Your correspondent took a rare trip out of the French capital recently. We went to Lyon, the second-largest city in France and only two hours south-east of Paris by high-speed train.
 
Outside of France, most people probably know Lyon for the recent success of its football team. But the city is renowned as a centre of gastronomy. This demanded rigorous investigation, so your blogger duly ate his own body weight in fantastic local food. (We recommend boudin noir, the Lyon equivalent of black pudding but a zillion times nicer. Next time we'll have the andouillette, a kind of sausage.)
 
The centre of Lyon is a commercial strip of concrete slabs and the usual high street stores. The old part of town, Vieux Lyon, leads uphill to two uncanny reminders of Paris - a kitsch, oversized white church like Sacre Coeur atop Montmartre and a replica of the top half of the Eiffel Tower. But apart from that Lyon has its charm. We stayed in Croix Rousse, a quarter that's home to artists and small bars still defying the smoking ban.

As usual in a new town, we looked for record shops. There's a local branch of Gibert Joseph near Bellecour as well as large stores like Virgin and FNAC - but for small independent music dealers in Lyon you should head for the streets around the town hall, where there are a handful. Our favourite was Sofa on the rue d'Algerie, which stocks mainly vinyl and non-rock sounds such as hip-hop and electronica. (To our joy, in the world music section we found 'I Am Brazil' by the Redneck Manifesto. We prefer to believe that it wasn't misfiled because of the title and that Irishness is fiercely exotic to the Lyonnais.)

Anyway, we survived away from Paris and it gives us the opportunity to tell you about an upcoming festival in Lyon. Nuits Sonores takes place on 20-24 May in venues around the city.

Now in its seventh year, Nuits Sonores is a popular and well-respected electronica and indie gathering. This year's programme features established acts like Carl Craig, Laurent Garnier, Miss Kittin, Holly Golightly and Dan Le Sac. The hipper-than-thee festival-goer will note the presence of Tiga, the Montreal-born DJ whose name is being dropped by other electronica acts the world over.

Miss Kittin is from Grenoble, so she won't have far to go for her Nuits Sonores show with The Hacker on 24 May. The pair have collaborated on a new album called 'Two' (their second long-player together, you see) and it's a superior set of melodic electro-clash floorfillers.

Before Lyon, Miss Kittin and The Hacker will be in Dublin on 3 May. Because they're French, this inevitably means their Dublin show is on at the ALT, the little Gallic musical enclave in Ireland. And, says Miss Kittin's MySpace giglist, later this summer they'll be in Paris, Madrid and... Naas! Of course, this is for Oxegen but at least they won't be shouting "'Allo, Dublin!"

(We feel bound to tell you that 'Naas' resembles a French word pronounced 'nazz' and which means 'very uncool'. If at Oxegen they tell you "You're Nazz!" and start giggling, now you're in on the joke and you can tell them to f**k off. It'll be gas.)

Miss Kittin and The Hacker are definitely not 'nazz'. Check out some of those 'Two' tracks on Miss Kittin's MySpace page, including '1000 Dreams', presented below in homemade video. Thanks to the Scottish community in Lyon:

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French turntable team Birdy Nam Nam have attracted a lot of international attention recently, as much for their sound as for the fact that there are four of them mixing and twiddling together where normally such things are a solitary pursuit.

In a way, this is quite odd. No one remarks on the fact that four rock musicians can combine as a group. Jazzmen tend to gather in fives, sixes or more. And what about the Berlin Philharmonic? There’s a hundred of them!

What’s more, in the studio Birdy Nam Nam probably don’t record live together but in individual takes and overdubs, like most rock bands. So, their onstage innovation counts for little down the coalmine of making albums. Like for most rock bands, in fact.

