More than nine years after the death of her daughter Kate Barry, Jane Birkin does not go a day without thinking of her. As a reminder, the young woman was only 46 years old when she breathed her last after being the victim of a fatal fall from the 5th floor of her apartment, in the 16th arrondissement of Paris. The famous singer then fell into a serious depression. She had the feeling that she no longer had “the right to exist”, because she “had failed” in her role as a mother. In the columns of La Provence, Saturday January 21, 2023, she spoke of her deceased daughter while she was on tour with her latest album Oh! Sorry, you were sleeping, in which she is very present.
It is in particular the loss of his daughter that allowed him to write his last album. “We started with the hardest songs I had written in my diary when I was in Lyon and I was extremely devastated because of Kate’s death,” she said. Still devastated by the death of her daughter, the one who is also the mother of Charlotte Gainsbourg added: “I had gone through a pharmacy where there was a small kit with everything you need for the nails of the feet. It reminded me of Kate who was the only person in the world I knew who paid so much attention to her delicate feet.”
Jane Birkin feels like she got ahead through writing
Taken by emotion, she could not contain her tears. Her artistic director had then given her advice to write all the feelings she could feel since the death of her daughter. “I did write Les Murs thick and Cigarette. It was Étienne (Daho who made the album with her, editor’s note) who found the title for Les Murs thick. He completely understood the horror that it was to go to the cemetery and imagine what is happening below”, she still confided, with a heavy heart. Despite everything, she had the feeling that it did her good to talk about Kate in song.
Jane Birkin © OLIVIER BORDE
