Je t’aime. Moi non plus? Exploring shyness and selective mutism, with help from Francoise Hardy, Jane Birkin & Serge Gainsbourg and Helen Keen!
Date posted: Tuesday 24th February 2015
 Mick Jagger and Francoise Hardy |
 Dylan & Hardy |
It’s 1969. In the streets of Paris, the tear gas has finally cleared and the cobblestones, recently used for hurling at the police, have all been se-set. Woodstock has been and gone and The Rolling Stones have just left Altamont, while the Vietnam War drags on. I’m just about to enter teenage and am languishing in a boys’ boarding school, run by an all-male religious order. Like all pre-teens, me and my friends are starting to ask serious questions; such as ‘Why do we need to learn French?’ This wasn’t a challenge to the authority of our teachers and mentors. At least it didn’t start that way. I blame our geography teacher for giving us mixed messages about learning ‘Modern Foreign languages’. ‘Take a look at this,’ he proclaimed one day, while pointing at a map of the world. ‘Do you see those pink bits? That’s The British Commonwealth. And if you go there you’ll never need to speak the local language.’
So it was inevitable that someone would eventually pluck up the courage to ask our French teacher about why we should waste our precious pre-adolescent time learning to speak another language. Brother Stephen, our elderly French teacher, was scandalised. But this shot across his pedagogical bows must have moved him to up his game, as it were, in order to keep us motivated. His solution was ‘Let’s learn some French songs together’. He probably had in mind Sur le Pont D’Avignon, or even the popular French-Canadian song Alouette, about plucking the feathers from a lark, in retribution for being woken up by its song. Our minds didn’t boggle, but it set me and my French friend Jules off on a path that very nearly led to disaster (again).
Jules was one of only two French boys in the school, and great fun. He could speak fluent English, but spent as long as possible pretending he was only a beginner, in order to skive off doing anything in lessons. Like all French boys, Jules had three great passions: cheese, ‘le rugby’ and Francoise Hardy. Francoise was huge in France, but barely known on our side of The Channel. While we Brits running around singing ‘Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da’ by The Marmalade, Jules was sitting upstairs with a faraway look in his eyes, listening to Francoise Hardy singing ‘L’Amitie’.
Francoise Hardy: L’Amitie
I well remember when I heard this song the first time, as I thumbed through Jules’ massive collection of photos of his heroine. I was stunned by her beauty, her voice and her utter French-ness. Britain at the time had Lulu and Mary Hopkin, and even Marianne Faithful, as our glamourous female pop singers, but none of these British lovelies could hold a candle anywhere close to Francoise Hardy. And it immediately became blatantly obvious to me why everyone should learn French: with just a rudimentary grasp of the language you could get the gist of what songs like ‘L’Amitie were about. (Though the final lines, ‘Alors, peut-etre je viendrai chez toi/ Chauffer mon coeur a ton bois’: roughly translated as ‘So, perhaps I can go to your house/ And warm my heart with your wood’, have always created a slightly alarming picture in my mind.) You could also use your basic conversation skills to chat up French Hardy lookalikes as they browsed alongside you in the hypermarket in Calais. (Give me a break. I was only 12, with very limited life experience, but a fertile imagination.)
So we hatched our plot, which was in two parts. The next day we innocently asked Brother Stephen if we could play L’Amitie in class, and perhaps learn some of the core vocabulary. He readily agreed, though frowned a lot at the reference to ‘wood’. The lesson was a big success, with all the boys paying far more attention than usual. Our teacher was up for more blasts of French popular culture, and readily agreed that we could play another French record at the beginning of the next lesson. He was not to know that Jane Birkin had recently released a record with her lover, Serge Gainsbourg, which had been judged to be so obscene that it was banned in most countries across the globe, though amazingly managed to reach number 1 in the UK without ever having been played on the radio.
Jane Birkin and Serge Gainsbourg: Je t’aime, moi non plus
This, incidentally, was not Jane Birkin’s only crime against common music decency, as you will see from this 1976 top ten French smash.
Brother Stephen was blissfully unaware that Jules had smuggled his big sister’s copy into the UK and we were all set to play it in class. Personally, I couldn’t see what all the fuss was about: Serge and Jane sang totally out of tune and sounded like they either had severe asthma or needed to drastically cut down on smoking fags. And the lyric ‘Like the undecided wave/ I go, I go and I come back’ was, quite frankly, puzzling in the extreme. Jules, with the air of a world-weary 12 year-old Libertine, explained to me that Jane and Serge were, ‘Ow you say in Eenglish… getting to know wuurn anurzer.’ I was a bit shocked: what if Brother Stephen knew about ‘this kind of thing’, despite a lifetime of wearing a cassock and having taken various vows?
Would we get hauled up to the Brother Principal to explain our behaviour? (We were, but that’s another story altogether). Jules was convinced that this song would cause utter mayhem in class. And it did. We got about a third of the way into the steamy soundtrack before Brother Stephen went ballistic. ‘They are singing out of tune!’ he raged, as he ripped the stylus from its groove, halfway through the line where Jane explains to Serge that ‘I am the shore and you are the waves’. His other beef was that the two singers obviously smoked too much.
Jane Birkin & Serge Gainsbourg: The mind boggles
I mention all this because Francoise Hardy was, and remains, an enigma. She describes herself as having been ‘painfully shy’ and not at all interested in being in the spotlight. She guards her personal life carefully, rarely gives interviews and, when she does, seems deeply serious. Mick Jagger chased after her, but Francoise was not interested, explaining, ‘I wasn’t dirty enough for Jagger. I didn’t do drugs or anything wild like that.’ (Unlike another French singer, who shall remain nameless, who arrived at a hotel wrapped around Eric Clapton and left a few hours later on Jagger’s arm. Google ‘Clapton, Jagger and Carla’ if you must.) Bob Dylan, on the other hand, wanted to ‘know’ Hardy for her poetry. He famously refused to come back on stage after the interval, during his first gig in Paris until Francoise, who was in the front row, came and talked to him in his dressing room.
Is Francoise Hardy ‘painfully shy’? Or might she be a great role model for girls who have something to say, but prefer to express themselves quietly? One thing we do know is that Francoise may have been quiet, but she did not suffer from selective mutism. This is an extreme anxiety condition, where children and teens, and also some adults, are able to talk well at home, but freeze up and become unable to talk in public.
Comedy writer, performer and broadcaster Helen Keen: no longer selectively mute
Comedy writer and performer Helen Keen recently led a fascinating BBC Radio 4 programme, where she described her childhood and teenage as someone with selective mutism. She’s fine now, but gives us an insight into what it’s like to be able to talk quite confidently at home, but have a phobia about hearing your voice in public. I recommend you go and get a cup of tea and a hobnob (or have a fag if you are Jane Birkin or Serge) and give yourself half an hour to listen to this excellent programme. Alternatively you can do what hundreds of people have done recently, and Google ‘Radio 4 Selective Mutism’ and listen to Michael Rosen interviewing Francoise Hardy’s number one British fan, discussing selective mutism and how to help.
Take care out there
Michael
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4xoxFrRA2Q
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