Adieu, Jane B.
The obituaries of Jane Birkin in this morning’s British newspapers mentioned all the obvious stuff — the BBC ban, the handbags — while neglecting to record two salient features of her career in the public eye. One was her extensive campaigning on behalf of many important causes (including the rights of immigrants and refugees, AIDS, abortion rights and climate change). The other was her music.
She became a singer through her association with Serge Gainsbourg, who gave her many good songs to sing, filled with his love of daft, clever puns and adroit double entendre. She remained faithful to them long after she and Gainsbourg had ceased to be a couple, and five years after his death in 1991 she made an album called Versions Jane, the title indicating its theme: a desire to find her own approaches to his songs.
Since her light, funny, deceptively fragile English-girl-in-Paris voice never changes, the settings are always the key, and for the album’s 15 songs she chose 15 different approaches. It opens with “Ces petits riens”, beautifully sung against animated pizzicato strings arranged by Jean-Claude Vannier. The joviality of “La gadoue” is animated by the sparky ska of Les Negresses Vertes, an accordion playing the role of rhythm guitar, with a cheeky interpolation of the melody from “Je t’aime — moi non plus”. The concert harp of Catherine Michel is the only accompaniment to the haunting “Dépression au-dessus du jardin”. The trio of the veterans Joachim Kühn (piano), Jean-François Jenny Clark (bass) and Daniel Humair (drums) give “Ce mortel ennui” a suave swing reminiscent of a Left Bank jazz club — Le Chat qui pêche, say — in the 1950s.
And on it goes. A full orchestra, arranged by Philippe Delettrez, billows beneath the mad verbal gymnastics of “Exercice en forme de Z”, with its buzzing bestiary of “chimpanzés, gazelles, lézards, zébus buses et grizzli d’Asie.” A slinky electro backing by Bruno Maman and the drummer Patrick Goraguer (son of Gainsbourg’s old musical director) adds a glide to “L’anamour”. The heavy rock of Daren et les Chaises detonates the demureness of “Elisa”. The Hammond organ of Eddy Louiss, once a member of Stan Getz’s European band, chugs beneath “Elaeudanla Téïtéïa”. Swelling strings and a rock rhythm section make a disquieting Euro-pop aria of “Aux enfants de la chance”, Gainsbourg’s warning against angel dust, magic mushrooms, freebasing and dragon-chasing. “Ford Mustang”, the story of a fashionable couple who die (or that’s how I interpret it) while kissing at the wheel of their big American car and crashing into those sturdy plane trees that used to line French routes departmentales, is recited against Boom Bass’s mosaic of samples: free jazz saxophones, random voices, piano, stabs of strings.
Birkin’s travels in pursuit of her various campaigns are recalled by “Couleur Café”, recorded in Dakar, featuring the drumming of the Senegalese griot Doudou N’Diaye Rose, and “Comment te dire adieu”, in which the contribution of the Orkestar Salijević, recorded in a Serbian village, results in a wonky brass band version that Tom Waits would enjoy.
Of the whole collection, the one that has always stuck with me most vividly is “Sorry Angel”. A lover’s ambiguous farewell, its words are half sung, half whispered against the layered guitars of Sonny Landreth, the noted bottleneck exponent in whose Louisiana studio the track was recorded. Floating in a gentle haze between boulevard and bayou, it’s a four-minute movie — and a highlight of the album that perhaps conveys best of any she made the range of her own creative thought.
I knew her a bit around this time and came to understand something of the extent to which she was admired and loved in her adopted country. One evening in Paris I got back to my modest hotel to find the woman at the desk beaming with unusual warmth as she gave me a piece of paper along with my room key. Mme Birkin had dropped by from her house around the corner a little while earlier and left a note about meeting the following day. As the receptionist handed it over, she practically curtsied.
thebluemoment.com 
I got to meet her back stage in 1965 when she was appearing in Passion Hotel. I was 17 at the time and my mother was a friend of the director . She was totally charming and along with Françoise Hardy she became on of my schoolboy icons whereas my friends chose Sandie Shaw or Cathy McGowan!
Richard, that’s a lovely and very sweet tribute. Birkin with Sonny Landreth – who’d have thought it? Interesting to note that Brian Odgers, who I best know from ‘Extrapolation’, is on several of her earlier albums – seems he was Serge’s bass player de choix
Ah, chapeau !
Thank you for celebrating Jane B’s more creative side and for such a marvellous account of an album I barely know but will revisit. My first encounter (and I am sure yours too) with Jane Birkin was in Antonioni’s “Blow-Up” (1966), where she played one of the two over-excited girls who stalk the David Hemmings character and end up being chased around his studio. A small note: it’s Patrick Goraguer not Gorgaguer. I grew up in Paris, and “Alain Goraguer et son orchestre” played jazz as well as rock’n’roll. Goraguer died last February. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alain_Goraguer
I first clocked Goraguer’s talent as a child, was a marvellous song whose lyrics were written by that famous French jazz writer (and trumpeter) Boris Vian (also a great novelist) – “Fais-moi mal Johnny”, sung by Magali Noël, the charismatic and sensual redhead who later became a Fellini star and died a week or so ago. That song with his hilarious account of a an S & M relationship that goes wrong, was one of my first experience of rock’n’roll, with a swinging accompaniment by Goraguer Sr who felt the essence of the new music more than most French musicians. The song is on YouTube, and worth looking up.
Blow-Up? Nah. I spotted her in the staircase sequence in Dick Lester’s The Knack (And How to Get It) a year earlier…
Thanks for the Goraguer correction.
Versions Jane, to be exact.
Thanks for sharing such a warm memory!
And then?
M
Lovely piece, thank you. I shall go in search of the album.
One other point, I do think that Eddy Louiss is more than “once a member of Stan Getz’s European band”. His leader dates alone merit a more generous recognition. Seek out ‘Our Kind Of Sabi’ as a very fine example.
Yes, I know, but I could have added lots more detail all over the place. Anyway, Louiss is terrific on that track.
Indeed, any French jazz fan would put Eddy Louiss high in the local pantheon…He was longtime organist for the great French jazz lyricist and singer Claude Nougaro.
Perhaps there’s no surprise in this but the French media have made a lot more of Birkin as actress, singer, muse, campaigner. It’s been quite touching to read and listen to the tributes, even to register one of the principal themes, Birkin’s stubbornly British accent when she spoke her doubtless impeccable French.