Catching Up With Jane Birkin

Jane Birkin may be best known for her namesake Hermès bag and her scandalous duet with Serge Gainsbourg on ‘Je T’aime … Moi Non Plus,” but these are only specks of sequins in her glittery 45-year career. At 64 years young, Birkin has recorded more than 20 albums, acted in more than 65 films, worked as a designer, a model and a muse, and actively supported a slew of humanitarian causes. Along the way she even picked up an Order of the British Empire title. Seattle’s Light in the Attic Records has just released two of Birkin’s albums for the first time ever on CD, “Jane Birkin/Serge Gainsbourg” from 1969 and “Di Doo Dah,” her first solo album, from 1973. Both recordings feature Birkin’s breathy, high-pitched vocals as well as Gainsbourg’s idiosyncratic songwriting and completely outrageous lyrics — thankfully in translation. Like so much late-’60s countercultural fare, these albums blew the minds and mores of bourgeois folks. One song was even condemned by the Catholic Church. “The Pope speaking out against ‘Je T’Aime … Moi Non Plus’ was the best P.R. we could ever have,” Birkin said by phone from her home in Brittany, France. The song, from “Jane Birkin/Serge Gainsbourg,” featured Birkin’s erotic heavy breathing above a lilting organ and was banned from airwaves across the globe but still sold more than four million copies. (Birkin insists the “petites morts” were completely faux.) Salaciousness and humor are hallmarks of both albums. Songs on “Jane Birkin/Serge Gainsbourg” like “Le Canari Est Sur Le Balcon” (a suicide note asking that the canary on the balcony not be forgotten), “Les Sucettes” (in which the protagonist enjoys sucking lollipops a bit too much) or “69 Anée Érotique” (in which the couple’s relationship is linked to that specially numbered year) are not exactly the stuff of Aznavour or Brel. “Di Doo Dah” is more musically constrained with Jean-Claude Vanniers’s lush string arrangements, but the lyrics are just as ribald. Here Birkin chirps about androgyny, getting picked up by a burly truck driver and an obsession with blowing up condoms.