Twenty-five years ago, on August 17 1982, the first ever CDs rolled off an assembly line in Hannover Germany. And the music that was on those first CDs? Some future-focused music of the day? Maybe New Order's 'Temptation'? Or Simple Minds 'Glittering Prize'? Or even the Stranglers 'Golden Brown'? No, the first music on the first CD was Richard Strauss' Alpine Symphony.

The first CD player hit the shelves a few months later on 1 October 1982. A Sony player, it was initially available only in - where else but - Japan. And the first CD to be supplied for mass consumption? Billy Joel's '52nd Street'. Obvious choice, really.

Anyway, will the CD be still on the high street for its 30th birthday? I have my doubts.

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How did your blogger spend his morning? Well, first we picked up today’s edition of Le Monde (‘All Quiet, Nothing Happening, Call Back In September’, says the front page headline), then bought some galettes in the local French market and eventually passed the morning with both newspaper and sweetbread in our favourite little café. Yes, you’ve guessed it – we’re still on holiday in Tralee.

A homesick French exile freshly-landed in Dublin, for example, can start today (Friday 17 August) by buying real pains au chocolat and croissants (not the awful Cuisine de France stuff in your local breakfast-roll shack) in the French bakery next to Grogan’s pub behind the George’s Street arcade – and then eating them in Café en Seine on Dawson Street.

(On which point, it’s disappointing that there’s no live music on the streets of Tralee for this year’s festival. Last year, bands like Republic of Loose, Delorentos, Dry County and loads others came to Kerry and played free outdoor concerts over the festival weekend. This year, all the live music responsibility rests with Richie Kavanagh. The organising committee plead lack of resources, as well as increased competition from festivals in nearly every Irish town – for instance, the recent music events in Mitchelstown, Portlaoise and Birr.)

Of course, most French people living in Ireland are well integrated here and aren’t trying to cocoon themselves in their own Paris-sur-Liffey. Similarly, your blogger isn’t really involved with the Irish community in Paris (approximately 10,000 ex-pat Pats in the greater Paris region) – nearly all my friends are French and I only venture into Irish pubs to watch football, GAA and rugby on TV.

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Normally, this blog is the gentle, timid type. It takes a lot to get it angry; it takes even more to get it in such a state that it’s shouting at the radio while stuck in traffic on the N81, much to the bemusement of its fellow motorists. The reason for such apocalyptic rage? Cllr. Dessie Ellis of Sinn Féin.

Why, you might ask, is Key Notes discussing politics? It’s not, it’s discussing idiots. You see, Cllr. Ellis found the time to address the burning needs of his electorate in yesterdays ‘Irish’ Daily Mirror. His problem was that A Lazarus Soul have featured an image of Martin Cahill, aka The General, on the front of their new single The Day I Disappeared. Cllr. Ellis claims that this is ‘inappropriate’ and ‘sends out the wrong sort of message.’ However, and the reason why I was shouting at the radio, on Phantom yesterday evening, Cllr. Ellis admitted he hadn’t yet heard the song.

If he had taken the time to listen, rather than pontificate, perhaps he might not be so quick to judge. The Day I Disappeared discusses the loss of the ‘Ordinary Decent Criminal.’ It doesn’t portray them as heroes, but it does spark debate about whether Cahill and his ilk were ‘better’ than the ‘Younger, faceless, more sinister gangs’ the Gardai are failing to deal with today.

Of course, Martin Cahill was no saint; who is? What he was though, was the biggest fish in the murky pond at a time when we had crime under relative control, something that Graveyard of Burnt Out Cars, the album from which the track is taken, deals with in full. We used to think things were bad, and indeed they were, but they are a lot worse now. That is the theme of the album in general and this track in particular.

Now, it’s not for this blog to point out that Cllr. Ellis is a member of a party with extremely close links to the organisation that claimed responsibility for Cahill’s death. That information is already freely and publicly available. What this blog would like to highlight, however, is that politicians, and indeed people in general, shouldn’t be so quick to criticise a band/artist for a song they haven’t even heard.

