Have our Dublin readers been along to the French Film Festival at the IFI? Seen anything interesting? Looking over the programme online, we saw that there's a screening of 'Ensemble C'est Tout' starring the lovely Audrey Tautou (Ah, if only everything in life were as lovely as the lovely Audrey Tautou). Also showing is petulant French footballer Vikash Dhorasoo's 'Substitute', where the ex-PSG player filmed (from the bench) les bleus' epic 2006 World Cup adventure.

Not forgetting romantic comedy 'Prête-Moi Ta Main' (here given the bland English title of 'I Do'; surely the literal translation - 'Lend Me Your Hand' - would have been better, given the film's storyline of a woman pretending to be a man's fiancé?) with the über-cool Charlotte Gainsbourg.

As it happens, Charlotte's mammy has a film at the festival too - 'Boxes' is Jane Birkin's directorial debut. It's autobiographical; Birkin stars as an Englishwoman looking back over her French life and loves. The film features John Hurt, Geraldine Chaplin and model/actress Lou Doillon - Charlotte's half-sister and Birkin's youngest daughter. Despite the mixed reviews it got from French cinema critics, it may still be of interest to Francophiles.

Birkin is, of course, famous for being the collaborator, muse and partner of Serge Gainsbourg. Regardless of how her directing career unfolds, her most celebrated contribution to popular culture will probably always be the long orgasmic groan that fades out 'Je T'aime (Moi Non Plus)', still pop's most notorious single.

The BBC banned it, the Vatican condemned it; unsurprisingly it shot to number one across Europe in 1969 and 1970. Apart from Birkin's suggestive sound effects, the lyrics are surprisingly unerotic - the most offended were probably ultra-Catholics ("l'amour physique et sans issue" - physical love without offspring, or without exit) and consultant proctologists ("je vais et je viens / Entre tes reins" - I come and I go between your kidneys). Gainsbourg wrote the song as a glib throwaway, and later regretted that outside France his entire career and work was reduced to this one single.

We've been told that the strange title - I Love You (Me Neither) - was apparently inspired by a French politician, perhaps Georges Pompidou of the ugly art gallery in Paris today, who hit upon the phrase 'moi non plus' as a way of worming out of a difficult question by appearing to both agree and disagree with the proposition - or at least to confuse the interviewer. But we haven't found any confirmation of this theory.

The song was originally written for Gainsbourg's previous lover/muse, Brigitte Bardot, in the manner of their 1967 duet 'Bonnie And Clyde', one of the greatest pop singles of the 1960s. However, Bardot objected to the finished version's sauciness and put her foot down; the single was never released. Today, listening to it on Serge compilations, perhaps she was justified on purely musical grounds - the poppy, jangly Bardot version is vastly inferior to the lush, soulful Birkin one.

But how did the English girl come to sing on France's most famous pop song? Well, Gainsbourg and Birkin met in 1968 when the actress screen-tested for a part in a French movie called 'Slogan'. She had previously caused moral outrage for her role in Michelangelo Antonioni's classic Swinging London film 'Blow Up', where she became the first mainstream cinema actress to appear as a full-frontal nude on screen. Once she moved to Paris and played Gainsbourg's muse, Birkin became an icon in France; Hermès named one of its luxury handbags after her.

In 1975 Gainsbourg made a film starring Birkin called 'Je T'Aime (Moi Non Plus)': a Lars von Triers-esque tale of passionless sex and confused sexuality in a dreary small town. Birkin received great praise for her performance; from that point on she seems to have been taken more seriously as an actress by the French cinema establishment.

Birkin continues to sing and act. She was a special guest of the Dublin French Film Festival in 2003, and while in Ireland she performed a concert of Gainsbourg re-interpretations at Liberty Hall. Her solo albums are also critically acclaimed in France; in 1992 she was named Female Artist Of The Year in the French music industry's prestigious Victoire de la Musique awards.

The masterpiece of Serge and Jane's collaboration is unquestionably Gainsbourg's electrifying 1971 album 'Histoire De Melody Nelson', one of the few absolutely essential and globally influential French records. That said, the wider world will probably always hear their name and think immediately of a soulful bassline, a wistful organ melody and an English girl's groans. Here's the video for 'Je T'Aime (Moi Non Plus); sorry, but it's not a 'making-of' film:

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It would come as a surprise to regular visitors but CLUAS is - for the moment - Ireland's no. 1 website for Jazz music. Official.

