In an interview with theipaper last year, Jane Birkin talked about her complicated relationship with her mother – and the echoes in her bonds with her own children
it is at its finest. Collaborating with Étienne Daho and Jean-Louis Pierot, she found a way to write and sing some of the most personal songs of her career, filling them with wit and pain and beauty. “Funnily enough singing in English, one’s so at ease,” she says. “It’s so lovely when it’s your own words.”
We are talking about her music, the pleasure of working with Daho and Pierot, the wretchedness of Brexit and Marine Le Pen, but her conversation veers to family, and particularly to her daughters Charlotte Gainsbourg , Lou Doillon , and Kate Barry .She talks as if she is still unravelling her relationship with her daughters,, and sometimes finding the most sense through the songs she has written and recorded for them.
In 2013, Kate, a photographer, died aged 46 after falling from her fourth floor apartment in Paris. Her loss is a subject Birkin addresses on, most particularly in the tracks “Cigarettes” and “Ces murs epais”. She says: “I couldn’t make such a personal album without talking about Kate. I had to do Kate first. Because it was the most important thing that had happened to me or to Charlotte or to Lou in our existence really. And for Roman, her son.
She visits Kate’s grave every two weeks. “I don’t stay long. Can’t wait to get away. In fact it doesn’t bear thinking of, actually. It’s surreal to think that somebody, and their body, is underneath.” She regrets not having her cremated. “It’s a far better way to go off in a puff of smoke like that, than to have the whole idea of being in a box,” she says. “So I move off quite fast, and that’s OK too.
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