SOUND AND FURY

In my latest album, Enfants d’Hiver, I’ve laid myself absolutely naked. It’s the frankest thing I’ve done. I just sat down at my kitchen table and spent six days writing down every passion and fury I could feel.

If you read the lyrics, everything is there: the sadness of love affairs ending, the desire of wanting to be loved again and an overwhelming nostalgia for my childhood and our idyllic family holidays on the Isle of Wight.

Writing the album was wonderful but bringing it out has been terrifying. I’ve been at home in Paris this past week promoting it – three radio interviews this morning, a television show this afternoon; non-stop. And at the same time everyone wants to talk to me about my late husband, Serge Gainsbourg, because there’s a huge exhibition about him at the Cité de la Musique.

TIME TO GET AWAY

I would never compare myself to him but I know that when I do concerts, people don’t just come for me. They come because they remember us singing Je t’aime . . . Moi Non Plus – and I owe all that to him. Other people can’t separate me from him but I can, because in the end I lived without him and had a daughter and another life. It was my good luck that he stayed a faithful friend until he died.

I gave the curators of the exhibition all my private letters, but they didn’t want them. They didn’t want anything intimate; they just wanted to concentrate on Serge’s work. I was glad, because they’re recognising that he was one of France’s greatest writers.

People are queuing for two hours to get into the exhibition, hoping for one last glance of him; and this month his face is on the cover of five French magazines. It’s as if he were alive again. It’s all become too much. They’re making a film about him and looking for someone to play me; and someone’s writing a book about me, which I can’t do a thing about.

Taxi drivers turn round and hold my hand and say, “God, I miss him.” Maybe I should buy a car and write on it, “I miss him, too.”

My association with him is rather like having lived with Baudelaire. I don’t feel it’s time to move on – I wouldn’t want to. But it’s time to move out of France for a year or so. I just can’t take any more questions. For most of next year I’ll be touring, so I’ll be in hotel rooms away from it all. I’d like to spend some time in England, too, but I always avoid Chelsea where my parents lived. It’s as if there are bodies there, laid out in chalk. I would go back only if I could see my mother in the doorway again and hold my father’s hand. They gave me such a blissful childhood.

When we were on the Isle of Wight we were allowed to be wild, like savages. We’d go down to the beach on our bicycles at 6am and nobody minded if we didn’t come back until it was dark.

It was wonderful; nothing was ever as good until I had children of my own. One of the biggest joys in my life now is taking my grandchildren and the bulldog to Brittany for the weekend.

SPLENDID WITHOUT SPECS

People ask me if I feel more English or more French but I couldn’t care less. I suppose when I’m in France I try to be English; and when I’m in England I try to be French. I can feel at home anywhere – it’s something I’ve inherited from my parents.

Maybe it’s an English thing but I spend as little time as possible on my appearance. I’ve never washed my hair much and now I’ve cut it as short as a boy’s so I needn’t do anything with it at all.

The only thing I take care of is my diet. At the moment I’ve been told to eat black bread and olive oil and to drink green tea.

When I see myself in the mirror I think I look splendid – until I put my specs on. Then all the ravages of time appear.

FAITHFULL FRIEND

I avoid loneliness by being jolly careful not to be alone. Last night I was doing a radio show until 10pm, then I had dinner with Marianne Faithfull, who was with someone who had known Kafka.

And then tomorrow I’m going on a march for Aung San Suu Kyi. There’s a petition on my website demanding her release. I’m as much an activist as a singer.

My mother had a great intellectual range and curiosity and I’ve always strived to live up to it, to be more like her. It’s one of the things that has guided me. I have regrets but I don’t think it’s worth looking back. My greatest chance in life was never to have had much going for me. If I’d had amazing beauty and talent I wouldn’t have tried.

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