Marilyn Manson isn’t responsible for kids shooting other kids, Elliott Smith (despite what this blogs mother might think) isn’t responsible for people killing themselves and A Lazarus Soul aren’t responsible for the gangland trouble we have today. Sparking debate and posing questions, while still composing a pretty accomplished indie-rock song, is something A Lazarus Soul should be applauded for, not criticised by someone who doesn’t know what they’re talking about.

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NME are reporting that the new Radiohead album (which was remastered last month) won't be out until 2008. I can only speculate, but there may well be some fascinating stuff going on behind this decision to postpone the release.

With Radiohead out of a contract, their non-aversion to corporate bashing (despite being signed for years to a multinational) and the music industry up in arms over what the future holds, I suspect that they are planning some innovative means of getting the album out there. I certainly don't expect them to do a Prince and stick a free copy of the album on the cover of the Daily Mail, nor just release it via iTunes or eMusic or Amazon's new MP3 store. They are in a unique position - a band with a huge global following without any record company obligations - to do something radical, shake some indsutry feathers and make a pretty buck while they're at it.

Or maybe they'll just release it on vinyl only.

Anyways, want to hear some snippets of the new album? Nigel Godrich, back as producer on their new long-player, took bits of tape which were chopped out of the mixes when tracks on the new album were edited. He then stuck them on a reel and when you play it back it sounds like this (Quicktime plugin required, if your browser does not show anything below go to where this was originally posted on the Radiohead site, and scroll down to the 15 June entry):

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Maybe it was all the thunder and lightning which scared and soaked the festival site Thursday and Friday that drove the crow legged Rastafarian to stumble along in the post-storm mud in what could only be his girlfriend’s pink knickers. He was tame however compared to the Italian who took it all off and stumbled around the muck and pools of rainwater near the main stage, taking mad runs at screeching girls and his mortified friends, his penis swinging in the wind.

Not officially nudist, Sziget is nonetheless one of the best natural locations in the world for a rock festival, an island on the outskirts of one of Europe's finest looking cities. The line up at Sziget 2007 in Budapest (taking place from Aug 8 to 14) isn’t bad either. Sinead O’Connor shares a main-stage bill with The Killers, Nine Inch Nails and Chris Cornell as well as Brits like Razorlight and The Rakes to play in front of 60,000 festival goers, many of whom arrive by a ferry up the Danube.

Maybe the best value of the whole week-long festival are the few dozen Roma gypsy bands who travel from the Hungarian hinterlands, Romania and the Balkans to play. No other rock festival can boast such a strong world music line up, and that's thanks in part to the world music lable Putumayo, which brought the gypsy bands to a special Roma stage on the festival site. A big name on any world music rankings, Romania's Fanfare Ciocarlia pulled a bigger and more boisterous crowd on the World Music stage than several of the western groups playing the main stage.

Sziget is more established and laid-back hippy than many among the dozens of more opportunistic recent arrivals to Europe’s festival scene. It started in 1993 as a way for Hungarians to party off the traumas of a post-war era of totalitarian socialist rule. In the hometown of classical greats like Franz Liszt, the event is starting to pull really big name rock to its main stage. There's plenty of local talent to fill the other 20 stages offering world music, jazz, blues, electronica and lots of other stuff that's not easily categorized. Promising magicians compete for attention with mind-bendingly sexy belly dancers from Turkey who perform in a giant tea tent of hookahs and tea.

Like most everywhere else there's punks and drunks littered around the main entrance who can't afford to come in. Just as well because you have to leave all bottles at the gate - Coca Cola is a major sponsor. The festival has moved on from its hippy origins. ATM machines around the site make it easy for a few hundred stalls to sell. Sziget organizers have everything covered, including a branch of Hungary Post allows festival goers to greet the folks at home.

