serge gainsbourg jane birkin helmut newton

She compares Gainsbourg to the fable of the scorpion and the frog, in which a scorpion asks a frog to carry him over the river, having reassured the frog that he won’t sting it, because to do so would drown them both. “I could do such complicated things – sing so high – do things that other people sometimes couldn’t do, but something as banal for him as not being able to do that, he was amazed.”īirkin is adamant, though, that she wasn’t exploited. He simply couldn’t understand how I couldn’t sing Ex-Fan Des Sixties, and then the more he screamed and the more he hit me with a ruler and the more everybody tried… When I sang somebody else, he was very affronted. “He also made me believe I could only sing his things. He liked little boys’ voices anyway, and little boys”. The chemistry of Birkin and Gainsbourg’s relationship seems unusual.īirkin credits him with giving her confidence, “because I sang like a choirboy. He wrote caustic homosexual songs, but not for Judy Garland’s daughter (Liza Minnelli) – there was too much voice. “But he said it wouldn’t be a present for her, it wouldn’t be a cadeau, because she needed gut songs, not sophisticated songs. “Edith Piaf asked him to write for her,” says Birkin.

Gainsbourg had a particular interest in getting actresses to sing. In the UK, the passion of their relationship was captured in the orgasmic disco of Je T’Aime (Moi Non Plus) – a tune originally recorded by Brigitte Bardot. Having first mistaken Gainsbourg’s shyness for contempt, she was surprised when an evening’s dancing concluded with Serge passing out, drunk, on his hotel bed. In spite of you not being with him.”įamously, Birkin met Gainsbourg when she – an English beauty heartbroken from the collapse of her marriage to film composer John Barry – was cast with him in Slogan, a Pierre Grimblat film, in 1968. I don’t know whether it’s existed in songwriting before that you’ve had the same author, until he died. “Every song since when I was 20 until I was 45, and he died after having written the last LP for me, which was Amours des Feintes. There’s a song which I’m very much attached to, called Une Chose Entre Autres, where he made me sing “One thing amongst other things that you don’t know is that you had the very best of me, more than anyone else,” and it’s true. Even to the months where one was lying – even the months are correct – they rhyme. “Perhaps I realise now quite how beautiful they are,” says Birkin, “and how painful and exact they are. “It sounds weird because they were songs that were written when I left Serge, for the most part, but they were the most beautiful songs on separation.”īirkin’s relationship with Gainsbourg, the songwriter who perverted the chanson, has long been the subject of fascination, not least because they lived their lives in public, and Gainsbourg documented their ins and outs in his lyrics. “They were my favourite songs,” Birkin says. Birkin’s relationship with Gainsbourg, the songwriter who perverted the chanson, has long been the subject of fascination

Serge gainsbourg jane birkin helmut newton