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Sunday, February 09, 2003:

This is from The Guardian. http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/features/story/0,11710,888892,00.html

Serge, mon amour

Jane Birkin tells Will Hodgkinson why she can't leave Gainsbourg behind

Wednesday February 5, 2003
The Guardian


Birkin: "Serge got girls because he was so clever."

 Jane Birkin has little desire to move out of the shadow of her former lover, Serge Gainsbourg, the sleazy but chic, louche but uptight singer, songwriter, occasional film director and Gallic icon who has become one of France's most enduring cultural exports. Just as Gainsbourg's influence is still felt by a new generation of would-be decadents, including Beck, Air, Jarvis Cocker and Johnny Depp, so it is by the gamine who completed his image, 22 years after they split up. Birkin left Gainsbourg in 1981, pregnant by another man and no longer capable of putting up with his wild mood swings and desperate insecurity, but his ghost clings to her closely.

"He was such a complicated person. He wanted to be loved by everyone, while at the same time lighting 500-franc notes on television to be provocative," says Birkin. "He bought a Rolls-Royce that he used as an ashtray because he didn't have a driving licence, and it amused him to say that he got the money for it from Tito's communist government after making a film in Yugoslavia. He went all over Switzerland to find the best lobby for his nugget of gold, and then he lost the address of the bank. I have no idea where his nugget is now."

We are in a French-run hotel in London's Kensington, one of those discreet establishments that look like a smart family home. Birkin, somehow chic in battered trainers and combat trousers, has a lighter-than-air aura that masks a firm resolve: a photo shoot at a nearby hotel is cancelled at her insistence because of the anodyne nature of the place, and she manages to convince her own hotel to go against policy and allow the photographs to be taken in one of their rooms. She is also very charming. "Serge would have loved to know that a boy like you is so enthusiastic about his songs," she tells me, despite the fact that my boyhood entered into the realms of the anecdotal quite a while ago. "I stand back while young people marvel at the brightness of him."

Birkin has come over from Paris, her home since 1969, ostensibly to talk about Arabesque, an album of Gainsbourg songs performed with Algerian violinist Djamel Benyelles. But it's Serge himself who dominates. "We performed Arabesque in a little park in Rome, where Serge's sister came to see us," says Birkin, who speaks in a soft Home Counties voice that frequently breaks into French. She has a childlike, whimsical manner that one would think was affected, were it not so consistent. "I haven't a clue whether Serge would be happy about it or not, and it would be pretentious to say that I did, but I know that it made his sister happy and that was very special for me."

The project began life in 1999 as a concert at the Avignon festival, France's equivalent to the Edinburgh festival, after Birkin was given carte blanche to do an hour-long concert. The concert was an important one: it would be broadcast live on the radio station France Culture, and what works at Avignon makes waves over the rest of the country. So she called up Philippe Lerichomme, former artistic director for her and Gainsbourg. "Philippe told me to listen to Djamel Benyelles, who had done a version of [Gainsbourg's song] Elisa," says Birkin. "I was overtaken by something so lovely - it made your arms go goosepimply, and it was strangely auspicious to hear Serge's song done in this melancholy style. So I went to Avignon with a present to France that no one was expecting. Philippe said, 'If you're going to do it all again, do something brave.'"

Arabesque took off from there. It gave Birkin another chance to sing the songs of her former lover, albeit in a totally different style, taking them to places Gainsbourg had never seen. A concert in Algeria in 2001, which turned into a benefit for the victims of the Bab el Oued floods, was the most rewarding. "That night much of the audience had heard of relatives dying in the floods in Algiers, when the mud came down the side of the hill and went into the poorest part of town. I handed over all the money we made, of course."

Birkin's posthumous voyage with Gainsbourg shows no sign of ending, for the near future at least. "I didn't think I was going to get caught up in Serge again," she says, slightly unconvincingly given that her entire recording history has been dominated by his work. "But this tour with Arabesque turned up, and it lets me have a bit of overtime with him. I took a tape recorder to the Lebanon and told the people in a market to bootleg the Gainsbourg songs I played them. So he goes on in different ways."

The journey began in 1968 on a film set in France. Birkin had become the ingenue of the moment after rolling around a studio floor with David Hemmings in Antonioni's swinging London thriller Blow-Up, and was cast to play opposite Gainsbourg in the film Slogan. Gainsbourg, 40, was recovering from being dumped by Brigitte Bardot, and decided to mend his heartbreak the traditional way: by sleeping with as many women as possible.

