RFI Musique - - Chanson - Jane Birkin, rebel with a cause

Jane Birkin, rebel with a cause

New album in French

Paris

12/12/2008 -

"One thing's for sure - and that is that love's rarely shared!" says Jane Birkin with her usual radiant, half-shy smile, summing up her newly-released album, Enfants d’hiver. It will come as something of a surprise to fans that Jane penned all the French lyrics on her new album herself, setting her songs to music by Alain and Pierre Souchon, Hawksley Workman, Eric Lanty, Phil Baron, Franck Eulry, Bertrand Louis and Edith Fambuena (who also produced the album). The material for this bitter-sweet album, full of light and shade, was completed before Jane embarked on her lengthy Arabesque tour. RFI Musique finally got the chance to hook up with the globe-trotting Ms. Birkin, that most English of French 'chanteuses.'

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RFI Musique: All of the songs on your new album, apart from one, are in French. Does writing in French come naturally to you?
Jane Birkin: Yes, it does. When I was working on Enfants d'hiver I found myself scribbling things down on scraps of paper as I went along and I was writing directly in French.

Did you write these songs for yourself or were you thinking of the fans who would listen to them afterwards?
Well, it all began in a very self-centred way really. I started out writing the way you would if you were jotting down your thoughts in a diary. I think one of the reasons I was maybe a bit vulgar - or at times, even downright crude - is because there are a lot of women out there who feel lonely. There are plenty of women out there who want to be loved at fifty. They've had their kids, they've done their bit. Is it so outrageous for them to hope for another great love in their life? Even when I was writing the lighter, funnier songs on the album I was really thinking about other lives. One of the reasons I've enjoyed touring my albums, doing interviews after films and directing a film like Boxes [Birkin's last feature film], is that I've been able to speak out in the hope that people will feel less alone. All mothers have doubts, you know. When mothers approach the end of their lives, they don't ask themselves whether they've been a good actress, or written a good book or a good play or made a decent album. What they want to know is whether they've been a good mother to their kids…

Talking of the lighter material on the album, there's a really funny song Oh comment ça va where you start insulting someone and then go at them hammer and tongs. It's the last thing anyone would expect from you...
I had so much fun writing the lyrics to that song. And the funniest thing is that I wasn't insulting anyone in particular, so that made things even more jolly. What happened was I dug out some lines I wrote for Jacques Doillon's film Comédie! - a film I acted in around twenty years or so ago now with Alain Souchon. At one point in the film I turn round and threaten him, saying "If you ever marry someone else after I'm dead, I'm going to come back and haunt you. I'll suddenly pop up at the window one night and scare the hell out of your new wife. She'll be so frightened she'll run off and throw up in the loo and she'll see me there, too, screaming my head off!" That was a brilliant jealousy scene where Jacques, who was directing, very cleverly let me go off the rails because he knew that when it comes to jealousy I'm an expert. I actually re-used those lines in the last verse of Oh comment ça va.
Don't you think it's amazing how polite we all are in our day-to-day lives? I'm always impressed by how patient people are in the supermarket. Really, I'm surprised that more people don't lose it before they get to the till. It's amazing that people stay relatively calm and well-behaved. I remember when I was a little girl and I was on the train I used to run off and scream my head off in the gaps between carriages, just so that I could come back and sit there quietly like a nice girl in front of other people. If I didn't let off steam like that my bad side would come out. And I'd know that I wasn't a nice little girl, after all, that there was this devil inside of me... I think it would be good to be bad every now and then and go round shouting things like "piss off!" and "shit!"

There's one song on your new album in English and that's Aung San Suu Kyi…
I wrote Aung San Suu Kyi in English because I wanted it to be a totally international song. The other day, in fact, I re-recorded some of the lyrics in French for RFI so that French speakers can understand it, too. We really have to stand up and take action on Burma. Twelve activists from Aung San Suu Kyii's party were arrested during demonstrations in September of this year and they've all been sentenced to 65 years in prison. And that's only after five charges - they still have to be sentenced for twenty-five other charges yet! These people will die in jail if we don't do anything about it. I urge people to write to the U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon and to President Sarkozy to get them to do everything in their power to help. We need to ask what companies like Total are doing over in Burma, why we're still investing in this rotten and corrupt regime.

I see that you're still very much committed to humanitarian causes…
Well, maybe people actually want to do more than politicians imagine. We all live with these little acts of daily cowardice on our conscience. It's like why didn't I stop and help that guy in the street the other day? Why did I stand by and do nothing when I saw that policeman mistreating someone?… I don't sleep so easily at night, you know. We all let too many things go by. We're not brave enough to be unpopular, to stand up and say what we think… Then, all of a sudden one day, after we've let all these little acts of cowardice go by, we're lucky enough to find ourselves with the right people at the right time. If I hadn't met Patrice Chéreau and found out that it was possible to go to Sarajevo during the siege, well, I wouldn't have gone there and that would have been that. I would have simply gone on thinking the same as other French people that nothing could be done there, that the mountains were too high to climb!