Model, singer and actress Jane Birkin was an icon of the golden age of pop, a muse for Serge Gainsbourg and a grande dame de la chanson in her final era, exuding elegance and savoir faire. With a long musical career and a juicy biography, which began in Swinging London, in the crazy sixties when he also met Serge Gainsbourg, with whom he would begin a turbulent romance and an artistic relationship that resulted in true icons of the golden age of pop.
The song Je t’aime … moi non plus deserves an essay, an analysis of its repercussion and transcendence, not only in pop music but in the morality of the time. Jane Birkin’s moans and eroticism were too much for some, but she created an indestructible pop myth. Although for melodic and conceptual wonder that will go down in the annals of pop nothing like Melody Nelson’s Histoire album; from the cover – the new Lolita, where she shows her incipient pregnancy with Charlotte Gainsbourg – to a highly sexual and taboo content, such as the relationship between an old man and a virgin teenager. A solid musical work, the scarce 28 minutes of which are a condensate of the pop of the moment, in 1971, in full glam explosion. A tribute to Nabokov around a story about the relationship of a 15-year-old girl with an older man, in an orchestrated, funk and rock album. She is central to the concept, puts her image, whispers her name and a few other words, in addition to giggles and small screams.
His complicated relationship with Gainsbourg did not prevent him from pursuing a remarkable career. In the seventies he published the explicit Exfan des sixties. In 1983 she collaborated again with what was her mentor and husband in Baby alone in Babylone. Although to understand what their sentimental and artistic relationship meant, nothing like the album Amour des feints (1990), in which the cover is a Gainsbourg drawing of her.
It was lavished live on our stages – Palau de la Música, L’Auditori or the Greek Theater –, especially in the new millennium, thanks to albums such as Fiction, Enfant d’hiver or the Rendez-vous versions disc, in that she was accompanied by Brian Ferry, Caetano Veloso or Paolo Conte, among others. And always with its elegance and melancholy. The concert he gave at Primavera Sound in 2018, with the Vallès Symphony Orchestra, was particularly emotional, where he put a serene and elegant touch on Gainsbourg’s songbook. It was an indelible moment, of letting go of tears.
The last time we saw her, last year, she was presenting the remarkable Oh! Pardon tu dormais…, in which his friend Étienne Daho collaborates, and he helped give the proposal the right drama, even in the aspect of artistic director of a show that served him as therapy, as happens in the song Cigarettes, to the rhythm of cabaret waltzes, dedicated to his daughter Kate, who died in strange circumstances between the accident and suicide.
His death reminds us of the twilight and narrative tone of Catch me if you can, a song in which he talks about the fear of growing old: “Will you protect me from the fear of growing old?”. She was found dead in her home in Paris, which has become another place of pilgrimage, now that the legendary Maison Gainsbourg will be a museum that can be visited from September 20. Jane Birkin is inextricably linked to Gainsbourg, but her musical career is as glittering as the glamor that radiates from the song that is playing as we write this text, Ta sentinelle, with pop grandeur and existential spleen.
