Jane Birkin Jane

Jane Mallory Birkin, OBE was an English actress, singer, songwriter, and model. She attained international fame and notability for her decade-long musical and romantic partnership with Serge Gainsbourg. She also had a prolific career as an actress in British and French cinema.

Jane Mallory Birkin, OBE was an English actress, singer, songwriter, and model. She attained international fame and notability for her decade-long musical and romantic partnership with Serge Gainsbourg. She also had a prolific career as an actress in British and French cinema.

Jane Mallory Birkin, OBE was an English actress, singer, songwriter, and model. She attained international fame and notability for her decade-long musical and romantic partnership with Serge Gainsbourg. She also had a prolific career as an actress in British and French cinema.

Created by bringing together Étienne Daho, Jean-Louis Piérot and Jane Birkin, Oh Pardon tu dormais is her most intimate album so far. “ Étienne helped me release a past pain, which saved me from melancholy and inertia. We gave each other everything, we took everything from each other and I’m still stunned by how the 3 of us worked together. We are this album’s parents… and this moves me” said Jane Birkin, who speaks for the first time about the death of her daughter Kate, the absence, love anxiety, ghosts from the past…

While cynics have put Jane Birkin's motivations for this concert recording in question, their suspicions say more about them than about this music. Arabesque, which is finally available in America, is singer and actress Birkin's tribute to the music of the late Serge Gainsbourg, her mentor, late (and ex) husband, and producer. Recorded in March 2002 at the Olympia Theater in Paris, Arabesque puts the music of Gainsbourg, one of France's most unlikely and beloved national heroes, into an altogether different context.

Following on from the world music stylings of 2002's remarkable Arabesque album, but dispensing with that album's reliance on Serge Gainsbourg compositions, 2004's Rendez-Vous is Jane Birkin's most wide-open album in years, a joyous romp whose only downfall is, contrarily, the very factor that brought it so much attention. A collection of duets, Rendez-Vous pairs Birkin with singers as far-flung as Etienne Daho and Bryan Ferry, Françoise Hardy and Beth Gibbons, and the success rate is thrown as far across the spectrum as the guests.