Glittery_Bug
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Sorry if this has been posted before:
http://web.ard.de
Some interviews:
Sexiest sporran on the Seine
IF WE were all asked to think of a person who's left Britain for France, immersed themselves completely in their adopted land and evoked an entire culture for those of us left behind, some would nominate Peter Mayle, the bespectacled, grey-haired author of A Year In Provence.
I pity you lot, because for me that person is Jane Birkin.
You had to have been exactly the right age when Birkin orgasmically groaned "Je T'aime... Moi Non Plus" with her lover Serge Gainsbourg, and that age was 12. It helped that sexual repression in our house was such that copies of my father's Amateur Photographer magazine with their tasteful, silhouette nudie shots were kept out of my grubby reach... that I wasn't allowed to watch the BBC's Play For Today for fear it would involve a ménage à trois and much rustling of a duvet.
I didn't know what a ménage à trois was, far less that it was French, like "duvet" (at 12 I still slept under a fleecy blanket, tucked in) and indeed "silhouette". My mastery of the language was entirely confined to 'Je T'aime', the sexiest record ever.
I haven't heard it for years. Probably now it would sound preposterous. But Birkin today looks fantastic. She's wearing a jersey, jeans, Ugg boots and a big, wide, full-lipped smile showing off the sexiest thing about her: the space between her front teeth. Her hair, tied at the back with a pencil, is flecked with the odd strand of grey and, of course, there are lines on her face. But it's hard to believe that this year - on December 14 - she will be 60.
One thing is missing, though. Famous for sex and Serge, Birkin is also synonymous with a bag, designed by Hermes in tribute to her, and called a Birkin. Where is it? And could that be a sporran she's wearing, low-slung, round her middle?
"I bought this second-hand in Edinburgh three years ago and a more useful little thing one couldn't own. It's the envy of Paris!" she says. "I gave up on the bag right away. That bloody thing. I told Hermes they were mad to make it! My one was always full and it ended up giving me tendonitis.
"The sporran cost me £10 from a shop near Edinburgh Castle and it's all I need for my mobile phone, some junky make-up and - look - useful pieces of driftwood from South America which give you good luck."
We're in a hotel in South Kensington, London, aptly next door to the Institut Français, where Birkin, the retired sex kitten, has hopped over from Paris to promote her new album. I expected her to be all talked out on the subject of her great love; in fact she mentions Gainsbourg first, then evokes his memory repeatedly over the next hour, in which she's charming, if somewhat batty, company. She speaks without stopping to take in air, which is ironic, considering it was heavy breathing that made her name.
"I was leaving him," she says at one point, "and I was afraid he would stop eating, so I took round a Lancashire Hot Pot. 'Serge,' I said, 'something's changed.'
"'Ah, have you cut your hair?
"'No, it's something else.
"'You're carrying a very big dish. It's for more than one person.
"'Well, I'm more than one person now.
"'What do you mean?
"'Serge, I'm having a baby.'"
The father was the film director Jacques Doillon and at first Gainsbourg was spitting mad. "He said: 'Right, you can't see my mother any more - and that watch is confiscated too.'" But the sanctions didn't last. "When baby Lou was born, he sent over these tiny woolly bootees that only a child of one day old could wear. He crammed the entrance to the American Hospital in Paris with gifts. He elected himself godfather. He was Papa Deux."
How fabulously decadent. How fabulously French. Birkin isn't French, of course; she was the skinny, gamine English girl who seduced the bohemian hero of the Rive Gauche, and at first Gainsbourg's countrymen despised her. But when 'Je T'aime' scandalised Britain, France was thrilled. Now they love the muse of their lost pop poet as one of their own.
THE FIRST WOMAN to appear full-frontal in a movie - Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow Up in 1966 - Birkin was always too sexy for Britain. While still in her teens, she had met, married, produced a child by the James Bond film composer John Barry and just as quickly left him. When she pitched up in Paris, Gainsbourg was getting over Brigitte Bardot (as you do).
