Dominique A, Arthur H, Mickey 3D, Vanessa Paradis… around twenty artists at the Olympia to say goodbye to Jane Birkin

This show “Jane Birkin by friends”, performed for the benefit of Restos du coeur, is based on an elegant casting made up of “friends, close friends, artists with whom she collaborated or whom she loved”, according to Jean-Louis Piérot, musical director of the event.

Fanny Ardant, Beth Gibbons (Portishead) and her daughters Lou Doillon and Charlotte Gainsbourg: a tribute concert brings together around twenty artists on Saturday at the Olympia in Paris, to say goodbye on stage to Jane Birkin, who died in the summer 2023, at age 76.

This show “Jane Birkin by friends”performed for the benefit of Restos du coeur, is based on an elegant casting composed “of friends, of intimates, of artists”. Jean-Louis Piérot, a multi-talented artist, had, in tandem with his accomplice Etienne Daho, tailor-made the latest album, Oh ! Sorry you were sleeping… (2020), from the French’s favorite Englishwoman.

“She absolutely wanted it”

This is the concert created to defend this record on stage, a show which also includes classics like Chic underwear, which is repeated at the Olympia. That is to say around twenty titles and as many performers, including, in addition to those already mentioned, Dominique A, Carla Bruni, Jarvis Cocker, Marion Cotillard, Thomas Dutronc, Arthur H, Keren Ann, Sandrine Kiberlain, M, Abd Al Malik, Mickey 3D, Miossec, Vanessa Paradis, Eddy de Pretto and Catherine Ringer. Various health problems had thwarted the tour of Jane Birkin, who, each time she felt better, had asked her historic manager Olivier Gluzman to find her a new date for the Olympia. “She absolutely insisted on it and, after her funeral, we said to ourselves with Olivier and Étienne that we were going to do at the Olympia, strictly, the concert that we were supposed to do there with Jane,” continues Jean-Louis Piérot.

“Unlike the usual tributes, the guest artists will have to follow in Jane’s footsteps on stage, for a show made with the same musicians and the same arrangements as those planned for her”

Jean-Louis Piérot, musical director

to AFP

“We, her musicians, are all very apprehensive. Emotionally, moments may be difficult, but this concert will allow us to mourn Jane’s musical mourning,” concludes Jean-Louis Piérot.

Dominic A had written the song for Jane Birkin Where is the city? on the album Fiction (2006), where we also found the Englishwoman Beth Gibbons, voice of Portishead, behind the title My Secret. At the Olympia he will sing one of the poignant titles of Oh ! Sorry you were sleeping…. in which Jane Birkin addressed the death of her daughter Kate, These thick walls. “Oh! Sorry, you were sleeping…, it’s a bit of a family portrait, a cathartic album”, summarizes Dominique A, seduced by the song of Jane Birkin, “became more and more inhabited over the years”.

“Jane had this ability to transmit an emotion, an experience. You can feel the life passing through her voice,”

Dominique A, author-performer

to AFP

“Oh! Sorry you were sleeping…, this record is so personal”, confided Jane Birkin to AFP at the time of its release. “As Serge (Gainsbourg) said, when it’s ‘banal blue’, everything is smooth, sublime, we are not tempted to write. When there is separation, injury, then we see clouds like William Turner arriving”, she added. Quoting one of the men of his life and an English impressionist, in whom, both, light coexisted with a dark side.