Serge gainsbourg a fist.., p.8
Serge Gainsbourg- a Fistful of Gitanes, page 8
Pierre Grimblat once again saved the day. As a glum Serge and Jane were having their last supper before she returned to England, he showed up at the restaurant with another director, Jacques Deray, in tow. Deray handed Jane a note, asking if the next day she could fly to the South of France where he was shooting La Piscine (The Swimming Pool) with Alain Delon and Romy Scheider in St. Tropez. An ecstatic Serge came too.
“Whereupon Serge hired the most enormous limousine. He was rather reluctant to tie the baby’s pram and all the nappies onto the roof because it degraded the car into a vehicle of a different sort and anyway, in St. Tropez, you couldn’t go down any of the streets in it, they were so tiny.” But it was an Alpha male thing – he was intensely jealous of Jane’s handsome co-star. “My mother said that he was panic-struck that I was going to go off with Alain Delon.”
Jane had a similar moment when they were sitting in a St. Tropez restaurant and one of its best-known residents walked in. “I saw his face go white: papier-mâché. It was Bardot. So I realised it was difficult for him.
“Similarly when we were in London and John Barry turned up to take Kate off for a walk and, watching at the window that impeccably elegant man take her by the hand and go off down the street, I started to cry. Whereupon Serge leapt to the piano and started playing the James Bond theme in a furious way. But some things take a long time to get over. It’s like one of those children’s slate things where you can pull the paper down and make the picture disappear, but if it’s been written too strongly you can still see the shadow until over time it’s transformed into something quite different, until the original drawing is forgotten. And that’s how it was with us. It wasn’t at all the banal thing that people always want to see it as – the Pygamalion who picks you up because you’re young and pretty. Because A, he wasn’t interested in me at all in the beginning. B, there was only 20 years difference between us. And C, we were both totally miserable people trying to get over what seemed to be the love of our lives. But, little by little, we rubbed the other people out and became the principal characters in quite another story.”
The day he left for Paris – Jane begging a very churlish Alain Delon to drive her to the station to say goodbye, then running along the platform like a little girl as the train pulled away – she found that Serge had covered their bathroom mirror with lipstick messages: “All over it were hearts and the words ‘je t’aime, je t’aime, je t’aime, je t’aime, je t’aime’. My mother said to my father: ‘I think this is it’.”
The theme tune to the successful Slogan was released as a single in 1969. It featured Jane’s singing debut, her heavily-accented “choirgirl’s voice”, as Serge called it – as with other women he recorded, he urged her to sing higher than her natural register to achieve the cracked fragility he liked – duetting with his breathy mumblings over big orchestral arrangements by Jean-Claude Vannier (whom Serge had met on Paris N’Existe Pas). “He liked working with actresses,” said Jane, “because he could tell them what to do – make them sing like he sang, very close to the microphone and whisper sensually. He found it far more interesting to make beautiful actresses sing than singers with beautiful voices.”
And he asked Jane to record another duet with him – the song he had written for Bardot, ‘Je T’Aime, Moi Non Plus.’
“When Serge first asked me to do a new version of ‘Je T’Aime, Moi Non Plus’ with him I said no,” said Jane. “I’d heard the Bardot version and it was just too impressive, and I was jealous when I thought of him shut away in a tiny studio with this exquisitely beautiful girl.”
“I don’t know how he got Jane to do it because she was such a lovely English upper-class schoolgirl,” said Marianne Faithfull. “But of course, he would have got her to do it by fucking her brains out! And ‘Je T’Aime, Moi Non Plus’ was perfect for Jane. She was born for it.”
Chapter 8
I LOVE YOU, ME NEITHER
When, in 1991, Serge secured a place in the renowned French encyclopaedia Larousse, slotted betweeen the painter Thomas Gainsborough and Nietzsche’s poetic opus ‘Gai Savoir’, the song the compilers selected as representative of his oeuvre was ‘Je T’Aime, Moi Non Plus’, his duet with Jane Birkin. A song whose release as a single in 1969 caused outrage in several languages, at least one excommunication, incalculable unplanned pregnancies and sales in excess of six million singles worldwide.
