The model, singer and actress Jane Birkin was an icon of the golden age of pop, a muse for Serge Gainsbourg and a grande dame of chanson in her last days, distributing elegance and savoir faire. She was an Englishwoman who knew how to capture the hearts of the French. With a long musical career and a succulent biography, which began in the most lavish of the Swinging London period, in the crazy sixties in which she also met Serge Gainsbourg, with whom she 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 a thoughtful essay, an analysis of its impact and significance, not only in pop music but also in the morality of the time. Initially intended for Brigitte Bardot, the moans and eroticism of Jane Birkin were too much for some, but they created an indestructible pop myth. Although for melodic and conceptual wonder that will go down in the annals of pop nothing like the album Histoire de Melody Nelson; from the cover -the new Lolita, where she shows her incipient pregnancy from Charlotte Gainsbourg- to highly sexual and taboo content, such as the relationship between an older man and a virgin teenager. Its fame for being scandalous and obscene is accompanied by the reputation of being a solid musical work, whose meager 28 minutes are a condensation of the pop of the moment, in 1971, in full glam explosion. A tribute to Nabokov around a story that talks about the relationship of a 15-year-old garçonne with an older man, on an orchestrated, funk and rock record. She is fundamental in the concept, she puts her image, whispers her name and few other words, besides giggling and little screams.
Entering the French pop aristocracy was not an easy path, but her complicated relationship with Gainsbourg did not prevent her from pursuing a remarkable career. In the seventies he published the explicit Ex fan des sixties. In 1983 she returned to collaborate with whom she was her mentor and her husband in Baby alone in Babylone. Although nothing about her was decisive in understanding what her sentimental and artistic relationship meant like the album Amour des feintes (1990), in which her cover is a beautiful Gainsbourg drawing of her.
And the best proof of his popularity in France are several live albums, recorded in emblematic venues such as the Bataclan, the Casino de Paris or the essential Olympia. It was also lavished live on our stages -Palau de la Música, L’Auditori or the Teatre Grec- especially in the new millennium, thanks to albums such as Fiction, Enfant d’hiver or the cover album Rendez-vous, in which She was covered by Brian Ferry, Caetano Veloso or Paolo Conte, among others. And always with her elegance and melancholy, either with her own songbook or Gainsbourg’s versions, which were never missing from her concerts. In this sense, the performance that she offered at Primavera Sound in 2018, together with the Orquestra Simfònica del Vallès, was especially emotional, putting a serene and elegant touch to the Gainsbourg songbook. It was an unforgettable moment, to shed tears, remembering the man with whom she shared twelve years of her life and who gave her “the best of him.”
The last time we saw her live, last year, she was presenting the remarkable Oh! Pardon tu dormais…, in which his friend Étienne Daho collaborates, helping him to give the proposal just the right drama, even in the aspect of artistic director of a show that serves as therapy, as in the song Cigarettes, to the rhythm of cabaret waltz, dedicated to her daughter Kate Barry -who she had with John Barry-, who died in strange circumstances, between an accident and a suicide. She was a very young mother and her relationship with her other daughter Charlotte has led to a documentary, the essential, Jane for Charlotte (2021) in which both explore, in an intimate story, her relationship.
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?” We do not know if anyone has protected her from her, but she maintained her status as a great lady of song until the end of it. She has been found dead in her house in Paris, which has become another possible pilgrimage site, now that the mythical Maison Gainsbourg will be a museum that can be visited starting on September 20. Jane Birkin is inextricably linked to Gainsbourg mythology, but her own musical career is as resplendent as the glamor that radiates from the song playing as we write this text, Ta sentinelle, with pop grandeur and existential spleen.