"He was terribly self-conscious about his looks," remembers Birkin. "He got over it with the help of beautiful women." Gainsbourg was not initially impressed by his co-star. He had wanted the class act that was Marisa Berenson, not a 20-year-old English waif in a bit part. But his frostiness didn't last. "He always said that he liked me because he was scared of breasts - although come to think of it, Bardot and Bambou [Gainsbourg's last girlfriend] had the prettiest bosoms imaginable, so I'm not sure if I should have believed him. You see, Serge got girls because he was so clever."

By the following year, Gainsbourg and Birkin were duetting on Je t'Aime... Moi Non Plus. Originally written for Bardot, the song became a shorthand for sexual freedom before hotel lounge bands the world over sucked the eroticism out of it. It was recorded in a studio in Marble Arch - not, as legend has it, with a tape machine under the lovers' bed - and it turned them into symbols of sophisticated freedom: the essence of chic decadence. Birkin refined the rough-hewn son of Slavic emigres; Gainsbourg gave the upper-class schoolgirl a touch of sleazy glamour.

"My only contribution to him, apart from inspiring his songs, was telling him not to shave and giving him a diamond to wear around his neck," claims Birkin, modestly. "He had a dandified quality, and I thought it so sophisticated to have a diamond against his bare chest. He lost it one New Year's Eve in Pigalle with my brother. He thought they were being kissed and cuddled as they got into a stranger's car; in fact they were being deplumed of all their riches. He came back and said, 'They've pulled all my feathers off.' I got him sapphires after that."

Many of the songs that Birkin inspired are on Arabesque. Among them are Valse de Melody, from Gainsbourg's neglected 1971 jewel of a concept album, Histoire de Melody Nelson. The story of a middle-aged man who runs over an English teenage cyclist in his Rolls-Royce before embarking on a short-lived, passionate affair with her, Melody Nelson combined the depth of Serge's love for Birkin with symphonic arrangements and delicate harmonies. Unfortunately, nobody noticed.

"He recorded it in Marble Arch," remembers the inspiration for Melody Nelson. "Me and my brother were with him, and we thought it was going to be the most fantastic hit. It was so beautiful and so thrilling, we thought it would be like wildfire. Nothing. It didn't sell a thing."

Gainsbourg ensured continued attention in middle age by increasing the provocation, with his devilish alter ego Gansbarre coming to the fore. In 1976 he made the film Je t'Aime... Moi Non Plus, about a gay lorry driver who falls in love with a girl who looks like a boy - Birkin, of course, with her hair chopped short. The film was panned, and Birkin's mother was upset to discover that her daughter was starring in a film showing only in porn cinemas. Then there was Lemon Incest, the notorious duet Gainsbourg made with his and Birkin's daughter Charlotte. "While he couldn't resist doing Lemon Incest, I never saw Serge in anything but a dressing gown, and none of the children ever saw him naked," says Birkin. "As prudish as anyone about his person, he thought being naked was the most vulgar thing in the world. But then I would say about Lemon Incest or something, 'I think you've gone too far,' and he would reply, 'The people in the street think it's funny, so too bad for you.'"

Birkin ended the relationship with Gainsbourg by presenting herself to him when she was six months pregnant by film director Jacques Doillon. "I told him that something had changed. He said, 'You're wearing a skirt. You've brought me a Lancashire hotpot.'"

He kept writing songs for her. One of the tracks on Arabesque is Amours des Feintes, which Gainsbourg wrote three months before he died in 1991. The title means "love of the dead". "I should have realised he was saying goodbye," says Birkin. "Around that time I would call and ask what he was doing, and he would be sitting at home, heating up a frozen cod and watching a western. I would tell him to come and see the play I was in - after all, it had been running for a year. He did turn up and smoked throughout, which was against fire regulations, and died soon after."

Gainsbourg lives on through his work, through Birkin's ongoing projects, and through the love that she quite clearly still has for him. France eventually forgave him for his myriad affronts to its culture (Michel Droit of the Académie Française once stated that the thought of Serge Gainsbourg breathing was as toxic as being in a car with the exhaust pipe broken off in a tunnel), and by the time of his death, he was the most popular man in the country.

"He wanted all publics. He wanted the covers of magazines to prove he still existed," says Birkin. "I saw a programme where 60 little kids came on a TV show smoking Gitanes and dressed like him, and he was so touched that he burst into tears. He would have loved it that Melody Nelson has become a hit, 30 years after being released. It hasn't been happy for me to sing these songs because I knew the reasons he wrote them, and they were generally written when he was sad. But I know that he would be overjoyed that they are still out there, and that makes me want to do it. He was intensely shy while not being falsely modest, and was always chic, even when in great chagrin and pain. That was the remarkable man that he was."

· Arabesque is released by EMI on February 17.

Tosh // 8:40 PM
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