While its vaporous, quasi-classical melody had its roots in an instrumental that Serge had written for the 1967 film Les Coeurs Verts, its title, he claimed, had been inspired by something that Salvador Dali once said: “Picasso is Spanish – me too. Picasso is a genius – me too. Picasso is a communist – me neither (moi non plus).”1
Although there are several Gainsbourgologists who claim that this was a later press invention on Serge’s part – and its neat way of bringing the conversation around to his own artiness, anti-communism and genius would certainly have been the kind of shrewd device he liked – it must be said that he did have a lifelong habit of coming across a catchphrase or a slogan and twisting it into a title which would serve as the inspiration for a song. And it might also be worth remembering that Serge – who never hid his admiration and affection for Dali, from buying his paintings and borrowing his home decor ideas to accompanying him on porn-watching sessions – had one of his seminal sexual experiences (which had long since become a favourite anecdote) with a woman he no longer loved, on the surrealist’s living-room floor.
Certainly ‘Je T’Aime, Moi Non Plus’s’ languid, almost over-pretty, chocolate-box melody contained some surreal images for a love song. But then, as the title indicated, this was a love song that denied it was a love song; or was too cynical or insecure to own up to what it really was.
Something that Serge told Bayon in his ‘Mort Ou Vices’ interview comes to mind: All the key women in his life, he said, had told him that they loved him, “But me? Never. I feel it, but I don’t know how to say it – although I love to hear it said.”2
“I was shocked,” Dominique Blanc-Francard (who years later would go on to become Serge’s engineer) recalled the first time he heard the song on the radio as a teenager in France. “But at the same time I was excited. It was great – and it was amazing that someone had dared to do that. No-one else I know of in France had ever gone that far on a record, and certainly not with the talent that the record showed. I think that was what was so special about it – to have managed to be so provocative and at the same time to make such a beautiful piece of music. There are a lot of Anglo-Saxon artists who have been just provocative – Bowie, Lou Reed – but never in France, and never with such a beautiful, and such a chaste melody.”
But the lyrical subtleties were lost on late ’60s Brits (a repressed, quite puritanical bunch, in spite of the efforts of Swinging London and “free-love” hippiedom); these, after all, were people who believed that “French” was a sexual position. What they heard on ‘Je T’Aime, Moi Non Plus’ was a slippery, expertly-stroked organ; a man and a woman’s orgasmic groans; and a vaporous, soft-focus melody, the musical equivalent of a Vaseline-smeared Emmanuelle movie. Here it was known as “that dirty record” – confirmation that life across the Channel was one of unchecked lubriciousness, and as essential a part of any successful seduction as a nice chilled bottle of Blue Nun.
The press, of course, speculated – as they had with the Bardot version – that Serge and Jane had recorded a live sex session on a tape-recorder hidden under the bed. “To which Serge, said, ‘Thank goodness it wasn’t, otherwise I hope it would have been a long-playing record’. We made it,” said Jane, “very boringly in the studio in Marble Arch, both of us in sort of telephone cabins. When you recorded in the old days you only had two takes anyway. He also put his hand up – because he was very afraid I was going to go on with the heavy breathing two seconds longer than I should and miss the high note – which was very, very high, an octave higher than the Bardot recording, because Serge thought that was more perverse, like a little choirboy – so he was waving at me like a madman from his cabin.”
All in all it was a better version, Serge said, than his original recording with Bardot. That one was “sublime”, he told Bayon, but at the same time “it was too… hot, whereas with Jane and me it was total technique. It’s like fucking: if you fuck hot, you fuck badly, if you fuck technique, you fuck better.” With Bardot he said “It was a horrifying kind of copulation, which was, I believe, too much.”3
As soon as they had finished recording the song, Serge and Jane rushed back with it to Paris. “The hotel where we were living at the time – where Oscar Wilde died; Serge liked it because of that anecdote – had a restaurant in the wine-cellar where people could sit in the little compartments and have dinner. There was a man that used to play rather slow and discreet records for background music. Serge couldn’t resist popping on ‘Je T’Aime, Moi Non Plus’,” said Jane. As they sat back and watched, “Everybody’s knives and forks were in the air, suspended. Nobody went on eating. Serge said ‘I think we’ve got a hit’.”
