HOWZAT

Coming to London was, she admits, the most terrifying journey of all. “It was the country I was most fearful of. I was not sure that Arab music was part of their culture. And how could they know how odd it was to be playing things that are so well known in France to an audience that had barely heard them? To me, it’s like doing Beatles songs to Arab music. In France, Serge’s stuff is as well known as that. If I miss out a word, the audience sing it for me. When I sing La Javanaise at the end, they all stand up and join in.”

She needn’t have worried — her recent appearances in London won over critics, and audiences, with what one reviewer described as “a breathy vulnerability as endearing as her artless stage presence”. Another struggled to sum up exactly why he was entranced by Birkin.

“Judged by normal standards, the Left Bank’s favourite Englishwoman would never make it past the first audition of whatever the French call their equivalent of Pop Idol. Her pitch wanders alarmingly, her breath control is often non-existent and in moments of grand passion she can sound like a bird with a broken wing. At the close, when she sang the timeless La Javanaise without accompaniment, the flaws were there. Not that we minded.” He and the rest of the audience were, he concluded, completely seduced.

As the self-appointed guardian of Gainsbourg’s legacy, Birkin delights in every sign that his work is taken seriously. For years, she says, she longed to come to the Edinburgh Festival. Then, six years ago, when she was invited to the opening of the Fringe’s first Gainsbourg evening, she had to decline.

“My daughter Charlotte (the film actress) was having Ben, Serge’s grandchild, so I had to be with her,” she says with a rare flourish of Gallic drama. “But every year since, they’ve done something on Serge, for which I’m forever grateful. I feel he’s been appreciated in Scotland for at least six years. The English are just waking up.”

She is also enchanted that the magazine Dazed and Confused included Gainsbourg in its 100 best songs of the last century. “Serge is there and it’s not with Je t’aime, it’s with Melody Nelson (the title track of his 1970s concept album that bombed at the time and is now considered his forgotten masterpiece).

“That’s what Beck put onto his record, that’s what all the others have been influenced by, that’s what Madonna talks about. I tell the French about this at every concert and I feel I don’t have to explain him any more really to the English. Which is nice.”

Working with Benyelles has, she says, helped everyone, including herself, to re-evaluate Gainsbourg’s work. “I think people listen to the words even more because they’re in such a different atmosphere. Even I listen to them more. Love of the dead, Amour des Feintes, which he wrote just before dying, takes on quite a different proportion. It’s a bit like talking poetry with music, except that I sing the poetry.”

Not that her ambassadorial work is over yet. The Americans have a way to go before they appreciate the full extent of the Birkin-Gainsbourg oeuvre. “I’m going to New York as part of this tour,” she says. “And when people heard that Jane Birkin is going to give a concert, and they said what, the lady with the bag?”

Jane Birkin performs Arabesque — The Songs of Serge Gainsbourg at the Usher Hall, May 17 (0131 228 1155)

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