It is to Jane Birkin’s credit that she remained undefinable right to the end. “Singer, actress, fashion inspiration,” read the New York Times obituary headline; “French music icon and mother of Charlotte Gainsbourg” read our own. Elsewhere, in the wake of her death at the age of 76, her decades-long collaboration with Serge Gainsbourg has been emphasized. All of which is true but somehow only scrapes the surface of this beguiling artist.
She was a shy English girl who first scandalized the world with the 1969 Gainsbourg duet “Je T’Aime… Moi Non Plus,” played Brigitte Bardot’s lover in Don Juan, or If Don Juan Were a Woman, campaigned against the far right in France, and in 2002 reworked some of Gainsbourg’s most revered classics to incorporate the influence of Arabic music—a daring, defiant move in France where racial tensions run high. Her solo career lasted from 1969 to 2023, 44 years of constant experimentation, art, and brilliant dramatic interpretation, which enabled her to finally escape the shadow of Serge Gainsbourg to become her own musical reference point.
What proved to be Birkin’s final album, 2020’s devastating Oh! Pardon tu dormais…, continued her record of constant evolution, with Birkin writing songs in English for the first time. Much like David Bowie’s Blackstar, the album also appeared to foreshadow the artist’s death. “Ghosts,” for example, sees Birkin surveying the phantoms of “Grandpa, grandma, mother, father/Daughter, nephew, cats, husbands and friends,” the singer pegged back by the weight of mortality. The other (non) presence on the album is Birkin’s daughter with British composer John Barry, Kate Barry, who died in 2013 after falling from the window of her Paris flat. (Birkin had three daughters: Kate; the singer and actress Charlotte Gainsbourg; and actress, singer and model Lou Doillon.) Birkin’s lyrical, quizzical lines on “Cigarettes,” which address Kate’s death over a lively waltz time, show an artist at a late-career creative peak, her raw grief awash with sickly disbelief.
Despite the record’s air of finality, Birkin never retired. She performed live at the start of 2023 despite suffering “a minor form of stroke” in 2021. A run of concerts in Paris planned for June 2023 were planned but canceled in May. Politicians may be known for their eulogies of cultural stars, but French President Emmanuel Macron actually got close to the essence of Birkin when he described her as “a complete artist… her voice as sweet as her sense of engagement was fiery.”
Birkin’s catalog merits a deep dive. Here are seven songs to start with.
Serge Gainsbourg / Jane Birkin: “69 Année Erotique”
“Je T’Aime… Moi Non Plus” is undoubtedly the best-known duet between Birkin and Gainsbourg, its scandalous reception translating into a global hit. But “69 Année Erotique,” which followed soon after, may well be their best song together. Their exquisite delivery transforms a rather puerile joke about 1969 being an “erotic year” into a pop epic of eternal class and emotion. It seems to fly on a wave of gilded strings into the smoldering heart of the 1960s, lascivious but strangely innocent, as if Birkin’s naive, English-accented French has melted Gainsbourg’s icy ego.
Serge Gainsbourg: “Ballade de Melody Nelson”
Histoire de Melody Nelson, Gainsbourg’s towering 1971 concept album, is undoubtedly his best work and Birkin is at its heart. She provides the vocals, cover photo, and inspiration for the English central character, who the narrator falls in love with after his Rolls Royce knocks her off her bike. Histoire de Melody Nelson would never have existed without Birkin and her vocals. Best heard on “Ballade de Melody Nelson,” they exemplify the power of restraint she brought to her early songs. Birkin sings only two words, “Melody Nelson,” which she repeats four times. “Sings” might perhaps be too grandiose a word for her whispered vocal with the slightest suggestion of harmony. But the song simply wouldn’t be the same—or a fraction as good—without Birkin’s note-perfect delivery at the beating heart of the action.
Jane Birkin: “Help Camionneur”
Di Doo Dah was Birkin’s debut solo album, released in 1973, after the 1969 joint album Jane Birkin-Serge Gainsbourg. Gainsbourg may have been ever present on the album—writing or co-writing all of its tracks—but Birkin makes the album hers. On “Help Camionneur,” an ode to being picked up by truck drivers, Birkin offers a tale of active female desire. Her voice is oddly moving in its hushed power as she casually reaches for the high notes with the nonchalance of someone picking apples on a warm summer’s day. It’s a testament to Birkin’s cinematic charm as a vocalist that, in most other hands, this song would have been entirely gross.
