Dose of Minogue (and Gainsbourg and Bardot): Kylie’s Love of the French Creeps into Last Weekend’s “Mad Men”

In S6Ep4 of AMC’s “Mad Men,” there was a scene where Joan and her friend Kate hit the town with a new male acquaintance. They end up sitting on a couch at a trippy lounge that’s playing (1960’s) French music, and with that said, the phrase, ménage à trois popped in my head. Yet it was the song that was playing at the club to which I was paying the most attention: Bonnie and Clyde, the 1968 duet between the French singer, Serge Gainsbourg and the actress Brigitte Bardot.

As soon as I heard it, I immediately thought of Kylie. I remembered a 2007 interview, in which she spoke about each track on her album, X. She noted that she was thrilled to obtain the approval to use a sample from Bonnie and Clyde and weave it through her song, Sensitized.

Listen to the original, then…



…listen to Kylie’s Sensitized. You will definitely hear the sample:



Double Dose: Gainsbourg had a long personal and professional relationship with the singer, actress and fashion icon, Jane Birkin (the film, Evil Under the Sun; the muse for the wildly expensive Hermès Birkin Bag). Gainsbourg and Birkin collaborated on the classic song, Je t’aime… moi non plus. (Kylie also covered Je t’aime; it’s heard briefly in her 2003 one-off concert show, at the start of Breathe. As I’ve noted in earlier posts, Kylie and her team certainly find inspiration from the sixties.) BSo