Going from drummer to solo artist is an unusual career change, but as Organic Sampler proves, Jeremy Hickey has found his niche. A fresh focus on the groove rather than the details, without ever letti...

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Messiah J and the Expert's place in Irish music is almost unique. A rapper/producer duo that has found equal adoration among die-hard rockers and indie kids alike. 2008 seems to have been their ye...

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Richard Egan, a.k.a. Jape, has been a staple on this ol' "scene" of ours for quite a while now, producing record after record of quality, often disparate, material. This year sees the no...

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Oppenheimer are possibly one of the best natured and refreshingly enthusiastic bands in Ireland at the moment. The Belfast-based electro-pop duo's second album Take the Whole Mid-Range and Boost I...

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A review of the album The Crying Light by Antony and The Johnsons Review Snapshot:The spine tingling vibrato remains very much in evidence and the bruised and broken hearts that found refuge in &l...

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Do you remember our recent trip to the edge of the world (i.e. a remote Paris satellite town) to see cult French electro-chappie Bertrand Burgalat in concert? And how we mentioned his special guest that night, April March? And how we’d write about her in more detail, such is her all-round interestingness?

Well, your memory is better than ours. Your blogger had to be viciously prodded by an impatient reader about following up that one. So anyway:

You might know April March (right) for a song called ‘Chick Habit’. This hipswinging number featured on the fine soundtrack to Quentin Tarantino’s ‘Death Proof’, thus guaranteeing it cult status, and has since been used on a TV ad for the Renault Twingo (a quintessentially Parisian car). The song is March’s English-language adaptation of ‘Laisser Tomber Les Filles’, one of Serge Gainsbourg’s many hit compositions for France Gall.

But who is April March?

Well, we’re disappointed to say that April March is only her nom de pop; her real name is Elinore Blake. But she has a definite talent for names – before becoming April March, Blake was in bands called The Pussywillows (whose live line-up featured Ira Kaplan of Yo La Tengo) and The Shitbirds. Yes!

As a schoolgirl in California, Blake became obsessed with France and spent time here on a school exchange programme. Transforming herself into the pop butterfly that is April March, she has maintained this infatuation. ‘Chick Habit’ comes from a 1999 album called ‘Chrominance Decoder’ (here she loses her naming talent a little) that revisits Gainsbourg’s early-‘60s yéyé period of innuendo-laden twist-pop written for the naïve young Gall, who still admits that at the time she never realised what ‘Les Sucettes’ was about. An earlier March album, ‘Gainsbourgsion’ (okay, she’s clearly better with pseudonyms and band names than album titles) features both ‘Chick Habit’ and ‘Laisser Tomber Les Filles’, as well as other Serge artifacts from that era.

March is signed to Burgalat’s Tricatel label, which explains why she’s a guest in his concert. Thin and frail, she seems quite nervous and unsure as she walks on stage to join Burgalat and his band. But she acquits herself well. Her part of the show ends with a cracking performance of ‘Chick Habit’; the sparse crowd can go home happy.

(Trivia: Blake is a cartoonist and was once the principal animator on ‘Ren and Stimpy’, and she drew Madonna in the title sequence and video for ‘Who’s That Girl’. And let’s not forget that she was in a band called The Shitbirds.)

You can check out more retro French pop on April March’s MySpace page. There’s no official video for ‘Chick Habit’, so we’ll show you one of her other songs. A loving recreation of both ‘60s French pop and ‘60s French ‘scopitone’ pop videos, here’s April March with ‘Mignonette’:

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For those of you who don't know, Barretstown was founded in 1994 by the late, great, Paul Newman.  It was to be the first of his European Hole in the Wall Camps; established to provide seriously ill children with recreational and therapeutic camping experiences.  The camp has grown from serving 124 children in a marquee in 1994 to over 12,000 children and their families from 23 European countries  and is now equiped with excellent medical facilities.

Every child (and their family) visits Barretstown free of charge (including any travel/food costs).  In order to do this Barretstown must raise over €4.5 million every year, with 96% of this coming from donations from companies and private individuals.  Now, obviously we are in a 'Credit Crunch' (queue the spectre of George Lee behind your shoulder) and the first thing that people stop doing is donating to charity and those like Barretstown, with such a lack of government support, are the first to suffer.  Key Notes has seen first hand what a positive effect Barretstown can have on the life of a child diagnosed with a life-threatening disease and has always been a supporter of the venture. Now, you too can help them.

On the 27th of February The Academy will host Inspirations - Gig of the Year.  Acts already confirmed for the event include Republic of Loose, Ham Sandwich, Sinead O'Connor, Engine Alley, The Blizzards, The Kinetics, Fun Lovin' Criminals, Shane MacGowan and The Walls with more to be announced soon.  All the bands will be performing songs that have inspired them and influenced their music. 

Tickets are available from usual outlets for a very reasonable (considering the amount of acts) €28.  So go on, get down to The Academy on February 27; you get to have a good night out and do something worthwhile at the same time!  What more could you ask for?

Ham Sandwich: Running Up That Hill (Kate Bush cover)

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A review of the album 'Blue Lights On The Runway' by Bell X1

Review Snapshot: Uninventive indie rock dressed up in the too-large suit of Talking Heads, the new Bell X1 album has little in the way of invention or excitement. It would take a tectonic shift in their creative thinking for this band to become relevant or interesting again.

