It is impossible to pay tribute to Serge Gainsbourg, who died just 25 years ago, without mentioning his famous title Je t’aime… moi non plus. The song performed by the composer and the young Englishwoman Jane Birkin, still unknown at the time, caused a real scandal when it was released in 1969.
“I want to go to prison, but not just for a 45-lap! Go back to London to make a whole album.” More than forty years later, Jane Birkin fondly remembers this line from Meyerstein. This one had been right. The song he was about to release was to become the most outrageous of its time. “The pope was our best publicist,” recalls Jane. L’Osservatore Romano, the Vatican’s official publication, had called for a boycott of this song, considered obscene, and had its broadcast banned in Italy. Same story in Great Britain, where the very respectable BBC did not intend to allow such incongruity on its airwaves. This did not prevent the piece from climbing to first place in the English charts, a great first for a French production. It is also in London, where Gainsbourg had taken the habit of burning his discs since 1966, that this piece was recorded, under the baton of the arranger Arthur Greenslade. It was a year after a first version orchestrated by Michel Colombier and interpreted by Gainsbourg in duet with Brigitte Bardot.
“Serge behaved like a gentleman, and canceled the commercial release of the disc when everything was ready,” recalls Jane Birkin. BB’s husband, Gunter Sachs, was moved by the possible broadcast of a title bringing together his wife and her former lover. “He made me listen to the recording in his parents’ apartment after we met. When he asked me if I wanted to sing it, I accepted only out of jealousy: I didn’t want him to do it with another girl, ”says the singer. In order to distinguish Birkin’s interpretation from Bardot’s, Gainsbourg asks him to sing his lines an octave higher. “In the studio, he would wave frantically at me when I got too carried away with the heavy breathing. There is one that stops suddenly, if you listen carefully. Jane’s high-pitched tonality, combined with her explicit rattles, lends an obvious haze to the piece, which its composer will revel in when testing it. “We lived in the hotel on rue des Beaux-Arts where Oscar Wilde died. There was a very chic restaurant downstairs where Serge played the record. When he saw the forks that were left in the air, he turned around and said to me, “We have a tube”.
Less than a year after May 1968, the song had the effect of a bomb. The Philips label refuses to market it, the radios to broadcast it (with the exception of José Artur, in his “Pop Club” on France Inter), just like television. Je t’aime, moi non plus owes its spectacular rise in the rankings to the nightclub circuit. The wind of freedom that the song blows takes on a particular resonance in countries where dictatorship still prevails, such as Spain or Portugal. “When I visited South America, I became aware of the impact the song had had, for a few weeks when censorship had not yet tickled, recalls Jane Birkin, who considers that she owes her career to this initial success. I already know what melody will be played at my funeral!”
After debuting in musicals in England, Jane Birkin really started her career as a singer with Je t’aime, moi non plus. When she played it to her parents, before the commercialization of the 45-rpm, she took care to raise the needle of the turntable on the most explicit passages. “My mother thought it was a lovely tune, and my father defended me when the scandal took on enormous proportions.” Forty years later, the memory of the title earned Jane beautiful testimonies when she traveled abroad, from Hong Kong to Jakarta, via Buenos Aires. “I was recently at an antique dealer in town who called out to me, asking me if I wasn’t the girl in the song, she says. A few minutes later, he made me sign his copy, the copy of the original disc. In London, last year, a taxi driver even admitted to him: “I conceived my five children on this music.”
There is no doubt that the triumph of the song opened the door to the posthumous recognition of which Serge Gainsbourg is now the object in the international musical milieu. Ten years after the impact of the title, when he began the sessions for the album Auxarmes et cætera, in Jamaica, the atmosphere was tense. underpants
Marked by the gasps of pleasure from the verses, non-French-speaking listeners of the song missed its key verse: “Physical love is without issue”, which belies the libertine intention that has been attributed to the composition. . The grammatical trick of the title, said to be inspired by a statement by Salvador Dali – “Picasso is Spanish, me too; Picasso is a genius, me too; Picasso is a communist, neither am I” – has entered common parlance, becoming an expression enjoyed even by political commentators.
In 1986, Serge Gainsbourg telephoned Jane Birkin, from whom he had been separated for several years. “I have very bad news for you. I’m going to release the version with Bardot of Je t’aime, moi non plus.” His former muse agreed to broadcast the recording, which remained secret for almost twenty years, on the condition that the profits from the disc be donated to animal defense associations. “I said to myself: ‘everyone will realize that I am less interesting than her on the title’”, recalls Jane Birkin. However, it is his interpretation that has gone down in history.
