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You might remember that we told you last year about the floating music venues of Paris - boats docked on the Seine by the quay near the Bibliotheque François Mitterand. Being at a gig in the hold of a boat is a strange experience, but one we definitely recommend. (One of these boats, the Batofar, is actually an old Irish lightship still painted fire-engine red.)

The most popular of these venues was the Guinguette Pirate (right), more recently known as the Cabaret Pirate. As the name suggests, the boat had a pirate theme to it, although the music could be anything from electro beats to salsa rhythms.

As the more astute of our readers will have guessed from our use of the past tense, the Guinguette Pirate is no more. The boat still exists and will continue to host a busy programme of concerts and clubs. It's just that the owners have decided to change the name back to that of when it was a fully-functioning boat. So, from this day forth it's La Dame de Canton.

The Oriental flavour to its name is due to the fact that the boat is actually a Chinese junk. (The South China Sea was, and still is, a popular spot for pirates.)

Of the upcoming events on board, the one that catches our ear is the Spectaculaire festival this Sunday 28 September. We hear that one of the performers on the bill is The Mighty Stef (left, on a previous Paris trip). Stef's MySpace confirms the gig, but the venue's programme doesn't mention him.

(We also believed that French singer PacoVolume was on the bill. Again, the venue doesn't list him.)

Your blogger will head along on Sunday to find out, safe in the knowledge that he will not now risk having to walk the plank.

With a tenuous link to walking the plank, here's the video for "Death Threats" by The Mighty Stef, where he finds himself beside the sea:

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The cultural heart of Paris is la rive gauche, the celebrated Left Bank of the Seine. Its beat comes from the district of Saint Germain des Prés. 
 
Saint Germain has impeccable arty credentials. After the Second World War, existentialist writers like Sartre, de Beauvoir and Camus debated in Les Deux Magots and the Café Flore. A half-century before that, Oscar Wilde passed away in his final home, a room at the Hotel Alsace on the rue des Beaux-Arts.

A fat, bearded Jim Morrison would get raucously drunk in those same cafés. Continuing on his tourist trail, he sought out and stayed for weeks in the very hotel room where Wilde died. Morrison died soon after; rumour has it that he expired not in his apartment tub in Le Marais across town, but in a Saint Germain nightclub and was unceremoniously dumped back at his flat.

(There’s no connection between this area and Paris Saint Germain football club. PSG are named after Saint Germain en Laye, an affluent town west of Paris where the club still train.)

Today the Boulevard Saint Germain still buzzes with activity. In front of the street's large old church, especially on Sundays, there are exhibitions and happenings and street performers. You're sure to find musicians there, but they won't be playing 'Wonderwall' or 'Hallelujah' - not on those clarinets and double-basses. Saint Germain is the traditional home of jazz in Paris.
 
The Saint Germain jazz boom happened in the '40s and '50s. True, before the Second World War Django Reinhardt had been playing successfully around Paris with Stephane Grapelli and their group, Le Hot Club de France. (Trivia: the Hot Club de France were one of the first music groups to have a lead guitarist supported by a rhythm guitarist. Today most four- or five- piece rock bands line out in this formation.) But Django's greatest popularity came with his 1951 residency at the Club Saint Germain on rue Saint Benoît. 

Saint Germain was where bebop first hit Europe. The sleekness and melancholia of the new U.S. jazz sound was mother's milk to the dark-dressed, Gaulois-smoking, hip young artists in the clubs of the area. Local singers and artists like Boris Vian and Juliette Greco became French icons.
 
Miles Davis ruled here when he stayed in the French capital in the late 1950s. The monument to his Paris reign is his mournful soundtrack to Louis Malle's 'Ascenseur Pour L'Echauffaud'. One of the greatest and best-loved recordings in jazz history, Davis wrote and recorded it in a couple of days. The film's most famous scene and the score's best known section, when Jeanne Moreau wanders aimlessly along late-night streets, is the essence of Paris.

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It seems that every second French act is playing folk-tinged acoustic indie-pop. It's something of a fashion here.

So far this year we've featured Syd Matters, Barth, Cocosuma, St Augustine, Poney Express, The Rodeo, The Dø, Roken Is Dodelijk, Da Brasilians and adopted Frenchie Micky Green. All of them are clearly in thrall to the likes of Nick Drake and Elliott Smith, which is no bad thing.

Now, lest you think we only have ears for soft-spoken strummers, here's something loud and swaggering.

Pussydelic (right) are a self-styled "girls' rock n'soul band" from Limoges in central France. An all-female six-piece, the group clearly take their lead from Beth Ditto - they make a Gossip-esque punk-funk racket that's high on attitude. Three of the six - Natty, Mayhia and Myriam - are singers, and the band's three-up-front line-up certainly goes for power. But the vocal trio can also harmonise to good effect.

In the often macho world of live gigging, their sense of sisterhood is all the greater - they augment their line-up with Justine the second bass player and Caroline the sound engineer. 

The band's most noticed song to date is called "Dick For A Brain". While it could never reach the dizzyingly high expectations you have of a song called "Dick For A Brain" by an all-female rock band called Pussydelic, it's still enjoyable. They also do a rocked-up version of Nancy Sinatra's "Bang Bang".

You can visit Pussydelic's MySpace page to hear tracks from their recent EP, "Six, Sex And Fun" (a pun on a Serge Gainsbourg hit called "Sea, Sex And Sun"). Here's the band live, playing a song you won't hear on that EP - the raucous "I Don't Need This":

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Remember how we told you about La Route du Rock, the French indie music festival that was in danger of financial meltdown?

The story so far: Last week’s three-day event at Saint Malo in Brittany needed to attract at least 14,000 paying punters to break even and guarantee the festival’s future. However, mere days before the kick-off, it was rumoured that only 8,000 tickets had been sold. The festival director told the media that La Route du Rock was in financial trouble. The festival’s website featured a begging letter asking fans for donations. Now read on…

The attendance was healthy enough to ensure the survival of the bi-annual trip to Brittany. “There will be winter and summer shows in 2009,” declared festival director François Floret, who only days before had been downbeat about the event's future.

Cynical readers will probably wonder if the festival organisers were overplaying their poor-mouth act just to generate extra publicity. However, painting your festival as a dead man walking is hardly going to attract floating voters. That said, 6,000 extra punters don’t just walk up to a geographically-isolated festival at the last minute, as we’re lead to believe here. 

Whatever the reasons, France’s much-loved indie festival seems set for a stable future. The sea air obviously works wonders.

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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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