Lou Doillon on family, Je TAime... and personal tragedy

Maman is ‘mad’ and sang the raunchiest song of all time. Her ‘papa deux’ was Serge Gainsbourg. So, Lou Doillon tells Event, of course I was born to sing

‘I’ve had my share of pain but I can’t just lie down and cry. Every moment of pain takes me closer to who I am. We all experience life and death – the rest is a show for when the reality of life is too hard,' said Lou Doillon

In the Palm Court of London’s Langham Hotel, the French singer Lou Doillon is mulling over the sauciest, and arguably most controversial, song ever committed to vinyl, Je T’Aime ... Moi Non Plus.

Her thoughts on the subject are significant, as it was Doillon’s mother who was responsible for the majority of the ecstatic groaning on the 1969 single, recorded, incidentally, just a negligée’s-throw from where the 33-year-old chanteuse now sits.

‘My mother was and still is an exceptionally brave woman,’ she says of the English singer, actress and activist Jane Birkin OBE, after whom the iconic Hermès handbag was named.

‘I wasn’t interested so much in what she was singing in Je T’Aime… as the response it got from people. They were absolutely fascinated.

‘My mum is mad but in the best way,’ she smiles, toothily looking eerily like Birkin. 

‘She is graceful in everything that she does – it’s a way of being for her. Unfortunately, I didn’t get that gene.’

That doesn’t appear to be the case this afternoon, as Doillon saunters through the lobby, all tousled tresses and bohemian chic. 

A former Pirelli calendar model and the face of Chloé and Givenchy, she is strikingly attractive and as cool as a Gauloises. 

A young Lou Doillon with Jane Birkin, left, Serge Gainsbourg and their daughter Charlotte in 1985. ‘My memory of Serge was mostly of having great fun. He was very light and funny in person,' she said

The piano player all but stops as this willowy mademoiselle winds her way through the tea room to settle, almost regally, at a discreet banquette.

Descended from one of France’s most famous artistic dynasties, Doillon’s pedigree is parfait.

The daughter of Birkin and film director Jacques Doillon, the model/actress turned singer/songwriter is fast becoming a name in her own right.

Yet her seemingly charmed life has seen death, depression and anguish, a libertine upbringing having left its scars. 

She is the half-sister of actress Charlotte Gainsbourg, whose father, Serge, remains one of France’s most celebrated sons. 

The singer, actor and troublemaker was her mother’s former partner and soulmate. 

Growing up, Doillon referred to Gainsbourg as ‘Papa Deux’, as he was often at the house with them, despite the fact Birkin had long since married Jacques Doillon, presumably ‘Papa Un’.

She recalls a home full of fantasy and fruity goings-on. 

‘I was raised by people who were always doing things,’ explains Doillon, in perfect English. 

‘There was constant creativity. People assume that we were just famous and wealthy, but what I remember is this hum of activity: at the piano, behind a camera, or sketching away with that look of concentration in their eyes. 

'When I was small I thought the sexiest thing in the world was concentration.’

The demi-monde would descend to work, drink and hang out with the intriguing Birkin and Gainsbourg. Perhaps they would witness one of their legendarily passionate fights.

Jane Birkin and Brigitte Bardot in 1972. ‘My mother was directing her own films when women really didn’t do that sort of thing. She was decades ahead of her time,' said Lou Doillon

‘The love and fascination for them wasn’t quite religious, but it wasn’t far off,’ Doillon gasps. 

‘My memory of Serge was mostly of having great fun. He was very light and funny in person, but made serious points. 

'He was extremely cultivated but pretended that he was not. There was always this crazy intellectual ping pong going on.

‘Serge is a difficult person to explain and I rarely try,’ she squints. ‘It’s difficult to grasp exactly what he was because, like his songs, there were so many layers to him. But he was never boring.’

But there was darkness too. Gainsbourg was a troubled alcoholic who latterly became as famous for his obscene public outbursts as his provocative songwriting.

Birkin wasn’t as enigmatic to Doillon but, like Gainsbourg, she was a creative force of nature. 

‘My mother was directing her own films when women really didn’t do that sort of thing. She was decades ahead of her time.’

Her parents separated when she was nine, as Birkin had become consumed with grief after Serge Gainsbourg died in 1991. 

This was compounded by the death of her father, a former Royal Navy lieutenant commander, in the same week.

Doillon went to stay with her father in France, living with Charlotte and her half-sister Kate Barry, from her mother’s first marriage, to the James Bond composer John Barry. 

She would also spend holidays in north Wales at the home of her uncle, the British screenwriter Andrew Birkin, and his children. 

‘Wales was wonderful, because we lived outside of society in a fantasy world of books and movies and music,’ she remembers.