There's no shortage of t-shirt stalls but the invisibility of security– try finding someone who can tell you where the exit is when you’re tired – allowed some of the inebriated to go stark naked mad. Others were better covered. A grandly sized EU tent had the most comfortable couches south of backstage. There was more than the rain to tempt festival goers onto the deep blue couches. Like free pens and balloons - you have to do a quiz to get an umbrella. Outside beefy men in yellow impermeables power hose the loos. Inside local thinkers and polticians debate the cuntry's issues with youngsters and their musical heroes.

Next door in this "Civic area" of tents the country's culture ministry try to engage youth on the country's parliamentary process by offering pens, mugs and t-shirts. Given that they're emblazoned with a print of the parliament, one of the city's finest looking buildings - and that's saying something in Budapest - the maroon coloured t-shirts are worth having, if you can answer enough questions about the Hungarian political system.

Socialist sports rain down on the Sziget site too. Anyone bored by the music can play table tennis, for free. Budapest is a dream festival town, something to thank socialist egalitarianism for. Great public transport and millions of square metres of accommodation in this town were built by the socialists – the underground system is an identikit of its deep-bellied counterpart in Moscow, Pyongyang and everywhere else Soviet engineers took their trade. There's plenty of traces of the old communist era in the shop signs and proletarian looking old signs for state-owned restaurants and shoes shops which have faded into the decorous, unpainted facades of downtown buildings.

With sights like that this city doesn't need a festival to bring backpackers in. Yet caretakers and housekeepers of the graceful old tenements built during the Austro-Hungarian empire hang out with clipboards at Keleti train station to spot anyone loading a backpack, rasta hats and faded Guns n Roses t-shirt. Others just camp.

(to be continued, watch out for photos coming soon)

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So all of France is on holiday (and we’re not exaggerating: there really are loads of French shops and businesses that close for three weeks every August) and Parisians have deserted the city. Families are in holiday camps, the bobos are backpacking round Asia and South America… and the privileged (both old-money and nouveau riche) are in the south of France. More accurately, they’re just off it, on their yachts.

However, the Palais Club’s programme illustrates France’s current supremacy in the superstar-DJ arena. There’s Laurent Garnier, arguably the originator of the current Parisian dancefloor scene. In our local library in France there’s a book by Garnier on how he got involved in DJ-ing, recounting his youthful ‘80s experiences in the Hacienda in Manchester, where his American house sets were a vital early influence on both the Stone Roses and Happy Mondays. Your indie-kid blogger knows that he needs to broaden his musical experiences a good deal (and start reading more books in French), so it’s on our to-read list for la rentrée.

Another Frenchman on the club’s line-up is Bob Sinclar (note the spelling: not ‘Sinclair’ with an ‘i’), pseudonym of a Paris DJ called Chris The French Kiss, which we suspect may not be his real name either*. Bob has been enjoying great chart and airplay success over the last couple of years with some of the most irritating singles ever released, usually accompanied by videos starring smug stage-school brats gurning and back-flipping like circus chipmunks. His 2006 hit ‘Love Generation’ is particularly inescapable in France because it’s the theme music (la generique, as they say in French) of TV talent show ‘Star Academy’.

David Guetta (left) is also representing the home team – seemingly forever trading as ‘F*** Me I’m Famous’. And another superstar floorfiller who we hadn’t realised was French is Martin Solveig (below). His Scandinavian-sounding surname is actually just his nom de disco - his real name is Martin Picandet and he’s from Paris. You’ve probably seen Solveig’s irritating videos, where he smirks self-contentedly while starring in the same ‘I’m not the star and this is a witty video parody’ format repeatedly.

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Australian roots activists return with their fourth long player.

The CLUAS Verdict? 5 out of 10

John Mayer, Roy Harper, Dave Matthews… how you react to that list pretty much determines whether the John Butler Trio are your bag or not.