Jane Birkin: “Valse de Melody (Live à l'Odéon-Théâtre de l'Europe, Paris / 2002)”
Gainsbourg and Birkin separated as a couple in 1980. But she continued to engage with his music: 2017’s Birkin Gainsbourg: Le Symphonique saw Birkin perform orchestral versions of some of the classic songs she originally recorded with Gainsbourg; 2012’s Jane Birkin sings Serge Gainsbourg Via Japan was a live album performed largely with Japanese musicians in memory of the victims of the 2011 tsunami. Best of all was Arabesque, an album recorded live in Paris in 2002, in which Birkin and a group of Arabic musicians re-interpreted classic Gainsbourg and Birkin songs under the influence of North African folk music.
This was a brave move for an artist in France, where the far right Front National was a genuine political force in the early 2000s (and remains so today as Rassemblement National), one that inevitably called back to Gainsbourg’s controversial decision to reinterpret the French National anthem as the reggae song “Aux armes et cætera” in 1979. It was also a beautiful artistic statement, casting Birkin’s previous work in gorgeous new colors. On “Valse de Melody,” originally released on Histoire de Melody Nelson, Birkin initially cedes the vocal spotlight to Algerian rai singer Cheb Moumen, the forceful drama of his virtuoso performance driving Birkin to deliver one of her strongest vocals ever—all spine-tingling melancholy and concealed muscle.
Jane Birkin / Mickey 3D: “Je M’appelle Jane”
While it would be foolish to ignore Serge Gainsbourg’s influence on Birkin’s solo music—consider classics like 1975’s “Lolita Go Home” and 1978’s “Ex-fan des sixties”—she continued to make excellent music after he died in 1991. Rendez-Vous, her 2004 album, was perhaps the moment the wider world caught up with her genius. It featured vocals from Bryan Ferry, Beth Gibbons, Feist, Gonzales, Placebo’s Brian Molko, and more. It’s the album’s opening track, “Je M’appelle Jane” with French band Mickey 3D, that wins out—an utterly charming, flamenco-influenced circus stroll in which Birkin reclaims her history while giving her detractors the effortless kiss off they deserve. “Je m'appelle Jane et je t’emmerde,” the chorus runs. It essentially translates to, “My name is Jane. And fuck you.”
Jane Birkin: “Période Bleue”
Enfants d’hiver, Birkin’s elegiac 2008 album, was the first on which she composed the lyrics. She wrote in French rather than her native English, but the words apparently relate largely to holidays she took with her parents on the Isle of Wight during her childhood. Whether this is true or not—Birkin definitely holidayed on the Isle of Wight but the two geographical references on Enfants d’hiver are to Brittany—the languid, chilly feel of the British (or perhaps Bretagne) seaside dominates the album, occasional burst of strings peeking through the arrangements like sunlight piercing gray clouds. “Période Bleue” is particularly graceful in its search for times passed. Birkin’s voice—once full of the promise of youth—matured into an instrument of wisdom.
Jane Birkin: “Catch Me If You Can”
Oh! Pardon tu dormais…, the 14th and final studio album from Birkin, is perhaps her best solo record—an emotional masterpiece with mortality front and center. It’s packed with brilliant songs, from the claustrophobic cri de coeur of “Ces Murs Épais” (even more despairing on the 2022 live recording captured on the album Oh! Pardon tu dormais… Le Concert) to the distinctly Suede-ish “Ta Sentinelle,” passing by the defiant “Max,” the rotting boogie woogie of “Telle est ma Maladie Envers Toi” and the funked up and disappointed “Je Voulais Être une Telle Perfection Pour Toi!.” But the crown goes to the album’s closing song, a devastatingly heavy goodbye to her daughter Kate and—perhaps—to happiness itself, the song’s funereal air suggesting the inevitable end that awaits all of us. It is a fitting goodbye to a dazzling, unconventional career of rare artistic singularity.