Well, official at least in the eyes of Yahoo, or Microsoft's 'Live' search engine because, at the time of writing, those two search engines are ranking CLUAS as the number one result for searches for 'Irish Jazz Music' (see Yahoo's results here, Live.com's here). What's more Google was also ranking CLUAS as the number one result up until last week when they (getting a dose of common sense or something) decided to rank another website for these vital key words (Update: After dropping CLUAS from the no.1 spot, in fact dropping us from their entire list of top 100 'Irish Jazz Music' websites, Google has decided that CLUAS is, once again, a top website for Irish Jazz Music).

How did this happen? It is the result of an experiment I undertook at the beginning of October to see if I could get CLUAS to rank highly for a genre of music we usually do not focus on. Jazz music was a good candidate I thought. While it is certainly not something the site focuses on, there have been a tiny number of articles published in our 8 years history that can be classified as being about jazz (or something vaguely jazzy), so there was something to work with.

So what did I do? It was just a few simple steps. I first created a brand new page on CLUAS for Jazz music, let's call is the CLUAS 'Jazz Music home page' (this is the page now appear as the number one result for Yahoo and Live). I then set about making this the strongest page about jazz on CLUAS by doing the following:

• I put a link to each of the jazz articles on CLUAS on this 'jazz home page' (there are a total of about a 10 articles for jazz, definitely not comprehensive coverage).
• I then added on each of these articles a link back to the CLUAS 'jazz home page'.
• I did a site wide search for all occurrences of the word ‘jazz’ on CLUAS and then linked each of them back to the 'jazz home page’. I also added a link as well to the CLUAS sitemap page (a page the search engines visit regularly, this meant I could be confident the search engines would find the jazz home page).

I then sat back and waited for the search engines to do their stuff. Within a week I started to see results. Google was the first to rank CLUAS as no. 1 for Irish Jazz Music (and also the first to drop it! Update Nov 19 - it's back as the no.2 site now). The Yahoo and Live search engines soon followed.

But once I saw the result I set about creating other thematic 'home pages' using exactly the same method, with a view to getting them to also rank well for relevant key words (and so drive more traffic and new users to CLUAS).

The first 'thematic target' I set was Dublin gig venues. A lot of people search for info on gigs by searching for the venue name. Maybe CLUAS could grab some of that search engine traffic by creating some relevant pages that could rank highly for different Dublin venues? With this in mind a month or so ago I set about creating a home page for each of the main Dublin venues where, over the years, the CLUAS writers have reviewed gigs. There is now a page on CLUAS for Tripod, Whelan's, The Village, Vicar Street, The Point Theatre, Olympia, Ambassador and the former Temple Bar Music Centre). Each page has links to the gigs we have reviewed over the years in that venue.

The result? Across all three of the major search engines (Google, Yahoo and Live) CLUAS is now one of the top 10 sites for various key word searches relating to these Dublin venues. The only downside is that we are not appearing in the top 5 results (where most people click on a result), when we appear it is more typically between the 6th and 10th spots.

Nonetheless this is bringing a healthy and steady level of brand new first time visitors to the CLUAS site. For example the traffic analytics service that CLUAS uses show that over the first two weeks of November 2007 a total of 44 visitors (i.e. an average of 3 a day or appox 100 a month) reached the site after they searched for something relating to Vicar Street. Not a huge number at first glance but is encouraging is that 97% of these visitors had never visited CLUAS before and once they get to the site they, on average, ended up choosing to view 2.8 pages on their initial visit. I am seeing similar levels of new visitors (and pages that they then go on to view) for people searching for info on the Point Depot, Whelan's, the Ambassador and Olympia.

In a nutshell these new venue pages are bring a minimum of 300 brand new first time visitors to CLUAS every month and these visitors don't just bolt for the door when they hit the site, they hang around and browse an average of about 3 pages each.

Expect some more themed 'home pages' on CLUAS that aim to rank highly in the search engines and, in so doing, rope in more first time visitors to the site. If even only 10% of them then go on to be regular visitors, it will result in a long term growth in our visitor base. 

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How was your weekend? Your Paris correspondent, still living under transport-strike conditions, covered a lot of ground on foot this weekend - mainly to reach the rare metro lines that were less affected than our own.

Nonetheless, we managed to catch Nina Hynes (left) in concert at the Flèche d'Or again (she played a gig there last April too). The Barbarella of Irish pop put on a fine show; her recent long-player 'Really Really Do' is a delicious pick n'mix of electro, glam and indie - one of the best Irish albums of 2007.

