1969 Serge Gainsbourg And Jane Birkin: Je T'aime... Moi Non Plus

Us Brits have always liked a bit of sauce. In the dark, pre-internet days we had to get it where we could and the late sixties/early seventies were a fertile breeding ground for it to crop up in all manner of places. Hammer quickly realised that a flash of flesh from Ingrid Pitt or Kate O'Mara in their films would attract jaded punters perhaps not usually interested in the antics of vampires and such while elsewhere, the 'Carry On' series made a selling point of Barbara Windsor and her catapulting bra. For the ladies, the sight of Robin Askwith's ever pneumatic arse in the 'Confessions' films provided treats galore. All good clean fun.

Not smut mind. We Brits have never cared for smut. Not in public anyway. Sid James yakking over Bab's Windsor's bare backside was one thing, Maria Schneider's dairy based anal lube was quite another. No good clean fun there. And it took a landmark sixties court case to decide that "Nay nay! Fuck's only what you do. animals fuck. But cunt's a lot more than that. It's thee, dost see: an' tha'rt a lot besides an animal, aren't ter? - even ter fuck? Cunt! Eh, that's the beauty o' thee, lass!" was actually artistic and not obscene smut out to degrade all who read it.*

Which brings me nicely to 'Je t'aime... moi non plus', a song that to the powers that be fell on the wrong side of that sauce/smut highwire to become the UK's first banned number one. Yes, it was banned in a typical British knee jerk reaction to being faced with something different and a bit off colour (foreign too, and you know what they're like). Because it's fair to say that to date, there hadn't been anything quite like 'Je t'aime... moi non plus' in the charts before.

Music from the continent was no stranger to our shores, and the annual Eurovision Song Contest made sure that Europop had its fans, but that genre was basically our own Britpop (sorry, bit early for that I know), albeit with the substance removed and replaced by air to make it bounce harder. Cheerful yet disposable, it never found a willing wider audience in a country notoriously xenophobic to anything not sung in its own mother tongue. Whatever else 'Je t'aime... moi non plus' was, it wasn't Europop.

Writer Serge Gainsbourg was as French/Euro as the Eiffel Tower, but his song of love replaces the usually jolly oompah sound and fixed grin with an eyes half closed clipped bass and red light lit organ coo that personifies a stereotypical soundtrack to those smutty (not saucy) Continental films where girls of loose morals struggled to keep their drawers on. It sounds like smut all by itself, the high class muzak equivalent of David Rose's 'The Stripper', yet eyebrows would have been raised further by the sound of British born Birkin groaning in the throes of orgasm over the top of it.

And yet Gainsbourg's song was not intended to be a titillating seven inches of porn for the raincoat brigade; he himself claimed it was 'about' the impossibly of physical love, but whether you swallow that or not, there's a definite irony in the title's "I love you - me neither" that's lost both in translation and the heavy handed sounds of the boudoir that the song conjures up. Heavy handed, now that's a key phrase and one that sums up why I've never been all that fussed on this.

In 'Je t'aime... moi non plus' I can hear neither sauce nor smut, but neither can I hear the lofty ideals Serge was allegedly aiming for. The porn film (let's be honest) music sets a nice scene for Birkin's faux orgasmic gasps, but they ring with all the genuiness of a mid-price hooker with one eye on the clock and taken together they render the song into overcooked stodge, more Reader's Wives than Playboy. Serge himself sounds too wry and arch for the scenario he's found himself in, and though his remove may go someway to emphasise the point he was trying to make, non Francophiles have to take it on face value and on that level it's laboured and irritating. But still, good clean fun eh?


* From DH Lawrence's 'Lady Chatterley's Love', first published 1928 but not legally in the UK until 1960.