So did the record company chief. “He already knew the song because he’d heard the Bardot version, but he listened to it and said, ‘Well Serge, I’m willing to go to prison but I’d rather go for a long-playing record, so go back to London and make another 10 songs, and I’ll bring it out under a plain cover’. So we went back to England – Serge made up a couple of new songs on the ferry boat and we resung a few others so we could put out an L.P. And they put ‘Je T’Aime, Moi Non Plus’ out in a plastic cover on which they wrote ‘Interdit aux moins de 21 ans’.” Over 21s only. Which of course guaranteed that sales soared.
Meanwhile, in Italy, ‘Je T’Aime, Moi Non Plus’ was banned after being denounced as “obscenity” in the Vatican newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano. “The head of Phonogram in Italy was sent to prison and excommunicated,” said Jane – actually a two-month suspended sentence and a fine for the distributor. “Serge said it was the biggest PR he could ever get. Then they heard about the record in South America through this Vatican newspaper and it got slipped back into Italy under the camouflage of Maria Callas record covers. So the whole thing from then on was extremely stimulating and exciting, because no-one had ever done anything like it before.” Bans followed in Spain and Sweden. In the U.S., with very limited airplay, it hit an implausibly perfect soixante-neuf in the singles charts; the song seemed to take on a life and an inbuilt publicity campaign of its own.
In Britain, soon after its summer ’69 release, the BBC predictably banned it, announcing that the song was “not considered suitable for play”. Equally predictably, the statement ensured that the record would be a hit. On August 2 the song made it to number two in the charts – and would have gone to the top if Philips’U.K. arm, Fontana, had not bowed to pressure from its international H.Q. They too issued a statement, which announced: “Certain sections of the press and general public have seen fit to make a controversy over the contents of this recording. And as Philips does not intend to allow any of their products to be the subject of controversial matters, the record is being withdrawn from our catalogue.”
“Philips,” said Gilles Verlant, “was partly owned by the reigning Dutch queen Juliana. When she heard of the scandal, the story goes, she told the board of directors she was displeased and asked for the song to be dropped immediately.”
At which point British keyboard player Tim Mycroft, operating under the group name Sounds Nice, took the opportunity to step in with an instrumental version, renamed ‘Love At First Sight’. His reasoning made sense: since the BBC’s ban (which, with their near-monopoly of the airwaves at the time, effectively meant zero airplay, outside of a couple of pirate stations and discotheques) had been based on the song’s lyrical content (although, since the lyrics were in French, no-one could precisely say what they were about) there could be no possible objection once the words were removed. Profiting from the song’s new infamy, Mycroft’s rendition charted too, reaching number 18 on September 6.
Then suddenly Serge and Jane’s version was back in the shops again – resuscitated by an independent record label Major-Minor. On 11 October 1969 it made it to number one. ‘Je T’Aime, Moi Non Plus’, the first foreign-language single to take the pole position, spent a total of 34 weeks on the U.K. chart.
Over the years it would continue to make the odd – sometimes very odd – reappearance. First, as expected, came the spoof version: Up Pompeii’s Frankie Howerd duetting with June Whitfield in 1971 on ‘Up Je T’Aime’. Upholding the fine reputation of British sexuality, it featured June trying to stir the snoring Frankie by whispering French words of love in his ear, only to be met by protests: “Not again! Do you know what time it is? What on earth’s got into you? It’s not Friday, is it? Speak English, woman!” and so on. In 1974, the Jane and Serge original was reissued with a sexy picture-sleeve, bringing it back in the charts for a third time, this time reaching number 31. The following year, Judge Dread’s interpretation of the song made it into the top 10.
Even into the ’80s, the song could still shift copies. A quite dreadful cover by actors Gordon Kaye and Vicki Michelle from the TV series ’Allo, ’Allo, singing in their characters of René and Yvette, managed to squeeze into the Top 60. The ’90s in their turn brought a bagpipe version by The Lothian & Borders Police Band. The song made its last, and possibly least appropriate British appearance of the millennium as the theme music to a British TV commercial – the not entirely erotic John Smith’s Bitter beer.