If you managed to see Nina on her recent Irish tour, you were lucky - she almost didn't make it. Her tour van broke down in Germany en route to Eire, and she had to hire an estate car (in American, a station wagon) to continue her trip. Hynes currently lives in Berlin, where there's a Paris-esque transport strike these days too. And there are no buses in the northside of Dublin either! Hmmm: she seems to be spreading bad transport vibes... next on her tour diary is Italy in December - let's hope those lovely intercity Italian trains survive the experience.

Nina's Paris concert reminded us that she lived her for a while, and her stay here obviously inspired her to write material. Her single 'Monoprix' is named after a well-known French supermarket. Your blogger does his hunting/gathering there, but it doesn't seem so astral or dreamy to us. Perhaps Nina's local Monoprix was cooler than ours...

Anyway, check out Nina Hynes' current material (with her band The Husbands) on her MySpace page. Here's the video for 'Monoprix', not filmed in a French supermarket, we're sorry to say:

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By any chance, has this song reached Ireland? It's being played all the time on French radio, and since it's in English we reckon it may spread Eire-wards very soon.

Yael Naim is a young Parisian singer-songer who mixes Hebrew folk and English pop. Her single 'New Soul' is a breezy little tune about how she's communing with the world (or something). First listen, it sounds sweet and cheery. After that, however, you want to kill it for its drippiness.

Our hunch about its world-domination potential comes because it's the perfect soundtrack for a commercial. You know the type: soft-focus beautiful people tripping through the daisies all hippy-like, eyes gleaming like deep pools of water, teeth shining like bathroom tiles. Then the logo for the bank or phone company pops up. All very soothing; you're literally begging them to take your money and make your world a happier place.

So, is Yael Naim the devil? Perhaps not. We just think that you'll soon be so sick of this song that you'll be kicking in your television. Here's the video, in which Yael moves into her new apartment and starts her new life - no doubt with the help of her friendly building society and their fantastically competitive rates:

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Key Notes doesn’t do politics. Well actually it does, but would be so inclined to rant and rave that it wouldn’t make for great reading material on a Friday afternoon. However, the current assault on the people of Pakistan and the swift and severe oppression of any form of protest against it, led your easily stirred blogger to consider protest songs and their history. 

A good table-quiz factoid for you is that the oldest protest song on record is The Cutty Wren, a composition from the 14^th century speaking out against the feudal system in place in England at that time. Despite the rumours however, I could find no evidence that it was actually written by Steve Tyler.

Though its origins were in England, it was in America where the protest song emerged as a beacon of hope for those tired of the status-quo (though many were said to have enjoyed Rockin’ All Over the World).  

The 20th century proved fertile ground for American musicians when it came to penning their protests. The lyrics "Southern trees bear strange fruit / Blood on the leaves and blood at the root / Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze" from Strange Fruit (famously recorded by Billie Holiday) were penned by Lewis Allen in response to the lynching of two black men. The songs impact was such that it was still being used in the Civil Rights Movement 30 years later, and was cited by Bob Dylan as an inspiration in (the excellent by the way) No Direction Home. 

Dylan himself was responsible for thousands of buskers inflicting the world with their version of Blowin’ in The Wind, one of the most recognisable and popular protest songs ever written. The fact that it wasn’t written about a particular event but simply posed a number of questions designed to make the listener question themselves and the world around them has allowed it to stand the test of time. Of course, this was before Dylan was hawking iPods and SUV’s, but the song struck a chord and was used as an anthem for protestors of the Vietnam war, and most wars since.  

Of course the Sixties produced a huge volume of protest songs from Respect to Give Peace A Chance and many of these are still used today. Indeed many commentators lament the lack of original protest songs emerging from today’ musicians. 

While it’s true that there are some laughable attempts at protest songs around (Green Day or George Michael anyone?) there are some great examples of the genre emerging in response to US foreign policy. Neon Bible, for example, is littered with references to the state of paranoia created by the Bush government. Neil Young’s Living With War was even more blatant in it’s critique. However, perhaps the greatest protest song written this century (in Key Notes humble opinion) was penned by, the frustratingly inconsistent, Bright Eyes. 

