Je T’Aime … Moi Non Plus was the succès de scandale of 1969 – but Jane Birkin’s music was far more than that

Serge Gainsbourg frequently had what you might charitably describe as complicated relationships with his female collaborators. There always seemed to be a problem: a joke or a satire on Gainsbourg’s part to which they weren’t entirely party, a level of controversy that Gainsbourg was willing to provoke but they were not. There was the 18-year-old France Gall, who he duped into singing a song that was evidently – to all but the innocent Gall herself – about oral sex, causing her to temporarily retreat from public life in mortification, and furnished with a succession of other songs that appeared to be viciously mocking their singer as she sang them (the Eurovision-winning Poupée de Cire, Poupée de Son, depicted