Excerpt from an article by Andrew Birkin on his sister Jane Birkin and Serge Gainsbourg
“For my part, it was love at first sight. Serge was so utterly different from anyone I had ever met: shy and flamboyant by turns, with a boy-like lust for fun and a scabrous sense of humor.
“ On the surface we were polar opposites: I was a deeply antisocial socialist, whereas Serge was a gregarious capitalist – or so he seemed. But alone with him, I caught my first real glimpse of his Russian melancholy and essential loneliness, despite his surface gaiety. As Jane later wrote to me, 'Serge has no friends. All the names in his fat address book are business relations or past mistresses – but not one real friend.’
...
After a month in Gacko, Serge suggested we drive to Dubrovnik for the weekend. He booked us into a romantic hotel overlooking the harbour, then we went shopping and bought an enormous toy train set, which we soon had running between our two bedrooms. When Serge wasn’t shooting, he worked on his Melody Nelson album, which turned out to be a triumph, a symphonic poem that I thought the most wonderful thing I had ever heard. Melody seemed to epitomise the two sides to Serge’s Jekyll and Hyde personality – the cynic and the romantic, in constant oscillation with one another, but never a tepid compromise between the two...
Playboy was not a magazine I regularly indulged in, but faced with a fortnight’s stint on location in Germany, I equipped myself with a copy. In addition to the fleeting distractions of Miss June, it contained a long interview with a man I had never heard of – Albert Speer, Hitler’s architect and armaments minister. By the time we reached Berlin, I knew what my next project had to be. As it happened, David Puttnam had read the same interview and felt exactly as I did. Six weeks later we were cruising down an autobahn to meet Speer in his Heidelberg eyrie, liberated after 20 years in Spandau and now enjoying the fruits of fame derived from his autobiography, Inside the Third Reich. We found him to be in fine fettle, exuding the same insidious charm he cast on Hitler, the Playboy interviewer – and us. When we left next day Speer blushingly asked if Jane and Serge would sign a copy of Je t’aime for him. Later I popped the question to Jane, who thought it a tad tactless to ask Serge, given his Jewish pedigree, but in the event he was only too happy to sign, doubtless relishing the irony. A couple of years later Serge made his album Rock Around the Bunker and gave me a copy to send to Speer.
...
One evening I played a new LP of Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov, extolling the virtues of digital recording. Serge was less than impressed and asked whether I had ever heard Feodor Chaliapin, the Russian bass. The next day he tracked down a copy of Chaliapin singing Boris in 1921. Despite the hiss and crackle of antiquity, Chaliapin’s voice resonated with an emotion entirely absent in the pristine digital recording. Later, and a little drunk, Serge listened again to Chaliapin on headphones, his face racked with sublime suffering. It is an image that has survived in my memory more clearly than any photograph.
Citation: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/starsandstories/10324114/Jane-Birkins-love-affair-with-Serge-Gainsbourg.html
