London

In choosing my favourite Londoner, I wanted to pick a woman. And I wanted to pick a woman who I thought was special. From what I’ve experienced of Jane Birkin, that just shines through. In interviews – or if you’ve been to see her in concert – you get that from her. It’s to do with her passion and honesty and her sexuality and sensuality. She never dates. And I suppose that’s what I promote in my work, that celebration of femininity: she’s a wonderful female icon.

She was born in London in 1946 to Major David Birkin, who was in the Royal Navy, and actress and singer Judy Campbell, who had appeared in Noël Coward films. She had a pretty conventional childhood and went to boarding school. That all changed when she reached her late teens and moved to Chelsea, where she still returns when she visits London from her French home in St Germain. My own first flat was in the King’s Road in Chelsea too. When she lived there, that was her bohemian, artistic period, when she was discovering who she was. Feature continues

I first became aware of her from pictures taken in the ’60s which I saw in my early teens. I was too young to know of her at the time: I was born in her heyday, in 1968, the year she first went to France. And the year before the controversial film ‘Blowup’ was made, where she did the first full-frontal nude scene shown in Britain. Later she played Brigitte Bardot’s lover in ‘Don Juan (Or If Don Juan Were a Woman)’ – which is mad!

I’m not nuts about the whole ’60s thing but I love all those pictures and images of London at the time. We’ve all seen them. They just all look like they’re having a great time. I’m passionate about London and I’m a Londoner myself. I travel a lot and you go to these different cities and fantasise about living somewhere else, but actually I know I could never live anywhere but London. So I love those iconic pictures.

She got married very young to John Barry, the composer famous for writing the James Bond theme music and, in 1967, she had the first of her three daughters, Kate Barry. When the marriage failed, she went off to Paris to audition for a film called ‘Slogan’. This is where she met him – Serge Gainsbourg. She went along, didn’t speak French or anything, and found herself working with Serge. I love that slight dippiness that says: I can do anything, let’s give it a go, even if I don’t speak the language. Of course she got the part, opposite Serge, though I don’t think they got on too well at first. He was quite a difficult person and he’d had this long string of lovers; he’d even had a fling with Brigitte Bardot before Jane. But then they went out for dinner one night and before you knew it they were having this passionate affair. Basically that turned into a really important partnership, not only for them, or even for French cultural history, but worldwide. In 1969 they released the song that made them so notorious, ‘Je T’Aime … Moi Non Plus’.