Fortunately for Birdy Nam Nam, the ends are just as impressive as the means. ‘Manual For Successful Rioting’, their second album, has just come out and it’s a cracker. Top-quality turntablism married to dancefloor electronica of considerable depth and imagination, it will make their name internationally. And, in our parish notes, anyone who was at their show in A.L.T. in Dublin last December will give a wry smile at that title. [Don’t go there, croissant boy! - CLUAS Legal Department]

Perhaps a more telling title is that of ‘Trans-Boulogne Express’, the 2007 track included here. That allusion to ‘Trans-Europe Express’ is a clear nod to Kraftwerk, the spiritual forefathers of this album, and marks a slight change in direction from the hip-hop-isms of old. Clinical beeps and blips, control-freak loops, distorted voices: the sonic template is Teutonic audio engineering at its finest. But, like the legendary German foursome, Birdy Nam Nam infuse their electronica with humanity and wit – mostly with the old-school rapping of Newcleus on ‘Shut Up’ but also with the soul and jazz samples that flash like lightning through this record. Crucially, you can dance to it too; producers Yuksek and Justice are old hands at that game.

And, of course, in places they sound positively French. The strangest track here is probably ‘Homosexuality’, a Jarre/Air-style exercise in swooshing retro-futuristic synths under a vocoder-ed voice that repeats the title. (We don’t know if there’s a point being made there; if so, it’s above our heads at least. That said, we could suggest some innuendo about the title ‘Trans-Boulogne Express’, but perhaps we’d best keep that to ourselves.)

Hardcore fans may be disappointed that this record is closer to carefully-crafted studio electronica than turntable cut n’pasting, but the BNN live experience can only enhance the thrill of this music. Until they land at your local venue, check out their MySpace page for tracks. And here they are on video, painting a model of the word ‘RIOT’ over and over. It must be art:

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The Pont Alexandre III (right), named for the Tsar to commemorate the Franco-Russian Alliance of 1892, features four extravagant gold-leaf statues of winged horses on columns at each corner. Raffaelli’s painting shows them as fauviste blobs of gold above the blurred red and blue dots of passers-by below.

Unlike other Paris music clubs and bars facing noise restrictions and complaints, Showcase doesn’t have too many neighbours. There’s the man who sleeps under the next bridge downriver, and houseboat residents upstream who should by now be used to the roar of quayside traffic and tourist cruises. In fact, it’s on a quiet route where your correspondent goes running.

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In true rock n’roll fashion, the problem is that the Flèche is too loud. The venue has been the subject of judicial complaints by local residents about excessive noise levels at late hours. However, the cost of renovation to reduce sound emissions is prohibitive. “The latest estimates for constructing a venue within the venue are too high,” said the Flèche management in a statement. “We don’t have enough money for this work and we must close.” Previous remedial works last year have proved to be insufficient.

To howls of disapproval from its regulars, La Flèche d’Or introduced a cover charge of €6 last September – still excellent value (your entry ticket gets you a small beer at the bar) but an affront to the innate anti-capitalist principles of Jacques le Frenchman. The move coincided with the gentrification of the surrounding streets – across from the Flèche the newly-opened Mama Shelter hotel featured a bar/restaurant by ultra-hip designer Philippe Starck – and the new Paris taste for disco-flavoured indie chic. The crowd demographic shifted: now the indie kids were rubbing shoulders with young professionals using Blackberries. The quality of line-up decreased, as the Flèche seemed content to trade on its reputation and profit from its hipness. Competitors like L’International, in the lively Oberkampf area closer to the city centre, began attracting the original Flèche-goers with its own free concerts. Quite simply, La Flèche d’Or became uncool.

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Were it not for the fact that we usually put embedded videos and MySpace links in our posts as evidence, you could be forgiven for thinking that the CLUAS Foreign Correspondent (Paris) simply makes up half the French acts featured here.

Yes, we appreciate that you have trouble taking seriously some of the music we write about.  For instance: today we'll be raving about a young Parisian singer-songer (right) who goes by the nom de rock of Arch Woodmann. Okay, says you, a rather odd anglophone name for a Frenchman but you continue reading nonetheless.

