Jane Birkin is the voice of one of the most famous female orgasms in history, moaning breathily on the 1969 hit “Je T’Aime … Moi Non Plus” with her lover, the notorious French singer Serge Gainsbourg. It outraged the Pope, was banned by the BBC and, inevitably, went to No 1. But scientists said recently that the “copulatory vocalization” that Birkin had unwittingly influenced generations of women to emulate didn’t necessarily correlate with female pleasure.
“I heard that,” Birkin, 75, says in her Pathé-newsreel-meets-Paris tones. “All I can say is at the very beginning with Serge we’d be in sort of prostitute hotels and people were afraid I was being murdered. We had very worried proprietaires knocking on the doors saying, ‘Get the little one out!’ — they thought I was under-age, because I was making so much noise. I remember saying, ‘We’re probably the only people in this brothel who actually love each other.’ So we were chucked out and went to make as much noise as we wanted in our chic hotel in the Sixth Arrondissement.”
