"I conceived my children on this music": return to the history of Je t'aime... moi non plus by Birkin

The scene is one of the most successful in the film Gainsbourg, Heroic Life, by John Sfarr: Jane and Serge make producer Georges Meyerstein - played on screen by Claude Chabrol - listen to the fruit of their last studio session in London, Je t love me neither. "I want to go to jail, but not just for a 45-rpm! Go back to London to make an entire album”, said Meyerstein to him. More than forty years later, Jane Birkin fondly remembered this line. 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 press officer,” Jane liked to recall. 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.

I love you... me neither, the version of Brigitte Bardot

“Serge behaved like a gentleman, and canceled the commercial release of the disc when everything was ready,” recalls Jane Birkin. B.B.'s husband, Gunter Sachs, was indeed 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 only agreed out of jealousy: I didn't want him to do it with another girl,” Birkin testified.

I love you...me neither, the Jane Birkin version

In order to distinguish his interpretation from that of Bardot, 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 sticking up in the air, he turned around and said to me, 'We've got 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 realized the impact the song had had, for a few weeks when censorship had not yet tickled, remembered Jane Birkin, who considered that she owed 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 makes her parents listen to it, before the commercialization of the 45-rpm, she takes care to raise the diamond from the platinum 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 still earned Jane beautiful testimonies when she traveled abroad, from Hong Kong to Jakarta, via Buenos Aires. “I was recently at an antique dealer in the city who shouted at me asking me if I was not the girl in the song, she said. A few minutes later, he made me sign his copy, the copy of the original disc. In London, in 2010, a taxi driver even confessed 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 gasps of pleasure from the verses, non-French-speaking listeners of the song missed its key verse: "Physical love is without issue." A phrase that 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", he confesses to her. 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 '', recalled Jane Birkin. However, it is his interpretation, and not that of B.B., that has gone down in history.