Birkin's new album, Fictions, does not have a Serge as musical director, but Johnny Marr perhaps comes closest and is credited thus: "With the special participation of..." But they didn't hit it off right away.
Although she loved The Smiths, she initially thought his guitar accompaniment on the opening number 'Home' was too heavy. "The song wasn't boring but it was like from a musical, and I always longed to be in Anna And The King Of Siam." She giggles. "If Serge was here now, he'd be wriggling his spiky tooth, as if to say: 'How old-fashioned can you be?'"
But she warmed to Marr, all the more when she learned he'd been with the same woman from the age of 14, her romantic life being oh so different. 'Home' was written for her by The Divine Comedy's Neil Hannon and the album also features songs gifted by Rufus Wainwright, The Magic Numbers and Portishead's Beth Gibbons. She's flattered, and only slightly surprised. "People are curious about me, because of Serge..."
For many, theirs was a great romance: two icons of the Swinging Sixties, who sang a song that defined sexual freedom and who, we were convinced, never slept in pyjamas. Probably never used a bed for actual sleeping. Crivvens, probably never used a boring old bed.
"Yes, it was the most fantastic, sensual romance," she confirms. "Every night we'd head out at nine. Serge would have booked the best table in the most splendid restaurant where he liked to see figuration: other faces. Then we'd trot off to Rasputin's nightclub, and afterwards the band would serenade us into the taxi and Serge - the most generous of men - would stuff money into their violins.
"Next it would be Calvados, where we'd drink tequilas and Serge would play the piano. Then Madame Arthur's, where everyone dressed as strange chickens, then Regine's where I'd dance with Baryshnikov while Serge would be spilling peppermint frappé on Mick Jagger's jeans. Then we'd have a croissant in the Pigalle and stagger home with the dustbins at six and wait in the kitchen to hear the children. Serge always said it was like nestlings waking up."
Birkin says Gainsbourg was a "very Victorian father". He hated trips to the country and would stare at the grass until the pubs opened. Their decade together was full of passion but also the kind of raging arguments which would provoke Birkin, a non-swimmer, to throw herself in the Seine.
The men who have come after Gainsbourg - he died in 1991 - have had a hardact to follow. "For 13 years [with Jacques Doillon], I lived behind a wall and read. Serge and I had no time for books," she says.
"Now I don't want to stay home. I live above a printing works with my bulldog, but usually I'm on my way somewhere with my suitcase on wheels. Maybe you have to be so humble, or to love Serge, to be with me. Some men have been very sweet, but they've tended to regard me as a museum piece, and I long for a land where no one knows you or endlessly refers to your past.
"I don't regret 'Je T'aime', it's taken me round the world, but I've been single for six years - the longest time - and it would just be so nice if a man was thinking of me as a sort of all-right-looking person, as people go, on the by. I mean just sort of ordinary, because I don't get whistled at on the Spanish Steps any more."
So who, Jane Birkin, is sexy these days?
"David Attenborough, Jonathan Miller, someone who can tell me that bats have nipples under their arms.
"The other night I met a man, equally scientific, from whom I learned that the flat-billed platypus doesn't have nipples but secretes milk through its fur for its young to lick. That's sexy!"
http://living.scotsman.com/index.cfm?id=431562006
This much I know
[FONT=arial,helvetica,sans-serif]Jane Birkin, actor and singer, 59, London[/FONT]
[FONT=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif] Bryony Gordon
Sunday March 12, 2006
The Observer
[/FONT] If someone knows who I am it is not because of my films or my music. It is because I was attached to something, to Serge. I've done nothing definitively wonderful in my life and I don't mind that. My Hermes Birkin bag has really bust my arm. I love it, but I lug so much stuff around in it that I believe it is part of the reason I have tendonitis. So now I have my sporran - £5 from Edinburgh. It's a delicious article that fits just the necessities in it. I told Hermes that if I was them, I would look seriously into the possibility of creating a sporran.