Then we tell you that Arch Woodmann's debut album is called 'Draped Horse Blue Licorne Argentée Feather Blue', and that's where we lose you altogether. You were willing to try Andromakers and take our word for My Internal Playground. But you're just not ready to go the whole 'Draped Horse Blue Licorne Argentée Feather Blue' by Arch Woodmann. Thanks all the same, like, but try selling it next door.

Anyway, for those of you still reading, Arch Woodmann's album is a fine one - a streamlined chassis of solid folk-pop songwriting, powered by an engine of American post-rock. There are even a few flecks of jazz in there.

Just to prove that we're not making all this up, here's the evidence:

(1) Arch Woodmann's MySpace page, where you can listen to tracks off (deep breath) 'Draped Horse Blue Licorne Argentée Feather Blue'. If you want to buy the album by post, cheques must be made out to a Mr Antoine Pasqualini; could this be the singer's true identity?

(2) From an acoustic session for a French music website called Sourdoreille (which translates as 'deaf ear'), here's Arch Woodmann with the just-as-fantastically-named 'Duities And Fruities':

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But for the rest of the world, the Avenue des Champs-Élysées (to give it its full name) is synonymous with Parisian glamour and French culture. Which is true, up to a point. Until the mid-19th century a few peasant hovels still lined the street; some Parisians see its souvenir stores and fast-food joints and maintain that this remains the case.

One of French cinema’s most iconic scenes (left) was filmed here: Jean Seberg in her ‘Herald Tribune’ T-shirt, selling newspapers and walking with Jean-Paul Belmondo in Jean-Luc Godard’s ‘À Bout De Souffle’ (known in English as 'Breathless').

Halfway down, the buildings end and the Champs-Élysées becomes a park-lined avenue, an arena for strolling. The richer of you will turn right onto Avenue Montaigne and its exclusive boutiques, but if you continue down the Champs you’ll see the impressive glass roof of the Grand Palais exhibition hall beside the statue of de Gaulle. Then at the bottom of the avenue you’ll reach Place de la Concorde (formerly home to the French Revolution’s most infamous guillotine, where Sydney Carton does his ‘far far better thing’ at the end of ‘A Tale of Two Cities’), the Tuileries and the Louvre.

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And, just as every late ‘80s/early ‘90s Irish band was labelled ‘The New U-Know-Who’, any promising French electronician is tagged as ‘The New Daft Punk’. Such was the case with Justice, and now it’s happening to an emerging DJ who looks like making it big in 2009.

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Although he takes his nom de rock from Joe Meek, it's fair to say that Stéphane-Franck Pascal's favourite '60s British pop stars are The Beatles.

After all, his second album, 'Sleeping With Big Ben', consisted entirely of Fab Four covers. (The record was released in 2003 in Japan only.) You think you're a dedicated Beatles fan for having read the official biography of Sir Paul by Barry Miles, 'Many Years From Now'? Pascal translated it into French. 

Unsurprisingly, his own songs are steeped in Lennon and McCartneyism, which is never a bad thing for songs. Sortie De Secours' (which translates as 'emergency exit') is the fourth album by MeeK (right), who insists on that upper case 'K' at the end of his name. The album slipped out at the end of 2008 but only came to our attention this week.

MeeK's brand of acoustic pop may be a bit too sugary for some tastes. But then again, there are people who don't like chocolate. And we'll never deter French pop stars from writing melodies and hooks and choruses, stuff many musicians here wouldn't dream of doing lest it taint their art.

Check out MeeK's MySpace page and listen to a selection of songs off 'Sortie De Secours'. First single 'Six Feet Under', inspired by the cult U.S. series of the same name, is currently getting plenty of airplay on Paris radio. Here's the video, a retro and romantic tour around Paris:

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Flairs is the nom de rock of Lionel Flairs, itself a name which is just too good to not be a pseudonym. Mr Flairs divides his time between London and Paris, making rather deadly electro-pop in both cities. Some Flairs tracks have been doing the web-rounds since last year, and now he’s gathered ten of them into an album that already has us planning for our end-of-year Best French Music list.

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