Summer's almost here, when the theoretical possibility of fine weather has bands on the back of lorries in every field, square and football pitch. In the rain. It's the festival season!

Your Paris-based blogger isn't sure if the brand-new Irish recession is going to limit your festival and travel spending power. It might even force you all in Eire to make heart-breaking sacrifices: only five drinking binges per week, no new Celtic jersey, clearing the second mortgage with the fourth credit card. Be strong.

Anyway, if you're thinking of travelling to a festival in Europe as part of your summer holidays, your blogger (like last year) will give you some ideas for outdoor music events in France. They tend to be cheap and sunny, so let's hope that continues for 2008. As soon as substantive line-ups are announced, we'll post about them.

First big event to play its hand is the Main Square Festival. It takes place in Arras, a town in the north of France near Calais, on the weekend of 4-6 July.

The location may not be as sun-kissed and exotic as regions further south, but the festival has attracted some big names. Okay, so the Radiohead show may not really be happening thanks to 'brown energy', but they'll definitely be there, headlining the Sunday night line-up that also features Sigur Ros, The Wombats and French band The Do. And more! If you didn't bother buying tickets for their Malahide show, now you can also not bother buying tickets for their French festival show. Who says globalisation is bad?

The Saturday bill is topped by Mika, born for summer festivals (and Christmas parties), with The Kooks, The Hoosiers, Digitalism and local Libertines-worshippers BB Brunes. And more!

The really impressive night of the show is the dance-flavoured Friday night. In reverse order, it stars the Chemical Brothers, Underworld, Justice, 2 Many DJs and Boys Noize. (Wait for it.) And more!

Tickets are still on sale via this page on the site of French ticket-agent FNAC, who are currently offering a three-day pass for just €95 instead of €135. The Radiohead-night costs €55 and the other two cost just €45. Camping costs an extra €7.50 and can also be booked in advance through FNAC.

So how do we get to Arras? Well, Calais is a well-known port, and the nearest big town is Lille, which is on the Eurostar line as well as the regular networks. You could fly to Paris or Brussels/Charleroi. The French rail system, SNCF, is planning to run a special train service from Lille to Arras for the festival. (As French regional trains are mostly controlled by French regional government, it's quite common to have special subsidised festival train services as support for the arts and culture).

Full details and updates are available in French on the festival's MySpace page - but you can get all your "useful informations" [sic] on the festival's English site.

That Friday night looks like great value. Here's 'DVNO' by Justice:

[Read more...]

Our favourite French radio presenter is Bernard Lenoir, who hosts an hour of cracking indie (with regular live sessions and world music specials) at 10pm Paris time on France Inter. You can listen to archived shows and check out his playlists on the C'est Lenoir website.

We have one sizeable quibble, though - he doesn't play enough French acts. Decent French pop bands, we mean. The only homegrown acts he features are godawfully-boring ageing wannabe poets like Alain Bashung or Murat who speak their lyrics over stale rock riffs. We're not even going to link to them.

But maybe that policy is changing. Last night Lenoir played 'Kim And Jessie' by M83, a lovely slice of '80s-sounding indie synthness from new album 'Saturdays = Youth'.

M83 is the project of Anthony Gonzalez (right) from Antibes on the swanky French Riviera.  Regular CLUAS readers may recall Daragh Murray's glowing review for his 2005 album 'Before The Dawn Heals Us'. (M83's album, not Daragh's.) The motorway-sounding name actually comes from an obscure constellation, and also a popular brand of machine-gun. (Again, M83 and not Daragh.)

'Saturdays = Youth' is the fifth M83 album. Action-packed with MBV-style chaussure-gazing and house-y beats and swishy Air/Jarre synths, it's all very nice stuff indeed.

You can see M83 in Dublin on 25 April, when he plays at (of all places) the Andrew's Lane Theatre. (Music at Andrew's Lane? Since when? Your ex-pat blogger now feels completely out of touch with his ex-home of Dubbalin and is pining for Tayto crisps.)

There are plenty of fine tracks on M83's MySpace page. From that new album, here's 'Graveyard Girl':

[Read more...]

Lucien Ginsburg (right) was born in Paris on 2 April 1928, eighty years ago today.

In 1944 he changed his name - to Lucien Guimbard. The rest of his family also adopted the temporary new surname: at the time they were hiding from occupying Nazi forces who wished to send them to a concentration camp with other Jewish families. Before fleeing Paris with his family, young Lucien wore the yellow star, which he would later cynically call his 'sheriff's star'.

