Almost two years after breaking a record silence of twelve years with Oh! Pardon, you sleep..., Jane Birkin (London, 1946) presents it tonight at the Teatre Grec. It has not been easy for her to tour again, and not only because of covid, since last September she suffered a mild stroke that kept her away from the stage for a few months, during which her daughter Charlotte Gainsbourg premiered a documentary about her: Jane by Charlotte.
Birkin talks on the phone from his home in Paris, where he had just returned from a concert in London. He had just passed the covid – for the fourth time – and he had to give a concert in Madrid last Sunday, which was canceled due to the indisposition of one of the musicians.
You wanted to return to the stage, right?
Yes and I love it. It's like going on an adventure, meeting new people. The only thing that makes me feel bad is leaving my bulldog, because he gets sad. If I could get the dog on planes it would be a perfect world.
Will you focus on the new album in Barcelona?
The truth is that I am very happy with the album, which I owe above all to Étienne Daho –composer of the music on the album–, and he himself has organized the concerts, and he wanted it to be somehow like when I was twenty years old, in my beginnings, with straight hair, jeans... and he made it very funny. There will be songs like Jane B, Di Doo Dah, Ex fan des sixties. Étienne wanted to start with Je t'aime... moi non plus, but I told him that he can't be, that Serge is gone, and he is far away. But the musicians start with this music, and then we'll play a lot of old and new songs. In London I noticed how excited they were to hear some songs from Melody Nelson's Histoire again, and perhaps that's the part I like the most. But I'm also very excited to sing some new songs in English, like Catch me if you can.
It's like an epitaph for his daughter Kate...
Étienne said to write an epitaph, but it wouldn't come out, and I went to my house in Brittany, and it came out in English, just like when I heard the Ghosts music, because all my ghosts are English, be they husbands or father and mother, cats or dogs... I love to sing this song. We also play Cigarettes, about Kate. And after a few more songs we ended up with a song that few people know about, Pourquoi ?, which I wrote for Charlotte when she had an accident... I haven't written any songs for Lou, because she's always happy, maybe it's not very fair . But I think people are satisfied, touched, with the concert.
For the first time the lyrics he sings are his own. Notice the difference, on stage?
The lyrics that Serge –Gainsbourg– wrote for me were rather difficult and very very beautiful, and it would have been terrible to have made a mistake and changed them, but if they are mine it makes me suffer less, and if I make a mistake in one word I put another and nothing happens. Also, when I sing songs that I have written, I am very clear about what I was thinking and I can give them more meaning. It also happens that the ones I've written in English are more serious, because the tone of voice changes from one language to another... But Serge's lyrics are poetry, while mine are just words.
Do you find it liberating, too?
Yes, it makes me feel like I'm flying, and more so in English, I don't have to worry about anything else.
Have these two years that we have been in the pandemic gone very up and down?
I never stop. I had a small stroke, in September, and my daughters suffered because I am always alone at home, and they wanted me to have a nurse at home so as not to suffer, but in my apartment there was not enough space, so I moved to another flat... twice! It seems to me that in the one of now I will stay the rest of my life. I have not stopped, no, and that I have already caught covid four times.
The last time very recently...
Yes, luckily now the variations are very slight, but it took me a few days to be negative in the tests, and it prevented me from living my life, visiting Serge's sister, who is ninety years old...
Lucky I was vaccinated...
Yes, four times! But I have no complaints. Because of the leukemia that I was diagnosed with, I go to the hospital a lot, and very young nurses explained to me how they had to overcome the deaths of patients, and things that when you are 19 years old are very strong. I went back to my apartment, and I took care of my neighbors, and I went to buy them if they needed it, but I didn't have to worry about anything, while these nurses suffered so much.
And for that reason do you think that from music you can bring light to people who suffer or have suffered?
During those months I loved doing anything for others. A theater in Paris had a great idea, they gave us a long list of phone numbers and asked us to call and say a poem. I did it, and I loved it, and I said a lot of Serge's lyrics, and I was lucky to be able to do it. I think it's a shame we don't keep doing things like that, in prisons for example. It only takes a few minutes, and I know a lot of old people who are bored and all they do is watch TV, and they'd love to hear a poem. If Jean-Louis Trintignant had called me, for example, I would have loved it. I am very, very grateful for everything that has been done.
Between the documentary of your daughter Charlotte and the new album, do you think you have closed a stage of mourning?
The Charlotte movie was weird because I didn't know what we were doing. I didn't like the first interviews she did with me for the documentary and I stopped it for two years. I think she needed to find out if her place is the same as Lou's or Kate's, and I was worried about her. But in the end the truth is that I really liked spending more time with her, and in the end she managed to make a movie about mothers and daughters, I don't think it has much to do with the celebrity or my life but with our relationship, everything the world wants to know what their place is. That's why people could identify and succeed. I think that after seeing her people went to see her mothers immediately.
Perhaps for her it was like an excuse to talk to you about things they hadn't talked about.
Yes, because the formality somehow forces you to ask questions that you otherwise wouldn't, especially topics that are painful, like Kate's death and what I thought I hadn't done for her... All the kids want to know if they have turned out well for the parents... I was surprised that Charlotte was interested in me, because I thought not, because of how her life had been, having lost her father so young, whom she naturally missed more than me . It's a good thing about dying, that at least people are more lenient with you.
I'm sure they have good memories of him too!
I hope so, ha ha ha!
I am very excited that my friend Gabrielle will come, because to save my life when I had a stroke, because she saw me and thought I made a strange face, and called the usual ambulance, and that saved me...
In the film he talks about the guilt he feels for not having been able to do more for his daughter...
My daughter Lou has been very honest about that, and her son, who told me that I was with them but not completely, was rather alone with my mourning, and I think he was right. Lou had to tell me that they were also suffering because they had lost her sister, that I had closed myself off and could stare at the wall for months and months. I should have been more for them. I still remember that I was giving a concert near Strasbourg, and when they told me that there had been a terrible accident I didn't think about Charlotte or Lou, I knew that Kate was dead, because she was always the one for whom she suffered the most.
Catalan version, here