In the U.S. ‘Je T’Aime, Moi Non Plus’ was tugged into a 16-minute epic in 1978 by disco queen Donna Summer and tackled by Cibo Matto and Sean Lennon on jazzman John Zorn’s tribute album to Serge. As this book went to press, Madonna had sought and been granted permission to record her own version of the song and, since her original plan – a reputed duet with Britney Spears – sadly (or not) fell through due to their “divergent schedules”, she was last reported to have approached David Bowie to be her new singing partner.
In Australia the song was translated into English by Mick Harvey of The Bad Seeds and sung by Nick Cave and Anita Lane. But it was the U.K. that truly embraced the song – for which Serge had a theory. He shared it with French magazine Rock & Folk in 1971: “I know certain people close to Princess Margaret who think it’s about sodomy. A fact which made them very happy. Perhaps that’s the reason why I got to number one in England.”4
The source “close to Princess Margaret” one assumes, was Lord Snowdon – alias Anthony Armstrong-Jones, the man namechecked in ‘Un Poison Violent, C’Est Ça L’Amour’ on Anna, and Serge’s future album-sleeve photographer. Snowdon also told him, to Serge’s utter delight, that on one of his trips with the wife to the Caribbean, the brass band dispatched to the airport to give the distinguished visitors their official greeting played the only two “British” tunes they knew – the U.K. National Anthem, and ‘Je T’Aime, Moi Non Plus’.
“Even now, when I go to England,” said Jane, “taxi drivers screech to a halt when I can’t resist saying I was the girl who sang ‘Je T’Aime, Moi Non Plus’. One of them turned round and said, ‘I had three fucking children to that record!’ He had it at home and I went there and signed it. It’s a historical record – but it’s also a criminal record; you’re reminded of it constantly. All I got from the British press for the last 30 years, was ‘what dirty records have you made, Jane?’which was a bit demoralising. But actually, if you’re going to be well-known for something until you die, why not that?”
In a sober moment, Serge claimed that his hymn to sexual liberation was, in fact, an “anti-fuck” song, about the desperation and innate impossibility of physical love. If the Vatican had not approved of its “almost liturgical” melody, they could at least have commended him for lyrics in which he did not allow himself to come. Anyway, he joked, the record was too short: “As for reaching a climax, it would have had to have been a 12-inch record for that.”5
Whatever, at the age of 41 and after 11 years in the business, Serge finally had his hit. An enormous hit. One that deserved a mark of recognition. Since nobody had awarded him one, he took himself off to Cartier the jewellers and ordered himself a star – a Jewish star, in platinum. A first step towards exorcising the rejection and humiliation of his teenage “sheriff ’s badge” years.
In the wake of the success of the single, the record company rushed an album into the shops: Jane Birkin, Serge Gainsbourg. Jane’s name first. “He wanted me to be a star; that’s what he did to people he loved,” said Jane. Due to the time pressure, several old songs had been resurrected, including ‘L’Anamour’, which he had originally written for Françoise Hardy, and ‘Les Sucettes’, the song which so upset the young France Gall. Among the new ones was the less than essential ‘Orang-outan’, inspired by Jane’s stuffed toy monkey, her lucky mascot. Better were ‘Jane B’, set to a slinky, orchestral version of Chopin’s Prelude No. 4, Opus 28 (which, in deference to the composer, he kept in its original key) and ‘69 Année Érotique’ (69, Erotic Year), which became their next single – their dare one say tongue-in-cheek equivalent of ‘The Ballad Of John & Yoko’.
Like their Anglo-Japanese counterparts, the couple à scandale were everywhere. Slogan, their first film together, was released in the summer of ’69 – a big success with the critics, the public, and the paparazzi who supplied the rapacious tabloids with photos of the pair at the premiere, Serge looking like he had just got out of bed and Jane dressed in a small pair of black panties topped by a see-through mini-dress.
