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The last few years saw an explosion in the number of summer music festivals big and small, not just in Ireland but across Europe.

However, the boom seems to have ended this season. Just last weekend we heard of the Dysart Festival in Kilkenny, which had to drastically re-cut its cloth. Then in Britain there was the now-infamous Zoo8, where the line-up was decimated when it emerged that acts were not guaranteed payment.

Mainland Europe, relatively unscathed by the credit crunch, hasn’t escaped the financial problems in the music industry. In France, one famous summer festival seems to be in serious trouble.

La Route du Rock is a three-day event that takes places every mid-August in Saint Malo, a quaint fortified town on the coast of Brittany. With a line-up that always features the season’s hippest alternative acts, it’s the traditional summer holiday for many French indie kids. This year’s event, the 18^th edition, features Foals, The Dodos, Pivot, The Notwist, The Ting Tings, Menomena, Tindersticks, The Breeders, Sigur Ros and others.

As an independent event without corporate sponsors or mainstream marquee names, La Route du Rock needs 14,000 paying punters to break even. However, with the 2008 edition just a few days away, word on the boulevard is that only 8,000 tickets have been sold – a potentially catastrophic shortfall. Unless 6,000 extra indie kids miraculously manifest themselves in Saint Malo this weekend, the festival doesn't look likely to reappear in 2009.

La Route du Rock has been in a precarious position for some time. Since 2006 the festival has run a series of winter concerts in February, straining its flimsy finances even more. Last summer the organisers took a chance and booked a big-name act, the reformed Smashing Pumpkins. The gamble backfired. Only 10,000 fans came to Saint Malo – not enough to turn a profit - and the festival’s indie reputation took a bashing.

Even with generous public support from the local council and regional authorities, La Route du Rock is in difficulty. Festival director François Floret admitted to financial problems in an interview this week with regional paper Ouest France. “La Route du Rock is in danger,” he said. “We’re in a very delicate situation and we hope to attract at least 14,000 fans to get out of it.”

At the time of writing, La Route du Rock 2008 is still due to begin this Thursday, 14 August.

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Research from France has found that the louder the music in a bar, the more you will drink.

The claim is made by Nicolas Gueguen, professor of behavioural science at the University of Bretagne-Sud in Brittany, in a paper entitled “Sound Level of Environmental Music and Drinking Behaviour: A Field Experiment with Beer Drinkers” which has been published in the journal “Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research”.

For the purposes of consistency, the standard drink was a 25 cl. glass of draught beer (i.e. a half pint, the normal unit of beer consumption in France). Another criterium was the music being played: only current chart hits.

 

At random, and with the permission of the bar owners, the research team changed the sound levels between either 72 decibels, considered normal, or 88 decibels, considered loud. Each time, the researchers would observe one subject’s drinking patterns. After the observed subject left the bar, sound levels were again randomly selected and a new subject was chosen.

The results showed a link between loud music and the tendency of bar patrons to drink more and faster. At the normal decibel level, customers had an average of 2.6 drinks and took 14.5 minutes to finish each drink. However, when the music was loud, customers ordered an average of 3.4 drinks and took less than 11.5 minutes to finish each one.

Guéguen has two possible explanations for his team’s findings. "One, in agreement with previous research on music, food and drink, high sound levels may have caused higher arousal, which led the subjects to drink faster and to order more drinks," he says.

"Two, loud music may have had a negative effect on social interaction in the bar, so that patrons drank more because they talked less."

In other words, loud music gets you excited but stops you having a conversation, so you channel your energy into drinking. The results are consistent with findings of psychological manipulation in advertising and supermarket environments.

However, Professor Gueguen makes a more serious point. Over 70,000 a year die in France because of chronic alcohol consumption, and drinking is linked the majority of fatal car accidents. "We have shown that environmental music played in a bar is associated with an increase in drinking," he said. "We need to encourage bar owners to play music at more of a moderate level, and make consumers aware that loud music can influence their alcohol consumption."

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A review of the album 'Year Of The Husband' by The Dudley Corporation

Review Snapshot: The Dublin trio return at last, bringing us a mixed bag of well-written alt-pop songs (yay!) filled out with Radiohead-style post-rock noodling (nay!). Likeable and interesting, it’ll charm you at times – but you’ll hardly get swept off your feet.

The Cluas Verdict? 7 out of 10

Full Review:
The more sentimental indie fans among you may find it charming that The Dudley Corporation story has gone from “The Lonely World Of…” to “In Love With…” and has now reached marriage. “Year Of The Husband” is named for the fact that the three Corpo members (Dudley, Joss and Mark) all got married during the making of this album.

Not that it’s a slushfest of marital bliss, but “Year Of The Husband” certainly has a romantic tint to it, with plenty of lovelorn lyrics and sweet arrangements. However, the album’s frequent tempo changes, post-rock blurriness and shifts from quiet to loud will remind most listeners of serious, unromantic Radiohead. This is most clear in the prog-experimental “Leave A Last Kiss” and “We Angled Our Shadows And Cast Them in Stone”.

