By 1972, Jane Birkin and Serge Gainsbourg had been together for four years. She was a British, Swinging London actor who had first hit the big screen as “girl on motorbike” in The Knack… and How to Get It (1965). He was one of France’s most respected songwriters and musicians, and versatile in almost any genre: jazz, reggae, electro-funk and yé-yé (early Euro-pop), as well as the traditional chansons.
But he is perhaps best remembered for a provocative repertoire that included a concept album exploring the Third Reich in breezy pop terms, a reggae version of “La Marseillaise” that earned him death threats and, most scandalously, “Je t’aime… moi non plus” – a hymn to desire and sexual liberation recorded with Birkin in 1968. Despite its nonsensical title and half-gasped, half-sung, barely intelligible lyrics, Birkin’s breathy simulated orgasms, punctuating a cheerful organ riff, led to it being banned from the airwaves throughout Europe (though only before 11pm in France). The Vatican denounced it and, of course, the song became a huge commercial success.
Gainsbourg had originally recorded it with his previous girlfriend, Brigitte Bardot, but their liaison was an illicit one – Bardot then being married to Gunter Sachs – and she begged him to suppress it, thinking, probably correctly, that its release might blow the lid off their affair.
Quite why Birkin and Gainsbourg are wearing matching outfits in le style anglais is unknown, but Vogue found them the “most romantic couple in Paris”. It couldn’t last. Gainsbourg once described his life as “an equilateral triangle, shall we say, of Gitanes, alcoholism and girls”. They parted in 1980 – amicably, despite all of the above making him intolerable.