wholesome and bracing hockey match. When Charlotte was 12, Gainsbourg persuaded her to record a song he had written called Lemon Incest. In the video, father and daughter danced half-dressed.
"Why did you allow it?" I ask.
When Birkin doesn't wish to answer a question, she replies with an unrelated statement.
"You should have seen Charlotte after Serge died," she sidesteps. I insist she answer my question.
"Well, I'm sure Charlotte is glad she did it now. It did no harm and she had so little time with him." (Gainsbourg's heart failed at 63.)
"The real point," she continues, "is that Serge could only show love for his child if there was a camera there to record it. He was very shy."
Strangely, it was she who left Gainsbourg, pregnant with her third daughter Lou, by the film director Jacques Doillon.
She says she "doesn't know why it happened". I suggest "it happened" because she had sex with Doillon - unless she believes in storks - and she looks truculent.
But good old Gainsbourg kept coming. "He never really went away. He would still write music for me and he would phone every evening saying he was cooking himself frozen cod and spinach and feeling lonely."
When Gainsbourg died, it seems as if her life ended. She has lived alone in Paris for 15 years now (her marriage to Doillon ended in 1993).
"I am happy. Everything has been so good," she says.
Does she really regrette rien? "Be honest!" I demand.
I mean, being the world's most notorious heavy-breather is all very well, but what did her nice, old-fashioned parents think of it all?
For the first time, I glimpse the middle-class English girl who is worried the dare has gone too far.
"People used to ask my mother about Je T'Aime, and she'd have to try to ignore their nasty insinuations. Being chained to radiators did upset her.
"Now I am sorry I shamed my parents. I can see it was tough on them and I hope they forgave me. Sometimes things are a struggle when you want to hold on to a man so much."
I say that is a brave and touching thing to tell me, but then the moment passes and she smiles gaily.
"But it was such fun!"
Birkin is like Scott Fitzgerald's Jay Gatsby. Nothing can destroy the vitality of her vision of her life.
However hard she struggles, she is borne back into the glorious past of mini-skirts, gilded youth - and Serge.
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[Boomer]

^^ Thank you! All terribly interesting- I can't figure out if she is to be pitied or admired for her unique life and behavior...