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Lou Doillon interview: ‘Hearing my mum, Jane Birkin, fake an orgasm felt wrong’
As Jane Birkin’s daughter, the singer Lou Doillon never got to be a blank canvas, she tells Neil McCormick
It’s nice to be in London, where no one knows who I am, or cares,” says Lou Doillon, talking perfect English with an odd accent. The 36-year-old singer-songwriter, actress and model cuts a striking figure, smoking an American Spirit cigarette in front of a King’s Cross hotel. Tall, slender, hair a gloriously tangled mess, dressed in shiny PVC trousers and bright blue jumper as if she had been rummaging in a punk jumble sale, she is the youngest daughter of the actress Jane Birkin by her third husband, French film director Jaques Doillon.
Charlotte Gainsbourg is her half-sister. All three women – Doillon, Birkin and Gainsbourg – were on the cover of French Vogue in December, billed as “Le Clan Birkin”.
“When I meet people in France, I can see in their eyes, they have a very clear idea who I am. Which is funny, because I really have no idea myself!” Doillon laughs, adding a lightness to remarks that might otherwise sound pretentious. “There is something terrifying in the ideas people form because they have seen you in a gossip magazine.”
Doillon is about to release her third album, Soliloquy. It shifts her haunted, folky style into a gritty framework of dirty beats and slinky guitar figures, delivered in her husky voice. “Because I write on acoustic guitar, I think people treat me as something a bit fragile,” she notes. “I’m all right with being roughed up! So I went into the studio with an electric guitar. My producers were horrified. And I thought, there, the fun begins!”
Doillon started acting at 15 but never felt the same calling as her more famous sister. “It’s a strange thing to embody other people’s words, other people’s emotions, wear other people’s clothes,” she says. “To be an actress, you have to be a blank canvas, and clearly I wasn’t blank enough. I started writing songs to have one place that is absolutely mine, to say what I want to say.”
She acknowledges the privilege of her upbringing, but says she “didn’t really understand the fame aspect; that is the least fun side. People think of jet planes and parties but my family were always much funnier and wilder than that. My mum was curious about absolutely everything. I never saw isolated, bored, multi-millionaire stardom. Everyone was constantly making stuff, collaborating with wonderful people.”
She recalls being baffled when people would describe her mother as a style icon. “I’d think ‘What the hell are they talking about?’ She was always in the kitchen in jeans and T-shirts. Before I discovered the internet, I’d never seen my mum in a short dress.”
She has childhood memories of her mother’s second husband, the controversial songwriter Serge Gainsbourg, but wasn’t aware of his music. (She was only eight when he died in 1991; her own parents separated soon after). She only discovered Gainsbourg and Birkin’s erotic 1968 single Je t’aime… mois non plus in her teens.
“I was very embarrassed. I used to hear it when I was in the supermarket and I hated it. You are always human, and to listen to your mum simulate orgasm is just wrong.” She laughs. “I know it’s a great song but it’s just not for me.”
Although she has won awards and had two successful albums in France, Doillon writes and sings in English. “I think it is true of people with bi-nationalities, that you are not the same person in different languages. I’ve got a dreadful politeness in French. We don’t talk about what is intimate. English is a language of feelings.” She identifies differences in the way music was played by different branches of her family. “In France, music seemed very intellectual. There was a lot of suffering involved, in a very French way. In England, it was grab a guitar and join in.”
Anno Birkin, her cousin, was a gifted poet and musician, who died, along with his bandmates in Kicks Joy Darkness, in a car crash in 2001, aged 20. “Anno was very inspiring, with such a dramatic end. I think all my cousins have a very passionate relationship with music, thanks to him.”
Her half-sister, the fashion photographer Kate Barry (Birkin’s eldest daughter by her first husband, the film composer John Barry) also died young, in a suspected suicide in 2013. She inspired one of the album’s high points, a song called Nothing, with a lyric worthy of Leonard Cohen.
“I had to talk in church when my sister died and I realised as soon as I put a word on her, it wasn’t her,” says Doillon. “It was everything before that word or after that word. It was to do with missing her and realising it is not the climaxes we miss, everything lies in the nothings in-between. I can’t say it better.”
Doillon has many tattoos, including a rather strange chicken bone on her left forearm. “Kate was a very poetic person and when she passed away, I discovered in the house that she had kept every wishbone but never took the wish. That was so strange and beautiful and kind of heartbreaking.” Her tattoo, she says “is there awaiting a wish.” On the other arm, she has the name of her 17-year-old son, Marlowe (from a short-lived relationship). He was named “in honour of Christopher Marlowe, which people only get in England. In America, they think of the detective. In France, they think I have misspelled Marlon Brando.”
Doillon is a striking lyricist and it is not hard to see why. Her conversation is peppered with astute references to writers, artists and philosophers, from Proust to Dorothy Parker, Egon Schiele to Gilles Deleuze.
If there is a theme to the songs on Soliloquy, it may be “recognising and breaking cycles, especially my own.” The title track wrestles bravely with demons of low self-esteem, while the closing track, Snowed In, sympathetically observes a loved one’s depression.
“There’s periods in time that seem to be a great sieve. Going from teenager to adult, I saw a third of friends make it, a third die from stupid things, overdoses to car crashes, and one third become the opposite of what they had been, in a way,” says Doillon. “And now, approaching my 40s, I feel I am next to the second sieve machine. I’ve got sadly many friends where you can feel some closing down, not going out of their houses, whether that house is spiritual or physical, and you want to open the door and say, ‘please live’.”
Doillon is an immensely engaging character, smart, funny, soulful. She describes herself as “a squirrel” with “a foot on many different branches. For musicians, I’m an actress. For theatre people, I’m a model. For models, I’m just a dilettante. This is the story of my life. For the French, I’m English. For the English, I’m French. It’s a great place to write from, because I am never part of the club.”
Soliloquy is released by Blue Wrasse on March 1