People know exactly where they were, or who they were in bed with, when they first heard 'Je t'aime Moi Non Plus'. I don't think you can get through the day in France without hearing it. I see the best qualities of my three husbands in each of my children, whereas their flaws come from me. Kate is a visionary like John [Barry, her first husband] and she is very modest. Charlotte has that quality in her private life of being candid, and never speaking about subjects of which she doesn't know a thing - unlike my good self - and that's what Serge had. And then there's Lou [from her last marriage to Jacques Doillon], who has the same oddly British sense of humour as her father. She's the only one of my children whom I can laugh about Dickens with. She understands the Beano. She gets the point of the Bash Street Kids.
There are people like Kafka and Proust who you could not say you would have missed had they not been born because you can almost not imagine that they existed. And that is because they changed everything. It is the same with Serge.
France has adopted me for nearly 30 years now and I feel the same way towards it as I imagine a child does towards their adoptive mother and father. Eventually they can go and find their real parents, but often they don't because they are scared of being disappointed, fearful of interrupting these people's new life and hurting those who brought them up.
It sounds a dreadful thing to say, but with death, sometimes a human is so magnificent that you have not seen the person standing just behind them. My Ma was behind my Pa, and I had 15 wonderful years with her. Now I have discovered my little sister.
I am not in a relationship, unless you count my bulldog, Dora. It is a disturbing thought that if I kick off with somebody now, he won't know what my Ma or my father were like. It would be nice to cross paths again with that boy I shared an apple with in the Isle of Wight when I was 16. But I expect he is very different now, and probably likes horses and things.
There is a civic quality in the English. They are so kind, with a reverence for rules. During the fuel crisis, my father was wondering which room he should heat. I said, 'Just heat the whole house,' and he replied: 'You have got so French! Hospitals will suffer!' I am proud that people cross the road at special places, whereas in France it is a national sport to knobble pedestrians.
I turn 60 in December this year, though it should be February of next year. I was due to pop out in 1947, which was a better year for wine, but my great misfortune was to make a fuss and come out at Christmas instead.
When I go, I won't have an epitaph or a gravestone. I hope I'm going to be put in a marmalade jar, which will just say 'Ma'. I think that is more comforting than winning an Oscar.
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/magazine/story/0,,1728161,00.html
http://web.ard.de
Some interviews:
Sexiest sporran on the Seine
IF WE were all asked to think of a person who's left Britain for France, immersed themselves completely in their adopted land and evoked an entire culture for those of us left behind, some would nominate Peter Mayle, the bespectacled, grey-haired author of A Year In Provence.
I pity you lot, because for me that person is Jane Birkin.
You had to have been exactly the right age when Birkin orgasmically groaned "Je T'aime... Moi Non Plus" with her lover Serge Gainsbourg, and that age was 12. It helped that sexual repression in our house was such that copies of my father's Amateur Photographer magazine with their tasteful, silhouette nudie shots were kept out of my grubby reach... that I wasn't allowed to watch the BBC's Play For Today for fear it would involve a ménage à trois and much rustling of a duvet.
I didn't know what a ménage à trois was, far less that it was French, like "duvet" (at 12 I still slept under a fleecy blanket, tucked in) and indeed "silhouette". My mastery of the language was entirely confined to 'Je T'aime', the sexiest record ever.
I haven't heard it for years. Probably now it would sound preposterous. But Birkin today looks fantastic. She's wearing a jersey, jeans, Ugg boots and a big, wide, full-lipped smile showing off the sexiest thing about her: the space between her front teeth. Her hair, tied at the back with a pencil, is flecked with the odd strand of grey and, of course, there are lines on her face. But it's hard to believe that this year - on December 14 - she will be 60.
One thing is missing, though. Famous for sex and Serge, Birkin is also synonymous with a bag, designed by Hermes in tribute to her, and called a Birkin. Where is it? And could that be a sporran she's wearing, low-slung, round her middle?
"I bought this second-hand in Edinburgh three years ago and a more useful little thing one couldn't own. It's the envy of Paris!" she says. "I gave up on the bag right away. That bloody thing. I told Hermes they were mad to make it! My one was always full and it ended up giving me tendonitis.
"The sporran cost me £10 from a shop near Edinburgh Castle and it's all I need for my mobile phone, some junky make-up and - look - useful pieces of driftwood from South America which give you good luck."
