“Je t'aime... moi non plus” by Serge Gainsbourg

Serge Gainsbourg wrote "Je t'aime... moi non plus" in late 1967 for Brigitte Bardot, his girlfriend at the time, and it began as penance: after a date that fell flat, she rang the next day and ordered him to write her the loveliest love song he could come up with. He delivered this and "Bonnie and Clyde" that same night.

The two of them recorded it in Paris over a Michel Colombier arrangement, a quick two-hour job squeezed into a small glass booth, and the engineer, William Flageollet, later let on that there was more than singing going on in there. Gainsbourg's best-known take came in 1969 as a duet with Jane Birkin, which topped the British chart, the first foreign-language song ever to get there, and was banned in several countries for its frank sexual content.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.