Guests on this album include Nigel Farrelly of The Waiting Room and Carol Keogh of Automata and The Tycho Brahe/Tychonaut, and Keogh contributes significantly to the record’s standout track, “Step-Out”. The contrast between her clear, distinctive voice and Dudley Colley’s indie slurring gives this rock-out a solid structure that’s lacking in the more impressionistic tracks elsewhere on the album.

Indeed, the quality of this record increases significantly when The Dudley Corporation drop the abstract noodling and deliver more focused material. A simple song like “Vapour Trails” suddenly takes off with a shimmering slide guitar lick that captures the restless escapism of the title and lyrics.

Having opened with the uptempo alt-rock chugging of “The Lens Begins”, the album closes in a much quieter setting. Another reference point for this record is the U.S. slowcore of Low, and the two closing tracks, “Aliens” and “Don’t Give Up, Stupid”, are slices of melancholic Americana that are much more satisfying than the band’s Radiohead-isms.

So, while this album features a good handful of quality alt-rock tunes, there’s a nagging sense that its more experimental stretches are just filler. You’ll like “Year Of The Husband”, but it’s best just to stay friends with it.

Aidan Curran

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Back in the summer of 2006, when this blog was still an old-fashioned monthly column, we predicted world domination for Versailles band Phoenix (below right). They had just released their splendid third album, "It's Never Been Like That", and looked set to capitalise on the exposure they received from featuring on the soundtrack to Sofia Coppola's "Lost In Translation".

And as singer Thomas Mars was going out with Coppola, there was a celebrity-gossip angle that was surely good for gaining mainstream attention.

Well, despite our enthusiasm and some glowing reviews in the UK and US music press, the album didn't break the charts. Still, Phoenix have built up a solid international fanbase from years of constant touring.

Time for some useful information:

Trivia (1): Phoenix formed to play as a session band for a remix of Air's "Kelly Watch The Stars".

Trivia (2): It was Mars, under the pseudonym of Gordon Tracks, who sang the vocals on Air's "Playground Love" from Coppola's screen adaptation of "The Virgin Suicides".

Trivia (3): Guitarist Laurent Brancowitz played with Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christos in a band called Darlin'. On their 1992 UK tour the band were dismissed by Melody Maker as "a bunch of daft punk". Wonder what ever happened to the other two lads?

Phoenix are currently in New York recording their as-yet-untitled fourth album, due for release in November. Before that, we can get a taster of what the new album will sound like. The band have contributed a new track to a promotional campaign for jewellers Cartier.

"Twenty-One One Zero" is quite different to the classic indie-popness of their last album. Opening with a Kraftwerk-esque loop, the track brings in an Eno-style ambient synth treatment, some pounding drums and a squally guitar. It all builds to an arena-friendly burst of energy.

Sound familiar? Well, we reckon it shares a lot with U2's "Where The Streets Have No Name". Are Phoenix planning to go all stadium-rock and turn a few dollars Stateside? Let's hope "Twenty-One One Zero", while diverting in its way, is just work in progress and they have some killer tunes in the bag.

You can check out the full five minutes-plus of "Twenty-One One Zero" on the special Cartier MySpace. As a preview, here's the first three minutes - and they don't even get to the track's two lines of lyrics. Hmmm:

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July 14 may well be the birthday of modern France, but modern French people prefer to celebrate July 12. Ten years ago today, the French football team won the World Cup, beating Brazil 3-0 in the final in Paris.

Even for non-football fans, this date now carries enormous emotional weight. The French side that night was a multicoloured mix of black, white and north African origins - an accurate cross-section of French society. Jean-Marie Le Pen, leader of the extreme-right Front National, had bemoaned the excess of non-white players in the French squad - completely misjudging the mood of the moment. There were optimistic hopes that the exploits of Zizou and co. would slay the beast of French racism.

This optimism was cruelly shattered in 2002. In that year's presidential election, five million French people voted for Le Pen and put him into the second round run-off against Jacques Chirac. As for les bleus, their World Cup defence was a disaster and they came home from South Korea after the first round.

Tonight at the Stade de France, scene of that famous victory a decade ago, the 1998 squad will play against an international selection managed by Arsène Wenger and Hristo Stoitchkov.

For French people, one piece of music evokes those dizzy heights of le douze juillet. Yes, football fans here get all misty-eyed whenever they hear that old disco classic, "I Will Survive".

Why has a feminist anthem from the 1970s become the theme to France's 1998 World Cup win? Well, anyone who's ever attended a French international rugby match will have heard a brass band in the crowd, playing 'La Marseillaise' and other motivational tunes. During the 1998 World Cup in France, these sports-loving musicians took to playing the trumpet refrain from a 1995 cover of Gloria Gaynor's hit, by the Hermes House Band. The French trumpeteers would throw in a few "Olé!" flourishes and break into a can-can rhythm, all to entertain the crowds.

It caught on, and soon French fans were singing along in "la-la-la" style and repeating that one line all through the night. By the time Didier Deschamps lifted the trophy, that single line embodied the joy and celebration of a nation.

Even today, if you find yourself at a French party or campsite and you wish to break the ice, just start singing the trumpet break to "I Will Survive". Here's the Hermes House Band version that captured the imagination of all France:

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