We're in a hotel in South Kensington, London, aptly next door to the Institut Français, where Birkin, the retired sex kitten, has hopped over from Paris to promote her new album. I expected her to be all talked out on the subject of her great love; in fact she mentions Gainsbourg first, then evokes his memory repeatedly over the next hour, in which she's charming, if somewhat batty, company. She speaks without stopping to take in air, which is ironic, considering it was heavy breathing that made her name.
"I was leaving him," she says at one point, "and I was afraid he would stop eating, so I took round a Lancashire Hot Pot. 'Serge,' I said, 'something's changed.'
"'Ah, have you cut your hair?
"'No, it's something else.
"'You're carrying a very big dish. It's for more than one person.
"'Well, I'm more than one person now.
"'What do you mean?
"'Serge, I'm having a baby.'"
The father was the film director Jacques Doillon and at first Gainsbourg was spitting mad. "He said: 'Right, you can't see my mother any more - and that watch is confiscated too.'" But the sanctions didn't last. "When baby Lou was born, he sent over these tiny woolly bootees that only a child of one day old could wear. He crammed the entrance to the American Hospital in Paris with gifts. He elected himself godfather. He was Papa Deux."
How fabulously decadent. How fabulously French. Birkin isn't French, of course; she was the skinny, gamine English girl who seduced the bohemian hero of the Rive Gauche, and at first Gainsbourg's countrymen despised her. But when 'Je T'aime' scandalised Britain, France was thrilled. Now they love the muse of their lost pop poet as one of their own.
THE FIRST WOMAN to appear full-frontal in a movie - Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow Up in 1966 - Birkin was always too sexy for Britain. While still in her teens, she had met, married, produced a child by the James Bond film composer John Barry and just as quickly left him. When she pitched up in Paris, Gainsbourg was getting over Brigitte Bardot (as you do).
Birkin's new album, Fictions, does not have a Serge as musical director, but Johnny Marr perhaps comes closest and is credited thus: "With the special participation of..." But they didn't hit it off right away.
Although she loved The Smiths, she initially thought his guitar accompaniment on the opening number 'Home' was too heavy. "The song wasn't boring but it was like from a musical, and I always longed to be in Anna And The King Of Siam." She giggles. "If Serge was here now, he'd be wriggling his spiky tooth, as if to say: 'How old-fashioned can you be?'"
But she warmed to Marr, all the more when she learned he'd been with the same woman from the age of 14, her romantic life being oh so different. 'Home' was written for her by The Divine Comedy's Neil Hannon and the album also features songs gifted by Rufus Wainwright, The Magic Numbers and Portishead's Beth Gibbons. She's flattered, and only slightly surprised. "People are curious about me, because of Serge..."
For many, theirs was a great romance: two icons of the Swinging Sixties, who sang a song that defined sexual freedom and who, we were convinced, never slept in pyjamas. Probably never used a bed for actual sleeping. Crivvens, probably never used a boring old bed.
"Yes, it was the most fantastic, sensual romance," she confirms. "Every night we'd head out at nine. Serge would have booked the best table in the most splendid restaurant where he liked to see figuration: other faces. Then we'd trot off to Rasputin's nightclub, and afterwards the band would serenade us into the taxi and Serge - the most generous of men - would stuff money into their violins.
"Next it would be Calvados, where we'd drink tequilas and Serge would play the piano. Then Madame Arthur's, where everyone dressed as strange chickens, then Regine's where I'd dance with Baryshnikov while Serge would be spilling peppermint frappé on Mick Jagger's jeans. Then we'd have a croissant in the Pigalle and stagger home with the dustbins at six and wait in the kitchen to hear the children. Serge always said it was like nestlings waking up."
Birkin says Gainsbourg was a "very Victorian father". He hated trips to the country and would stare at the grass until the pubs opened. Their decade together was full of passion but also the kind of raging arguments which would provoke Birkin, a non-swimmer, to throw herself in the Seine.
