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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The lineup for this years Hard Working Class Heroes Festival has been announced.  Taking place in the POD complex over the course of 3 nights (28th, 29th and 30th of September) HWCH '07 will see almost 100 Irish up and coming (and indeed some more established) bands given the chance to perform around Dublin in a festival like atmosphere. 

For me, the outstanding bands in this year's line up are Alphastates, Ham Sandwich, and Dark Room Notes.  Alphastates were the first band I saw at my first HWCH.  A cold shower inducing fusion of sultry soul and near erotic electronica; the Alphastates sound is augmented perfectly by the breathless vocals of Catherine Dowling.   If you don't believe me, check out the video for Kiss Me, a track from their 2004 debut Made from Sand.

Those of you who've graced the Key Notes blog before will already know of my admiration of Ham Sandwich.  Currently working on their, as yet untitled, debut album they are undoubtedly one of Irelands finest live bands. Having toured relentlessly over the last 18 months or so you can expect a full house when Ham Sandwich hit HWCH.  I don't think you're likely to see Lionel Richie there though.

Dark Room Notes are not only the saviours of wet and windy Monday evenings in Whelan's but also the purveyors of some of the finest electronic indie you're likely to hear.  Usually all it takes is a Casio to draw comparisons between *insert band name here* and the likes of Depeche Mode and Joy Division but in the case of Dark Room Notes it's entirely warranted.  It's a long time since a band excited me this much.   The video for Love like Nicotine is available to view below.

The full line up of Irish acts performing is available here.  Who are you looking forward to seeing most? 

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If you managed to catch Daft Punk’s show at Oxegen in July then you’ll have seen the trailer for their new movie. ‘Daft Punk’s Electroma’ is currently showing at the IFI in Temple Bar in Dublin.

The soundtrack also plays an essential part in shaping this faceless, speechless story. Daft Punk fans may be disappointed to learn that the film doesn’t feature any music old or new from the helmet-wearing pair. Instead, the choice of tracks ranges from classical pieces by Chopin and Haydn to more modern sounds from Brian Eno, Curtis Mayfield and Todd Rundgren – all scrupulously selected to serve the narrative.

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The days of record company lawyers sending intimidating letters to music fans suspected of illegally downloading and/or uploading copyrighted music may be coming to an end. At least in the EU.

If it happens it will be as a consequence of some action in that plush auditorium there to the right. No it's not Whelan's after its ongoing refurbishment, it's the main chamber of the European Court of Justice (ECJ) in Luxembourg. There is a strong likelihood that the ECJ's judges may soon rule that ISPs should not hand over to record companies details of an individual subscriber who is suspected of illegally downloading music.

An 'Advocate-General' produced advice for the ECJ on a case in Spain where a group representing the interests of copyright holders were requesting, in the context of a civil action, that an ISP (Telefonica) hand over information that would help them identify individual subscribers. The advice to the ECJ was that only in criminal cases - not in civil cases such as this - would the ISP be compelled to hand over the requested data. If the record companies can't get that data, they can't - obviously - get their lawyers to write those letters.

In the past the ECJ have followed the advice of an 'Advocate-General' in three-quarters of cases. If they do so this time it will put an almighty plank in what has been a principle reactive strategy pursued by record companies and their umbrella industry organisations since the arrival of music downloads. Maybe this will get them to focus proactively on more important aspects for the future of the music industry such as: removing copy-protection from MP3s, reducing the cost of a download and using more innovative pricing models.

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When recently blogging about what might possibly be the best ever pricing model for selling MP3s I mentioned how EMI were the only major record label to allow MP3s of their artists' music to be sold without copy protection. Now however they are being joined by Universal. Well, sort of. Let me explain.

Over the weekend Universal records said they would start selling MP3s free from the shackles of Digital Rights Management. A welcome move, but as always the devil is in the detail. For example:

• Their move is an experiment and not a full commitment to go down the route of DRM-free MP3s. They will evaluate how things are at the end of January before deciding if they will stick with this strategy.
• They will not sell songs on iTunes that are free of copy-protection.
• Tracks will not be sold indivdiually but by the album. Which defies logic as consumers shift more and more towards cherry picking the tracks they want to buy. Not to mention acts such as Ash who are moving towards releasing singles only.

The sort of good news is that they will sell these tracks for 99 US cents, 30 cents less than EMI are selling non-copy protected MP3s. Still twice the price they should be sold at, if you ask me. But some competition is better than none at this early stage in the whole digital music game.

What about the other 2 major labels who are still selling their MP3s with copy protection? I'd say give them just 6 months and they will be on board. And then competition will hopefully drive prices down. And maybe to even zero cents one day...

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France usually shuts down for the month of August. The local boulangerie closes for three weeks and you've to search for a bakery that's still open. Families clog up motorways as they head for massive campsites and holiday villages, and the president goes nuclear-reactor-selling in Libya and paparazzi-hunting in the USA. Even the usually-invincible Lyon still seem to be en vacances, losing to a late late Toulouse goal in the second weekend of the Ligue 1 season.

Luckily for Dublin's Francophiles, there's no summer holiday for French Friday. The Gallic-flavoured club night keeps its regular third-Friday-of-the-month appointment at Thomas House on Thomas Street in Dublin this Friday night, 17 August.

If you've never been, you can expect to hear the creme de la creme of French music (as featured on this blog) and party hard with Dublin's huge French community. As usual, entry costs zero euro and rien de centimes.

To get you in the mood, here's the single remix of 'Cassius 99' by Cassius:

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Anyway, last night while surfing the megahertz we picked up France Bleu (an oldies station we never usually listen to) just as they were playing a classic French hit, ‘Marcia Baila’ by Les Rita Mitsouko. Sacre Bleu! Now we already know and love this song – it’s a daytime radio favourite – but last night, far from France, it sounded so fresh, so exotic, so… French!

However, apart from their music they will always be remembered in France for a notorious TV incident in the '80s. Ringer was a guest on a chat-show, and beside her on the couch was none other than Serge Gainsbourg. It was common knowledge that Ringer had appeared in porn movies as a young actress, and that night she was discussing the experience calmly and dispassionately. At that time, though, Gainsbourg seemed to be making a determined effort to be as boorish and unpleasant as possible in public, and in an unforgivable lack of gentlemanliness he began repeatedly calling Ringer a ‘pute!’ (‘whore!’).

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