It's not clear when exactly Lucien Ginsburg changed his name for the second time. We only know that by the end of the 1950s he was playing in Paris piano bars as Serge Gainsbourg. The first name is that of an everyday Frenchman; the Frenchified English surname evokes aristocratic British sang-froid. Throughout his career he would try to embody both aspects.

As Serge Gainsbourg (left) he made some of pop's greatest music. His golden age was the period bookended by 1967's 'Bonnie And Clyde' and 1971's 'Histoire De Melody Nelson', still two hugely influential albums. He enjoyed a creative (West) Indian summer in 1979 with a reggae album that included his version of 'La Marseillaise'.

Unfortunately, outside France he is only remembered for one throwaway duet he made with his partner - and it's her contribution that made the song (in)famous.

One last time he changed his name. In the 1980s, his years of terminal decline, he became Gainsbarre - a name to put to his increasingly boorish behaviour and ugly appearance. This was the period of his drunken TV appearances: chatting up Whitney Houston and insulting French singer Catherine Ringer.

Lucien Ginsburg, Lucien Guimbard, Serge Gainsbourg and Gainsbarre died on 2 March 1991. They are buried in the Cimitière Montparnasse, Paris, in a tomb (right) covered with used metro tickets in honour of his first big hit, 'Le Poinçonnneur des Lilas' - a song about being the ticket-puncher at Lilas metro station. (Just opposite is the grave of Samuel Beckett, where fans often leave bananas as a reference to 'Krapp's Last Tape'.)

His daughter Charlotte plans to make a Serge museum of his long-time Paris home on Rue de Verneuil, near the Boulevard Saint-Germain.

As 2 April 2008 happens to be the day that Bertie announced his departure, here's Serge Gainsbourg singing 'Je Suis Venu Te Dire Que Je M'En Vais' - in English, 'I've Come To Tell You I'm Going':

[Read more...]

Having turned down the eco-unfriendly Glastonbury festival, Radiohead's green demands will be met at their concert in Arras, France on 6 July.

The show, part of the northern town's Main Square Festival, will be one of the most energy-efficient music events staged in Europe this summer. Up to 80% of the show's electrical needs will be supplied from renewable sources.

The Radiohead concert will be powered with energy drawn from biomass - in other words, human waste. This is thanks to a new €12 million waste treatment plant in Calais. The centre, opened in January, incorporates a process developed by engineers in Thailand in which sewage material is treated with nitrogen at high temperatures. The result, euphemistically called 'bio-oil' or 'brown energy', causes much less pollution than traditional oil when burned.

As part of the festival's commitment to using this new energy source, the contents of onsite portaloos - including those backstage - will be brought directly to the treatment plant by truck every night. Bio-oil will provide the energy for the concert's sound system, which means that what fans hear on the night will come entirely from the waste treatment process.

In addition, an onsite biogas converter (as used by the Indian government) will generate additional energy from smaller-scale activities like the catering tent and press centre.

"We are happy that Radiohead will play at our green festival," said the event promoters. "The band have always practised recycling, and they say they are interested in this sewage conversion system."

A Radiohead spokesperson praised the festival as "a valuable contribution to promoting sustainable development. Radiohead are committed to reducing their emissions, which is good news for conscientious music lovers around the world."

Here's 'Karma Police', which a slanderous, polluting 'playa hata' might unfairly allege recycles 'Sexy Sadie' by The Beatles:

[Read more...]

You've probably been following (via On The Record) the adventures of Bell X1 (right) in the USA.

With the States slayed, the Celbridge band's next objective is to conquer the old continent. In April and May, Bell X1 will be supporting Nada Surf on the latter's European tour.

The two bands will be calling to Spain, Germany, Denmark, Luxembourg, the Netherlands... and it all kicks off in France, where Nada Surf have always been more than one-hit wonders.

After rolling off the ferry at Cherbourg, Bell X1 will be down the road at Caen on 21 April. The following night they hit Paris, with a show at the Bataclan - a lovely ballroom-style hall in the hip Rue Oberkampf part of town.

The French leg of the tour ends with a concert in Lyon on April 26.

With luck, the three French dates should help Bell X1 to build on their current exposure in France. 'Flock' has just been released here on the Rykodisc label and is on the listening posts of the bigger record stores. What's more, 'Flame' and 'Just Like Mr Benn' have been getting airplay on Paris radio.

And no, none of the French DJs have called the band "Bell Onze".