The Cluas Verdict? 5 out of 10

Full Review:
It’s a coincidence that the two major Irish album releases of spring 2009, ‘No Line On The Horizon’ by U2 and ‘Blue Lights On The Runway’ by Bell X1, have such similar titles. Apart from sounding alike, both titles evoke images of sky and travel. And both are aspirational and ambitious: they tell us that U2 know no boundaries and Bell X1 are revving for take-off.

In fact, the Kildare band’s fourth studio album is flat and unadventurous, like an interminable taxi round the runway without ever leaving the ground.

The funkiness of ‘Flock’ has been left off this new album. With its stylistic nods to arty post-punk and emotive indie-folk, the strongest influences this time around seem to be Talking Heads and a bit of Arcade Fire. The Heads comparison is most obvious on lead single ‘The Great Defector’, where Paul Noonan lapses into a David Byrne-style singing voice that pops up again at various points on the record. Lyrically, Noonan’s taste for yoking together random quips and images also recalls Byrne and Black Francis.

But all of that feels like fancy dress. This album falls flat because there aren’t any outstanding tracks on it; no catchy hooks or earworm choruses to help these songs stay in the memory. Chord progressions are safe and familiar. Verses feature long lines of bedsit-romantic lyrics delivered with little melodic variety; we can tell that there are choruses because some lyrics are repeated. And there are two instances of maudlin piano ballads: ‘Light Catches Your Face’ and ‘The Curtains Are Twitchin’. Noonan’s distinctive Kildare vowels, like on ‘One Stringed Harp’, offer rare moments of colour and individuality, and that’s about all.

Quite simply, it’s stale and boring stuff – far from the tuneful charm of their 2000 debut, ‘Neither Am I’. Today’s newly-prominent Irish acts, such as Jape and Fight Like Apes, are making music that’s inventive and exciting. Next to them, Bell X1 sound like a band whose time has passed.

All in all, ‘Blue Lights On The Runway’ is just one step up from the horrors of Snow Patrol. The last Snow Patrol album, ‘A Hundred Million Suns’, shares the luminous, aspirational title imagery of this Bell X1 release, and both bands deal in the same over-earnest indie that plays on emotion over excitement.

Worthy but unoriginal – by analogy with landfill indie, can we consider Bell X1 and their peers as recycling-centre indie?

Aidan Curran

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The early ‘80s are now seen as a golden period in English pop, but it doesn’t seem to have been a great time for French music. The Paris disco scene of the late-‘70s had faded away (to re-emerge in the 1990s as a profound influence on Daft Punk) while rock bands like Téléphone and Indochine were merely following whatever English bands had been doing years earlier.

In the background, though, The Clash’s 1981 Paris shows inspired kids like Manu Chao and Rachid Taha to dream up the sounds they’d produce in the late ‘80s and beyond. That series of concerts in the Theatre Mogador has become a creation myth for French rock music. Chao formed Mano Negra, perhaps the best French band ever. And backstage at the Mogador one night, the story goes, young Taha gave his demo tape to Joe Strummer. The following year The Clash released ‘Rock the Casbah’ – influenced directly by Taha, boast French music fans. This may well be true, as Mick Jones and Paul Simonon have often joined Taha on stage for his rousing Arabic version of the song.

So, 1981 saw seeds sown in French music – but that harvest only comes many years later. From the music released at the time, as we said, there isn’t much that has endured. However, listening to the radio lately we discovered a rarity: a fine early-‘80s French single.

‘J’aime Regarder Les Filles’ (in English, “I like watching girls”) was a hit in 1981 for Patrick Coutin (right). Who? Well, he’s a French singer who hasn’t done anything else of note since then. But it doesn’t matter; one good song is one more than most acts can manage.

It’s an edgy, jittery sliver of punk-pop. The whole song hangs off a pulsing two-note bassline, with a sparse arrangement of guitar shards and very basic drumming. This sinewy sound sets up Coutin’s twitchy vocal delivery, which perfectly complements the lyrics about leering at girls. (Sample lyric: “I like watching girls walking on the beach/When they undress and pretend to be sensible/Their eyes asking ‘Who’s that guy?’”) The song teeters between strutting machismo and sinister perviness, and its catchiness has you humming along, making you complicit.

The song was recently covered by a French band called Astonvilla (one word), which conjures up a worrying mental image of Martin O’Neill at the beach with his binoculars out. Also, another mark of classic-pop-single status: it gets covered by contestants on TV talents shows.

There’s no video, which is probably just as well. So, while looking at a montage of the singer’s record sleeves, here’s ‘J’aime Regarder Les Filles’ by Patrick Coutin:

 

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Oasis will play in Beijing on April 3 - at the Capital Gymnasium, not the Worker’s Gymnasium as preferred by Kylie and Kayne West. It’s not clear what the band’s reasons for coming are but they shouldn’t have high expectations, nor hopes of making money. Their arrival hopefully marks the end of a long period of paranoia in China’s Department of Culture which issues performance licenses: pro-Tibetan chants by Bjork at her Shanghai show last year annoyed the bureaucrats, already worried about blemishes to China’s Olympics year. 

I can’t see how Oasis will make any money off this tour, considering the band has never had the cachet of Suede or Sonic Youth among China’s tiny rock community. Granted, those two groups solidified their local reputation by actually coming and playing here. Ticket prices range from RMB200 to RMB1600: 20 to 160 Euros.

I reckon there’ll be tickets for RMB50 – five Euros – on sale outside the venue on the night.

The band’s tour China:

• April 3rd, 2009 - Beijing Capital Gym
• April 5th, 2009 - Shangai Grand Stage
• April 7th, 2009 - Hong Kong AsiaWorld Arena

 

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