Not only did the couple fall in love, she agreed to sing Je t’aime with him. Jane was married but she and her husband – a film composer – were separated. It was on the set that she met Gainsbourg. Jane had recently arrived in France to take part in a movie, Slogan. However her husband, Gunther Sachs had heard enough rumours about his wife and the sexy Frenchman and put his foot down. They intended to record the song together.
She had asked him to write the most beautiful love song ever for her and Je t’aime was the result. They had worked together in France on her TV show.
It helped that the couple were lovers in real life but Gainsbourg hadn’t written the song for Jane, but for a previous lover, Brigitte Bargot. She was an ‘English rose’ and he was a rather degenerate-looking, Gauloise-smoking Frenchman almost twenty years her senior. I suspect that one of the reason for this was Birkin and Gainsbourg themselves. The title was repeated, whisperingly, to the sound of luscious organ music, by Jane Birkin, but where she and co-singer Serge Gainsbourg fell foul of the censors was the simulated orgasm sounds. Mind you, I suspect that the song Je t’aime shocked very few real people, if anyone, but the stuffy BBC decided to ban it from their airwaves.
You’d have thought that by the nineteen sixties people were pretty much unshockable. Je t’aime: Jane Birkin and Serge Gainsbourg.
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