Occasionally she’d visit London and stay with her grandmother Judy Campbell in Chelsea, a ‘wonderful, witty woman’ who was also Noël Coward’s muse. 

‘I guess that involved being brilliant and inspirational,’ her granddaughter shrugs.

‘My mum is mad but in the best way. She is graceful in everything that she does – it’s a way of being for her. Unfortunately, I didn’t get that gene,' said Lou Doillon (pictured with her mother in 2013)

It was, she admits, a curious childhood but ‘as well as intensity there was always a lot of love’.

Her adulthood has been no less turbulent. When she was 19, her cousin Anno – Andrew Birkin’s son – died in a car crash in Milan; around the same time, Doillon became pregnant. 

A year later the child’s father, musician Thomas-John Mitchell, left her. Then in 2013 Kate Barry fell to her death from a fourth-floor window in Paris.

‘I’ve had my share of pain but I can’t just lie down and cry,’ she says. 

‘Every moment of pain takes me closer to who I am. We all experience life and death – the rest is a show for when the reality of life is too hard.’

It comes as little surprise that Doillon’s music is shadow-strewn and brooding. 

She sings in English, deploying a sonorous, slurred purr, the songs often dissecting loss and romantic despair. 

Doillon’s debut folk pop album, Places, released in 2013, won Best Female Artist at Les Victoires de la Musique, the French version of the Brit Awards, making history by winning with a debut album. 

Her second collection, Lay Low, is not for the faint-hearted. More intimate than its predecessor, lyrical themes include obsession, jealousy and shame.

She is as fêted for her unique style as for her unsettling songs. The current Vogue magazine has a piece on how to emulate Doillon’s dress sense. This amuses her, as she claims to have none.

‘I’m a bad plotter, in life and in dressing up, so I just throw clothes on,’ she confesses. 

‘The moment I start to overthink something, it goes wrong. So I don’t know how to create an image or advise others apart from “always get dressed in no more than three minutes”.

‘After months of trying to decide what to do for an album cover, I took a selfie: no hair styling, no make-up. I’d literally just woken up. That was the image we ended up using. It’s honest, at least.’

Today, she is kitted out in an Arran cardigan, a vintage velvet jacket, high-waisted jeans and flat black military boots. 

‘I bought them yesterday,’ she says. ‘I’ve destroyed my others by taking them on tour. They’ve all gone a bit Artful Dodger.’

‘The moment I start to overthink something, it goes wrong. So I don’t know how to create an image or advise others apart from “always get dressed in no more than three minutes”,' said Lou Doillon

She was born with taste: her mother claiming that she would carry little Lou in a large Birkin bag as an infant.

Recently, Birkin asked Hermès for her name to be removed from their £15,000 Birkin Croco tote for ethical reasons, having been alerted to ‘cruel practices endured by crocodiles’ in the making of the luxury items. Hermès agreed to address her concerns and the matter was resolved. I tell Doillon that it is difficult to picture this firebrand eco-warrior babysitting like a regular grandmother.

‘The kids definitely don’t go to her place to have a quiet evening,’ her daughter declares. 

‘It’s non-stop adventures: they’ve always been to see a three-hour play or have gone to five museums in one day.’

Doillon’s son Marlowe, named after Elizabethan tragedian Christopher Marlowe, is now 13.

‘Does he hate me yet?’ Doillon wonders. ‘I hope so! He’s very healthy.’ 

She also speaks optimistically of a new boyfriend.

Tonight, Doillon will return to her family home in Paris’s 11th arrondissement, the fashionable area where the sickening IS attacks took place last November, before she and her band resume their world tour.

‘I was on stage in Normandy at the time of the attack,’ she shudders. ‘The Bataclan is at the heart of our musical community so we were all so worried. 

'We had to wait until three o’clock in the morning to find out if some of our friends were alive. Those bars and cafes that were targeted are on the street where I live.

‘But France loves to stand back up and it will do that again. It has a beautiful energy.’

Doillon once cheerily complained that she couldn’t walk ten metres in Paris without being asked about her celebrated film-star sister Charlotte.

As an actress, Doillon has appeared in more than 80 movies, but none of them broke any box-office records. 

‘I was either too weird or had “too much character”,’ she sighs. 

But now that her musical star is in the ascendant could Charlotte be just a little jealous of her sibling’s success?

‘I don’t think so,’ says Doillon. ‘And she wouldn’t say it if she was. Anyway,’ she adds, regaining her sang-froid, ‘we’re both doing so much we don’t have time to be jealous. 

'We’re hard-working women.’

‘Lay Low’ is out on March 4. 

Doillon performs at Bush Hall, London, on April 27, wrasserecords.com

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