How Serge Gainsbourg’s Je t’aime whipped up a scandal
Banned by the BBC and condemned by the Vatican, the song sold millions of copies — and spawned many suggestive spoofs
By the time Brigitte Bardot began dating Serge Gainsbourg, the 34-year-old movie siren had grown cynical of conventional romance. Her third husband, millionaire playboy Gunter Sachs, had showered her home with hundreds of roses from his helicopter before they married in 1966. But by 1967 he was cheating. Gainsbourg, the 39-year-old composer who joked he had a “head like a cabbage”, developed an obsession with “BB”. He signed her to the record label on which he pumped out perky pop hits and took her out after the pair had appeared on a TV show together.
Alas a combination of awe and booze caused Gainsbourg’s celebrated wit and charm to desert him and he staggered home believing he’d blown it. But the next day Bardot called offering him a second chance, on condition that he write her “the most beautiful love song he could imagine”. Ever excessive, he wrote two: “Bonnie and Clyde” and “Je t’aime . . . moi non plus”.
Although “Je t’aime”’s sweet, swirling organ melody (which echoed that summer’s big hit, Procol Harum’s “A Whiter Shade of Pale”) met Bardot’s demand for beauty, the lyrics must have given her pause. The drunken provocateur who’d just fluffed their date was asking her to sigh that she loved him while he would reply, deadpan: “Me neither”. Gainsbourg’s love of rhyme also led him to locate the act of love “between your kidneys”: “Je vais et je viens/ Entre tes reins.”
But Gainsbourg’s musings on the hopelessness of love struck a chord with the restless and troubled Bardot. They became lovers and met in Paris that winter to squeeze into an increasingly steamy booth and record “Je t’aime”.
The French press got wind of the recording and whipped up a scandal, suggesting the couple had had sex while making it. Bardot fretted that the bad publicity would damage her career and persuaded Gainsbourg to shelve the recording. He was frustrated. “The music is very pure,” he said. “For the first time in my life I write a love song, and what happens? They take it the wrong way.”
He approached other women, including Marianne Faithfull, to take Bardot’s part but in 1968 convinced his new girlfriend, English actress Jane Birkin, to do the heavy breathing. Gainsbourg laughed off further rumours of audio vérité: “Thank goodness it wasn’t, otherwise I hope it would have been a long-playing record.”
Despite being banned by the BBC and condemned by the Vatican, the song shifted millions around the world and shot to number one in the UK where its lyrical subtleties were lost in translation; it became a straightforward disco snogging song. That Christmas, Birkin played the rest of the couple’s debut album to her family, but decided to spare them her orgasmic groans. Meanwhile Birkin’s brother, Andrew, later said that the former Nazi armaments minister Albert Speer had asked him for a signed copy of the record, an irony which delighted the Jewish Gainsbourg.
A slew of suggestive spoofs followed from comics including Frankie Howerd, June Whitfield and a version packed with “Gud moaning” from the cast of the British sitcom ’Allo ’Allo, set in Nazi-occupied Paris.
The song’s breathy sensuality helped inspire Donna Summer and Giorgio Moroder’s pulsating disco sound and they covered it together, with added sax appeal, in 1978. Artist Sam Taylor-Wood swapped the word “kidneys” for “thighs” in an English-language version with the Pet Shop Boys (1998) that cleverly evoked the digital despair of internet porn. Cat Power and Karen Elson swung it smartly Sapphic in 2008 while Madonna gave it a melodramatic S&M twist on her 2012 MDMA tour. Birkin references it on Birkin/Gainsbourg: le Symphonique, a Serge Gainsbourg cover album, which she released this March.
Bardot finally released the original in 1986 to raise funds for her animal charities. “I gave my beauty and youth to men,” she said. “Now I am giving my wisdom and experience — the best of me — to animals.” At the end of her affair with Gainsbourg, while he filled her suitcase with love letters, Bardot pierced the skin of her right index finger and wrote “I love you” in blood. He did the same and wrote “Me neither”.