Françoise Hardy: France’s girlish yé-yé star was a groundbreaking musical artist
Alexis Petridis
Hardy shot to fame singing airy, carefree pop before she took control of her career, hung out with 60s rock aristocracy and became a sophisticated singer-songwriter of rare sensuality and melancholy
March 2024
Ranked
Sex, Mozart and chanting monks … the 20 best Euro-pop UK hits – ranked!
As Nena’s 99 Red Balloons turns 40, we look back at the best continental foreign-language songs that achieved cross-Channel success
December 2023
Anger over plan to name Métro station after ‘misogynist’ Serge Gainsbourg
Petition demanding station outside Paris does not use singer’s name has received 4,000 signatures
October 2023
‘A salon, a studio, a brothel’: inside Serge Gainsbourg’s Paris home
Tours for fans are now available of the house where the musician and poet lived for three decades
Following the announcement that the late French icon’s home, Rue de Verneuil, will finally open to the public, we chart his 20 best performances
‘A very arranged mess’: Serge Gainsbourg’s Paris home to open to public
Property owned by daughter Charlotte Gainsbourg has been kept as it was when singer died 30 years ago
April 2022
Wrappers delight: The best album cover shoots – in pictures
From the Beatles crossing a zebra to a naked Prince, via Grace Jones attempting the anatomically impossible and Led Zeppelin’s New York tenements, these cover designs became as famous as the music they enclosed
September 2021
Jane Birkin doing well after stroke, say her family
English-born entertainer, 74, has cancelled her appearance at American film festival in France
August 2020
Munkey Diaries 1957-1982 by Jane Birkin review – passion and pop in Paris
Books interview
Jane Birkin: 'Serge Gainsbourg was never a boring genius'
July 2020
Sinatra swinging, Hepburn swimming: Terry O’Neill’s most celebrated images – in pictures
The first retrospective show since the death of the celebrated photographer is full of striking shots of performers at their most outrageous
December 2019
French new wave star Anna Karina dies aged 79
Karina was best known for the string of films she made with Jean-Luc Godard, including A Woman Is a Woman and Pierrot le Fou
October 2019
Life, death and Serge: Jane Birkin reveals her insecurities in emotional memoir
Charlotte Gainsbourg: ‘Everything now is so politically correct. So boring’
February 2019
Ranked
The greatest banned songs of all time – ranked!
Thirty years on from 2 Live Crew being banned by the Beeb, we pick 20 foul-mouthed, orgiastic outings deemed too scandalous for public consumption
