4 1GT Friday December 11 2020 | the times
cover story
O
ne of Jane Birkin’s
worst moments
came in a chemist’s
shop. It was several
years after the
musician-actress-
model had lost
her eldest child,
Kate Barry, from her marriage to the
James Bond composer John Barry.
Kate, a fashion photographer, died
in 2013 aged 46, after falling from her
fourth-floor flat in Paris. Suicide was
suspected, but not proved; she had
struggled with depression and drug
and alcohol addiction.
Birkin had popped into the chemist’s
and glanced at some pedicure
products. “Kate used to look after her
feet and suddenly her feet came back
into my mind,” she says down the line
from her home in Paris. The plummy
Chelsea vowels are intact despite half
a century in France. So is the English
stoicism. Standing in the shop, though,
it all came flooding back. Of all the
days after Kate’s death, Birkin says
that one was “particularly hard”.
Soon afterwards she bumped into
her friend and former artistic director,
Philippe Lerichomme. He saw she was
upset and asked: “What’s up?” Birkin
explained. Lerichomme said: “Write it
all down.” So she did, in the back of
the diary that she had been keeping
for decades. The one that she would
publish as Munkey Diaries, charting
her rise from London schoolgirl to
delicate face of Swinging London to
movie star (Blow Up, Evil Under the
Sun, Death on the Nile) and muse and
lover of Serge Gainsbourg, for whom
in 1967 she provided authentically
orgasmic moans on one of the most
controversial songs in history, Je
t’aime... moi non plus.
Those notes about Kate have now
become a track, Cigarettes, on Birkin’s
bracingly personal new album, Oh!
Pardon tu dormais (Oh, sorry you
were sleeping). The song features the
line “Ma fille s’est foutue en l’air” —
loosely “my daughter f***ed herself
up.. .” — which “felt obscene, but also
fair”, she writes in the album notes.
The song continues: “Had she opened
the window to clear the cigarette
smoke... perhaps it was a stupid
accident, who knows?”
There’s a similar tension in the
tone of Cigarettes where Birkin, 73,
sounds fragile, sad and angry, but also
weirdly jaunty. That’s in part due to
the Kurt Weill-style accompaniment
from her collaborator, Étienne Daho.
“It gave one a shock, but at the same
time I thought that’s just what it
should do,” she says.
This is the first time Birkin has
written about her daughter’s death.
“I haven’t tackled it at all before,”
she says. For a long time afterwards,
“I was no good at anything.”
In an interview in 2017 Charlotte
Gainsbourg, Birkin’s daughter with
Serge, said that her mother was “gone‘It’s taken me seven years to
Jane Birkin tells Ed Potton about her
ex-lover — and why she’s breaking her
silence about her daughter Kate
Top: Jane Birkin
in 1969 and, above,
with her daughter
Kate Barry in 2012for years. Really gone... She wouldn’t
get up. If you told her to come over,
she would, but she didn’t talk, not to
my children or to anyone.”
What made Birkin ready to sing
about Kate? “It wasn’t that I was ready
to do it, it was that it was impossible to
make a record that was so personal
without starting off with her,” she
says. “That was something I had to do
immediately. I say immediately — it’s
taken me seven years to say anything.”
Daho, she says, was “very delicate in
his suggestions. Like a lover who says,
‘Was that all right for you?’ ” Even so,
it must have been hard. “It wasn’t hard
because I’d written [the notes] in my
diary,” she says. She has a shrugging
French aversion to the obvious.
Another song on the album,
These Thick Walls, is also about
Kate. Again, it was inspired by a poem
from Birkin’s diary, this one “about the
gifts I could no longer give to Kate,
about the horror of the graveyard,
the spring flowers left in haste, the
terror at what might be happening
below the ground”.The album is full of Birkin’s past.
“Floating out of my body came all
the people I’d loved,” she says of one
song, Ghosts. Grandparents, parents,
daughter, nephew, husbands, friends,
dogs, cats. It’s the husbands that she
gets asked about the most. First was
Barry, whom she met when she was
17 and married soon after.
Despite being one of the beauties
of her age, Birkin was hugely insecure.
She kept eyeliner under her pillow.
“I didn’t dare show my bare face,”
she says. “Because in those times we
wanted to look like Jean Shrimpton
— we wanted to have big eyes
with eyelashes all the way
round. I thought that if John
saw me with my little eyes in
the middle of the night, he’d
be disappointed.”
A mischievously Bond-like
track on the album called
Catch Me If You Can was
inspired by “those nights of
being alone, of asking him if
he’ll still love you in ten years’
time. All those questions. They
were there when I was 17 and again
when I was 38 and now at 70 one’s
been able to make them into a song.
I haven’t changed much!”
You wonder how her self-esteem
issues compare with those of the
Instagram generation. “I hadn’t
thought of that at all,” she says. “I
thought how wonderful it was toA harasser? It
doesn’t equate
with the Serge
any of us knew
show your bare face like
Charlotte did in her films
when she was 13, 14, not
trying to look like other
people. How wonderful it
must be to think you’re just
fine as you are. It came to me
later thanks to Serge — one
can hardly have looked more
like oneself with short hair and
hardly any make-up at all.”
Gainsbourg was the great love
of Birkin’s life. They never married,
but were together from 1968 until
1980 and worked together on a
string of projects including his Histoire
de Melody Nelson album and the
transgressive movie Je t’aime moi non
plus, in which her submissive character
endures painful anal sex. Yet Birkin’sloyalty to Gainsbourg, who died in
1991, is unyielding. I ask about recent
comments by Lio, the Portuguese-
Belgian singer who recorded with
Gainsbourg and described him as a
“Weinstein of songs” and “quite simply
a harasser”. Did that equate to the
man Birkin knew?
“I don’t think it equated with the
Serge that any of us knew,” she saysYou can’t judge
things by other
epoques, you can’t
measure them
by this state that
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