It is that buoyant season in New York, between Thanksgiving and the new year, when every tree and building sparkles with fairy lights. (awkward since this was published today) Outside it is a frosty 2 degrees but inside the velvety Town Hall theatre, there is a cosy murmur of transatlantic accents. Behind me, actor Isabella Rossellini is carrying on an animated conversation in French and to my right, a row of young British expats discuss the merits of ye-ye music as they slide out of their coats.
The eclectic audience is here to see Jane Birkin: the toast of 1970s Paris, lover and muse of singer-songwriter Serge Gainsbourg and mother to his daughter, Charlotte. It is the final night of Birkin's US tour, called Serge Gainsbourg and Jane via Japan. Tomorrow she will return to Paris - her home for the past 40 years - to enjoy the holidays with her three adult daughters and their children, before resuming the tour in the new year.
As the band plays the primal opening beats of Requiem pour un Con, a spotlight falls on Birkin: tousled hair, crisp white shirt, vintage YSL ''smoking'' trousers and suede men's brogues, a ghost of Gainsbourg himself. Then there is that voice: a compelling mixture of frailty and determination, gaiety and sincerity.
Birkin, now 65, is probably best known for her heavy breathing duet Je T'aime … Moi Non Plus, recorded in 1969 with Gainsbourg, when she was 22 years old. The hit song - banned by the BBC and condemned by the Vatican - had originally been written for Brigitte Bardot two years earlier. ''People remember it as if it was yesterday, so I can't curse that song because it's the reason I'm going to Australia, because people sort of remember who you were,'' Birkin says. ''They're wondering what you're going to come up with this time and what you look like.''
In spite of her tender years, the controversial hit song was not the first big adventure of Birkin's young life. She married at 17, had a child at 19, appeared in Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow-Up at 20 and relocated to Paris from England two years later to star in Slogan opposite the 40-year-old Gainsbourg, with whom she fell in love on the rebound from her marriage to composer John Barry.
''[Serge] was terribly romantic, the way Slavs are,'' she says. ''He cried an awful lot and then suddenly he was like a teenager, boasting; and then buying a Rolls-Royce, and then using it as an ashtray because actually he couldn't give a f--- and he hadn't got his driving licence.'' By every account, their 13 years together were heady - lots of drinking and staying out until dawn. She once jumped into the Seine by way of apology for humiliating him in public. And she posed nude - a lot - including the oft-referenced image of her chained to a heater wearing suspenders. It was an extraordinary emancipation from her respectable English upbringing.
''I don't think I would ever have had the career I've had [staying in England],'' she says. ''I had such a famous, beautiful mother and I had such a hero father that I would never have dared to do all the things I did with Serge, for a start.'' Birkin's mother was stage actor Judy Campbell - Noel Coward's muse. Her distinguished father, David Birkin, was a lieutenant-commander in the British Royal Navy and a decorated war hero.
The early risque behaviour never inhibited a very accomplished career encompassing a vast range of acting roles in film and theatre, forays into directing, more than 20 albums and a slew of collaborations with other musical artists including Beck, Feist, Franz Ferdinand, Bryan Ferry, Beth Gibbons and Rufus Wainwright. And, yes, there is a luxury Hermes handbag named for her.
The love affair with Gainsbourg ended in 1980, when she took up with film director Jacques Doillon, but the friendship persisted to the end of Gainsbourg's life. He even insisted on the role of ''Papa Deux'' to Lou, Birkin's daughter with Doillon.
Many, including Birkin, believe Gainsbourg wrote his best songs for her after their relationship ended. ''There's one that I sing right at the beginning [of the show], which is En rire de peur d'etre obligé´e d'en pleurer, which means 'I better laugh for fear of crying'; about separation,'' she says. ''All of the beautiful ones I sing were because of our separation.''
''My brother [screenwriter Andrew Birkin] always thought Serge should come out with a whopping great book just of his lyrics, translated by a university word-for-word and also by another poet, so they would get the gist in two ways,'' she says. ''He's the most important writer in France since Apollinaire, I think. Or maybe Celine or Proust - you know, actually changing the language.''
Birkin's daughter, Charlotte, an accomplished singer and actor in her own right, spent years campaigning for her father's home to be turned into a museum. In a 2007 Vanity Fair article, ''The Secret World of Serge Gainsbourg'', writer Lisa Robinson describes a tour of the house with Charlotte - 16 years after her father's death - and that each thing was ''in precisely the place that Serge put it''.
Did the museum ever eventuate? ''[Charlotte] decided to keep it for herself,'' Birkin says. ''She wanted to keep a bit of him just for her and she had the boldness to say so.''
All this fidelity to Gainsbourg can take its toll creatively, however, and Birkin found herself, 20 years after his death, looking for a way to give his songs a fresh interpretation.
A humanitarian trip to Japan after last year's earthquake and tsunami proved inspirational. She met a group of Japanese musicians, including the pianist Nobyuki ''Nobu'' Nakajima.
''It was Thursday and I could be there by Sunday and I didn't care about fallout and radiation and things like that - I'm old enough not to have to worry,'' she says.
''I just wanted to be with them because there's nothing like being with somebody.'' If Nobu were to do new orchestrations of Gainsbourg's songs and tour with her, she reasoned, people would be reminded of Japan's need for assistance. ''That's not a bad thing because in the news everyone forgets everything the following day,'' she says. ''I mean, I exaggerate - but the following week.''
Birkin is accustomed to lending her voice to causes. Throughout the years, she has used her celebrity to raise awareness of AIDS research, the detention of Aung San Suu Kyi and conflicts in Palestine, Vietnam, Iraq and Chechnya. Almost as impulsively as her trip to Japan, she headed into the Bosnian war zone in 1994.
''I have the good fortune to know someone who knew the man who could get you into a tank, so you could actually get on the spot and be with the girls in the cellar and sing a song and say, 'The others are thinking about you,''' she says. ''And suddenly I felt like my father, going backwards and forwards during the [Second World] War on nights with no moon to pick people up from the French coast and drop off others.''
The intrepid humanitarianism must be a family trait. Birkin's mother, at 85, flew to New York after the World Trade Centre attacks in 2001 to perform A Nightingale Sang in Berkley Square at the Town Hall theatre. ''It was very touching that I was singing in the exact same place that my mother sang for 9/11.''
Gainsbourg, she says, used to accuse her of being ''terribly pretentious'' when she would return home in tears, having failed to convince a taxi driver of the injustice of the death penalty.
''He'd say, 'Do you mean to say you thought that on a 15-franc journey you could persuade a man of a lifetime's conviction?'''
His opinions are, evidently, a constant touchstone as if 20 years had not gone by. Although she is now only three years older than Gainsbourg was when he died, Birkin regards him as forever young.
''Like that wonderful thing, 'They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old','' she says, quoting Binyon's For the Fallen. ''He won't; he will be an eternal adolescent.''
It is some consolation for a loss still felt keenly.
''I just know him as Serge,'' she says wistfully. ''I wish I could just ring him up and we could talk like old chums and it would be lovely.''
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