Singer, actress and long-term collaborator with her former husband, Serge Gainsbourg, London-born Jane Birkin was an icon of the 1960s and 70s. Having starred in films such as Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow Up, Birkin met Gainsbourg during the making of Pierre Grimblat’s Slogan in 1969. The pair re-recorded Gainsbourg’s Je T’aime… Moi Non Plus that year, gaining both notoriety and a UK number one. During their ten-year professional and personal relationship, Birkin narrated, and featured on the cover of, Gainsbourg’s 1971 masterpiece, Histoire de Melody Nelson, and the pair collaborated on Birkin solo albums right up until Gainsbourg’s death in 1991. In this interview with MOJO from 2017, Birkin looks back at how music changed her life, how she would like to be remembered and her parting gift to Gainsbourg…
I’d describe myself as…
A sort of cartoon. Someone who’s got big teeth and mousey hair who’s sort of… fun! I like being with people who can make you laugh. I’m serious as well of course.
Music changed me…
By giving me a whole other career. It started with Serge, because he started writing for me until he died, for thirty years practically. All that changed what I might have become or not become had I stayed in England and not met him… and all those butterfly theories.
When I'm not making music…
I go to the cinema and the theatre, and exhibitions, I try to see [daughter] Charlotte in New York, I’ve got [daughter] Lou in Paris, I pick up grandchildren. Also, I live next door to the Jardin des Plantes, and I know the vet there. He’s always doing operations on strange animals and he lets me come. He’s got a red-haired panda that has Alzheimer’s, there’s a serpent who has cancer of the skin… the animals are very lucky, and it’s good when children come and visit me.
My biggest vice is…
Well, I like spending money. And I consider being popular a sort of vice, because it’s so nice.
The last time I was embarrassed was…
The other day. I replied to a journalist, and I wish I’d been brave enough to say, I don’t want to answer that question. Instead of which I tried to answer it and got tearful, and then you feel rather revolting because you should have said no. But I’m not embarrassed about most things that make people embarrassed.
My formal qualifications are…
I passed a few ‘O’ Levels – English Literature, English, History, Art, and I think something for needlework.
The last time I cried was…
I’ve already said. I find that I cry more and more. [2016 film] Manchester By The Sea, I was so overwhelmed by the tragedy of that man that I spent the whole film in tears, on a plane. Probably joyful people being sad is the worst thing in the world.
Vinyl, CD or MP3?
None. I listen to the radio. I’m like something from an old British movie, with the BBC banging on all the time. It educates me. I’ve got records, quite a lot, because I like the covers – I do have a pick-up (a turntable) but I don’t think it’s been plugged in for a long time.
My most treasured possession is…
It was a monkey, made of felt, that my uncle won in a pub when I was about five. It’s on the cover of Melody Nelson. I wouldn’t move without it. Serge wouldn’t move without it! Once we missed a plane because we had to go back to a hotel and find the monkey before they chucked him into a bin, because he looked really hideous. I wrote my diary to him – I wrote his name strangely, as ‘Munkey’. When Serge died, in a pure panic of what to leave with him like some Pharaoh, I thought the children can only be comforted if I put Munkey in (his resting place). So now I know exactly where he is, and he’s doing everything he should have done. Good old Munkey.
The best book I’ve read is…
It always comes back to Dickens for me, because of the characters and the secondary characters. David Copperfield, and Great Expectations is a such a good one too. Maybe it would have to be the Collected Dickens.
Is the glass half-full or half-empty?
Sometimes you think it’s empty, and it sort of gets filled up again. It’s all we’ve got, so you might as well drink something.
My greatest regret is…
I would like to have been a nurse. To be someone who was gentle all day long. But I think songs can be a bandage, if life has been difficult.
When we die…
That’s it. But you go on in peoples’ memories, I know that, for a generation or so.
I would like to be remembered…
By my children. That will be fine. I’d rather not be remembered for the [Hermés] handbag (called ‘The Birkin Bag’), though I’ve got nothing against it. And it would be nice to pop up on the radio. People who know whatever song it might be can remember where they were, and with whom, and what was going right or wrong.
This article originally appeared in MOJO 283.