The John Butler Trio are led by Mr Butler himself. Native of North America, he moved to Australia at age 10. Grand National is the band’s third album and he is credited almost single-handedly with making roots music fashionable down under - roots music being an umbrella term covering  a kind of looping, groovy brand of rock replete with wah-wah guitar solos, banjos, lap-steel and vaguely political lyrics. He preaches peace (man) and has the dreadlocks to show he takes it all very seriously. The opening track (and lead off single in Australia) is the highlight of the album. Better Than is funky, melodic and soars over the rest of the tunes on the album in that it does not sound forced. It is driven by an insistent banjo riff – if you’re going to download a track from the album, make it this one.

Daniella has a vaguely hip-hop feel to it. Butler syncopates his words in some embarrassing take on Dave Matthews. It’s awful. Funky Tonight does exactly what it says on the tin – throwing banjo, harmonica, congas and cowbells together in a messy squall. It works well enough but is followed by the execrable Caroline, a dreadful ballad about child abuse. The lyrics are trite, almost insulting. Poisonously syrupy. The musicianship is of a high standard, including a fabulously jazzy interlude on Gov Did Nothin’. The song is still let down by some entertainingly cack lyrics – “Now I don’t mean to offend / No I don’t wish to start a fight / But do you really think that the gov would do nothin’ / If all those people were white”. Sheesh…

Groovin’ Slowly is Bob Marley-lite. Devil Running up the ante with its opening backwards guitar solo over a droning didgeridoo before the ubiquitous groovy acoustic takes over. The chorus comes over all emo(!).The rest of the record floats by almost by accident.

Stephen McNulty

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Eurocultured is a free festival taking place this Saturday (18 August) in Smithfield in Dublin. Now in its second year, it's part of a series of events that also visits Manchester and Berlin. The music acts range from indie to electronica to hip hop to world sounds, and there'll also be food stalls, performing arts workshops and (most importantly) face-painting!

The festival brings together acts from Ireland and across the continent. Among the acts on the main stage outdoors you can cheer for local heroes Fight Like Apes and Hybrasil, enjoy the Portuguese fado of Raquel Tavares and flee in terror from Lithuania's Metal On Metal.

Meanwhile (of relevance to this blog's remit), Thomas Read's in Smithfield will become a departement outre-mer for the day, as it is hosting the festival's French contingent. Lauren Guillery and the Claws are on the bill (she's also in Crawdaddy this Thursday), hopefully featuring that elusive new member she's been looking for. The French Friday team feature too - if they'll have recovered from their monthly Thomas House appearance the night before. And Yann Dovi will also be Dj-ing there, as he does every Sunday evening with his Sunday Groove of soul and reggae.

More info is available from the festival's MySpace page.

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CLUAS Verdict:  5 out of 10

A brave but, alas, futile, attempt at greatness; Everything Last Winter is the debut album from Fields.

The goal of Fields and their producer Michael Beinhorn (Soundgarden, Red Hot Chili Peppers) seems to have been to make Everything Last Winter a multi-textured indie pop record that gave the listener a new experience each time. However, the more one listens, the more one becomes frustrated with the bands attempts to shoehorn the ghost of Nick Drake and the soul of Fleetwood Mac into the same song. Put simply; there is just too much happening on this record to make it an enjoyable multiple-listening experience.

The difficulties faced by the listeners can be summed up in two songs. Both If You Fail We All Fail and Feathers, being the two most obvious attempts at combining the bodily fulid swapping intimacy of the bands earlier work and their new mega-stadium filling rock pretensions, start brightly enough. However, the cacophony of sound that litters the ending of both becomes far too claustrophobic over multiple listens and the bands desire to write the perfect crescendo would make even Gary Lightbody blush.

It’s not all bad though. While the majority of the album sounds as if it was written with serious musical aspirations in mind, tracks such as Skulls and Flesh and More and especially Schoolbooks, sound like they may well have been stumbled across in Nick Piell’s attic and it’s the listener, by being allowed more room to actually listen and appreciate, who is the main beneficiary of this serendipity.

In summary, Fields have the potential for greatness; they just don’t need to try so hard.

Steven O'Rourke

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