Containing the stinging opening verse; "When the president talks to God / Are the conversations brief or long? / Does he ask to rape our women’s' rights / And send poor farm kids off to die? / Does God suggest an oil hike / When the president talks to God?" it is a powerful critique and its rawness touched a chord with a great of disillusioned and disgruntled people. It’s a pretty good song too which always helps. So to the people of Pakistan, and indeed anyone living under the pretence that democracy is for your benefit and not for theirs, Key Notes presents Mr. Conor Oberst, When The President Talks to God.

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Parisian chanson française singer Daphné (left) has won the 2007 Prix Constantin, beating high-profile nominees like Justice and Keren Ann to the honour. She was rewarded for 'Carmin', her second album.

The singer was presented with the prize by jury chairperson Rachid Taha at a ceremony in Paris last night. The presentation took place after a show featuring performances from all the nominees. The only absentees were Justice, who played their scheduled concert in Bordeaux last night.

The Prix Constantin, France's equivalent to the Mercury and Choice prizes, is awarded to the act considered to be the year's musical revelation. The two criteria for eligibility are that the act is signed to a French label and has never attained gold status in France (75,000 sales).

After last year's win by slam rapper Abd Al Malik, Daphné's success is a return to the prize's 2005 form, when idiosyncratic singer/voice artist Camille was rewarded for her quirky take on the traditional French chanson style, where a skiffly/jazzy sound is combined with Latino/manouche rhythms and carefully-crafted lyrics.

You can listen to some tracks from Daphné on her MySpace page. Here's the video for her recent single 'Musicamor':

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Anybody who tried to access the CLUAS home page, blogs or discussion board this morning (from about 6am GMT to 1pm GMT) would have seen a big fat 'sorry you can't access this website, mate' error.

These sort of errors happen once in a while around these part so it's - normally - no big deal, just a bit of an inconvenience. However this time around it was the first time that the ability to access parts of the site was deliberately blocked by our hosting company because there was too much traffic to the site (to be perfectly precise, access was not blocked to CLUAS but our website was disconnected from the database that contains the content of our blogs and discussion board; the other parts of the site not depending on the database were still accessible).

Being blocked for attracting too much traffic is good news (hey, hey we're attracting more users!) and bad news ("damn, we're going to have to toughen up the hosting infrastructure to deal with the increased levels of traffic").

While sorting out the problem in conjunction with CLUAS.com's hosting company I was curious to see that the increase in traffic was less becuase an increase in humans accessing the site and more because of a (big) increase in visits of the search engines 'bots' accessing CLUAS to retrieve our content for their own purposes (i.e. knowing what's on CLUAS so that they can present relevant results for their users when they search for various key words).

So what did I have to do to persuade our hosters that we would no longer completely hog access to the server which hosts our database (and databases of other websites) and so they would be confident enough to allow CLUAS to reconnect with its database? Basically I reduced the traffic the site will get from search engine bots by:

• Reducing the frequency with which the Google 'bot' visits CLUAS from the default of 'Normal' to 'Slower' (it's possible to set this via CLUAS.com's account on Google's rather good Webmaster Tools)
• Adding extra lines into CLUAS.com's robots.txt file that instruct the Yahoo bot (called 'Slurp') to stop crawling any files in the parts of the site that are database-driven.
• To be sure I also barred another major Yahoo bot ("Yahooseeker") from crawling the entire website.

Following these steps the site was reconnected by the hosting company and, bingo, CLUAS was working again around lunchtime today.

The steps I had to take have their obvious downsides - some CLUAS pages will be indexed either less frequently or not at all by major search engines, which in time is going to compromise the amount of traffic we get from search engines (which has always been very good). But it is a short term solution until I move the CLUAS site to a more robust hosting environment.

But one encouraging lesson I have learned from this is that the migration of CLUAS from its previous dated environment almost exactly one year ago is (finally!) paying dividends - at least if when I note that the search engines have decided what we have merits them to go and increase significantly the rate and frequency at which they trawl our site. I always knew it would be a long road but that, in long run, CLUAS would be much better equipped for the future. We are certainly not there yet. There is a ton more to do. But the tools to do what we need are at our disposal.

Anyways. To mark the 1 year anniversary of the beginning of the massive (and ongoing) operation to bring CLUAS (kicking and screaming) into the 21st century I am going to, this week, start a series of blog entries that outline what CLUAS has done in the last year, with what technologies, why, and where this all may lead the site in the future (and, er, you can wake up from your slumber now).

Fret not, though I will also be getting back into posting, in parallel, some more blog entries about music and technology and what is going on out there. Watch this space, etc.

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