The men who have come after Gainsbourg - he died in 1991 - have had a hardact to follow. "For 13 years [with Jacques Doillon], I lived behind a wall and read. Serge and I had no time for books," she says.
"Now I don't want to stay home. I live above a printing works with my bulldog, but usually I'm on my way somewhere with my suitcase on wheels. Maybe you have to be so humble, or to love Serge, to be with me. Some men have been very sweet, but they've tended to regard me as a museum piece, and I long for a land where no one knows you or endlessly refers to your past.
"I don't regret 'Je T'aime', it's taken me round the world, but I've been single for six years - the longest time - and it would just be so nice if a man was thinking of me as a sort of all-right-looking person, as people go, on the by. I mean just sort of ordinary, because I don't get whistled at on the Spanish Steps any more."
So who, Jane Birkin, is sexy these days?
"David Attenborough, Jonathan Miller, someone who can tell me that bats have nipples under their arms.
"The other night I met a man, equally scientific, from whom I learned that the flat-billed platypus doesn't have nipples but secretes milk through its fur for its young to lick. That's sexy!"
http://living.scotsman.com/index.cfm?id=431562006
This much I know
[FONT=arial,helvetica,sans-serif]Jane Birkin, actor and singer, 59, London[/FONT]
[FONT=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif] Bryony Gordon
Sunday March 12, 2006
The Observer
[/FONT] If someone knows who I am it is not because of my films or my music. It is because I was attached to something, to Serge. I've done nothing definitively wonderful in my life and I don't mind that. My Hermes Birkin bag has really bust my arm. I love it, but I lug so much stuff around in it that I believe it is part of the reason I have tendonitis. So now I have my sporran - £5 from Edinburgh. It's a delicious article that fits just the necessities in it. I told Hermes that if I was them, I would look seriously into the possibility of creating a sporran.
People know exactly where they were, or who they were in bed with, when they first heard 'Je t'aime Moi Non Plus'. I don't think you can get through the day in France without hearing it. I see the best qualities of my three husbands in each of my children, whereas their flaws come from me. Kate is a visionary like John [Barry, her first husband] and she is very modest. Charlotte has that quality in her private life of being candid, and never speaking about subjects of which she doesn't know a thing - unlike my good self - and that's what Serge had. And then there's Lou [from her last marriage to Jacques Doillon], who has the same oddly British sense of humour as her father. She's the only one of my children whom I can laugh about Dickens with. She understands the Beano. She gets the point of the Bash Street Kids.
There are people like Kafka and Proust who you could not say you would have missed had they not been born because you can almost not imagine that they existed. And that is because they changed everything. It is the same with Serge.
France has adopted me for nearly 30 years now and I feel the same way towards it as I imagine a child does towards their adoptive mother and father. Eventually they can go and find their real parents, but often they don't because they are scared of being disappointed, fearful of interrupting these people's new life and hurting those who brought them up.
It sounds a dreadful thing to say, but with death, sometimes a human is so magnificent that you have not seen the person standing just behind them. My Ma was behind my Pa, and I had 15 wonderful years with her. Now I have discovered my little sister.
I am not in a relationship, unless you count my bulldog, Dora. It is a disturbing thought that if I kick off with somebody now, he won't know what my Ma or my father were like. It would be nice to cross paths again with that boy I shared an apple with in the Isle of Wight when I was 16. But I expect he is very different now, and probably likes horses and things.
There is a civic quality in the English. They are so kind, with a reverence for rules. During the fuel crisis, my father was wondering which room he should heat. I said, 'Just heat the whole house,' and he replied: 'You have got so French! Hospitals will suffer!' I am proud that people cross the road at special places, whereas in France it is a national sport to knobble pedestrians.
I turn 60 in December this year, though it should be February of next year. I was due to pop out in 1947, which was a better year for wine, but my great misfortune was to make a fuss and come out at Christmas instead.
When I go, I won't have an epitaph or a gravestone. I hope I'm going to be put in a marmalade jar, which will just say 'Ma'. I think that is more comforting than winning an Oscar.
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/magazine/story/0,,1728161,00.html
