Jane Birkin | Jane Birkin, the singer who would never have won a ‘talent show’

2023-07-16 19:45:27

It’s not that Jane Birkin would never have won ‘La Voz’, ‘OT’ or ‘Eufòria’, it’s that she wouldn’t even have passed the first pre-selection. What is this young lady trying to handle that thread of voice! The jurors would have been horrified, attentive to affected nightingales and imitators. But, without overwhelming him with his singing, Birkin won us over by using equally or more important resources: a tender executive neatness, that credible identification with each stanza, the apparent inability to pretend.

Nor was she a composer (yes, a lyricist, on two of her latest albums), but even with those shortcomings, she gave shape to a perfectly enjoyable recording work. There are artists like this, who are creators without being so in a literal way: there’s her friend Marianne Faithfull. Well, fascinating keys float around the character, and the echo of the scandal still resonates, but we must not forget her recordings, which deserve attention beyond the review of Jane Birkin in the key of social life.

It is true that her discography has been, to a large extent, a reflection of the fantasies of Serge Gainsbourg, who composed her most recognizable songs for her, not only from the initiatory ‘Jane Birkin – Serge Gainsbourg’ (1969), but from the catalog that already deployed alone, with delicious pieces like ‘Ex fan des sixties’ (1978) and ‘Baby alone in Babylon’ (1983). No one better than her to sing the genius. After abandoning it, out of a mere sense of survival, when it had already become the decadent ‘Gainsbarre’, he tried to associate with other authors, and from there other beautiful records came out. But he didn’t stop coming back to Serge (the magical ‘Arabesque’, 2002), although lately his alliance with Etienne Daho.

After all, she liked to give a casual air to her adventures. That’s how she told me fifteen years ago, when I interviewed her at her house in Paris about her, in the ‘rue de Jacob’, in the heart of the ‘rive gauche’. Rooms full of books and with black wallpaper, antique furniture and a feeling of weight, all in contrast to her eternal light smile. She recognized herself as naive because she had gone to talk to Sarkozy so that France would not invest in the Burma of the military dictatorship, which had her friend Aung San Suu Kyi, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, under house arrest, and labeled her leap into the world of the arts as “accidental”. “I started doing things because someone chose me and proposed them to me.” And you couldn’t help but think that of course it was, because looking at her was the most natural thing in the world.