What the DJs have been mentioning without fail, though, is Bell X1's link to Damien Rice. Their former Juniper bandmate is very popular in France, a country which always loves sensitive artists - especially those visitors who do their interviews in French, like Damo does. We don't know if Paul Noonan spent as much time on his French homework as he obviously did studying 'Soundings'.

You can check out the full Bell X1 European tour schedule on their MySpace page. Here's 'Alphabet Soup', which features a reference to an Irishwoman who spent a lot of time in France:

[Read more...]

While everyone in England has been chattering about Madame Sarkozy, here in Paris all the talk is about a different female pop star and pin-up.

The big music news in France isn't the Teenagers album or summer festival line-ups. No, word on the boulevard is about two 2009 stadium shows by France's biggest female singing star, Mylène Farmer (right). The Quebec-born singer is often referred to as the French Madonna, for reasons that will become apparent as you read on.
 
We don't need to spend much time discussing her art: it's bland Pet Shop Boys/Dido-esque synth-pop that hasn't changed much since she started selling millions of units in the mid-'80s. Apart from her music, though, Farmer is a highly entertaining character whose story includes controversy, tragedy and mass hysteria. In other words, a proper pop star.
 
Born near Montreal in 1961, Mylène Gautier changed her surname to that of Frances Farmer, the American actress today remembered only for her psychiatric problems. Moving to France as a child, young Mylène moved from modelling to acting before meeting her future partner Laurent Boutonnat, who kickstarted her musical career by co-writing her singles and directing her videos.
 
As was the vogue in the '80s, Farmer's videos were epic productions, usually Barry Lyndon-esque costume dramas of over ten minutes. Costumes were often optional, however. The promo for 'Libertine' features what is considered to be the first full-frontal nude video appearance by a pop star. In a more recent video, 'L'Amour N'est Rien', she performs a complete strip-tease. Another video, for 'Je Te Rends Ton Amour', features Farmer as a blind woman raped and crucified in a church. And controversial film-maker Abel Ferrera directed the video for 'California', with Farmer playing a prostitute who murders her pimp.

The songs were just as provocative, often with sexual references or Lolita-esque characters. Farmer's shock-value and saucy image fuelled her incredible success - to date she has sold over 25 million albums worldwide.

Being a scantily-clad pop star meant that Farmer inevitably attracted stalkers. In 1991 one deranged fan arrived at her record company's Paris offices, demanding to see her. On being told that Farmer was not there, the man produced a gun and held the staff hostage. The situation ended tragically, with the stalker killing a receptionist before shooting himself dead.

The incident persuaded Farmer to move to California and live in near-reclusion. Her subsequent career has been conducted with minimum public appearances; typically, one press conference or interview per album or tour. This has only served to intensify the hysteria and speculation surrounding her.

Farmer is back in the news this week, with the announcement of 2 concerts at the Stade de France in Paris in September 2009 (yes, a year and a half from now). With depressing predictability, the posters (left) that are now plastered all over the Paris metro have raised some controversy.

They depict Farmer sprawled in a car park - according to some critics, suggesting that she has been either run over by a car, raped or has fallen from a height. Seeing the poster for ourselves, those are debatable interpretations - but once again Farmer has generated massive publicity for herself by doing very little.

So, for the most part Farmer's records are nothing worth hearing. There's one exception - we've already featured a fantastic single called 'Moi Lolita' (a predictably 'shocking' Farmer title) that she wrote for her protegé, a teen singer called Alizée. The 2001 single was a Top Ten hit in the UK and received plenty of daytime airplay in Ireland. Apart from the dubious lyrics, it's a brilliant piece of disco-pop.

Here's one of the rare not-awful Farmer songs, accompanied by an even rarer video where Farmer keeps her clothes on (the snow-covered setting was probably a factor there). As if to compensate for the lack of nudity, this 2005 song is heavy on the curse-words. It's called 'F*** Them All' and in France there were no asterisks or bleeps. The song is in French except for the chorus (the title, shouted) and a venomous English middle section. Imagine our thrill at hearing this on Saturday-morning kids TV:

[Read more...]

The Fondation Cartier is one of the hippest and most interesting cultural exhibition spaces in Paris. The building itself - all glass and greenery - is impressive yet intimate. Similarly, its shows are ambitious but always accessible and informative.

Your blogger saw the excellent 'Rock n'Roll 39-59' exhibition there last summer. And this spring the Fondation Cartier rocks out again, as it presents a selection of visual work by rock icon Patti Smith (right).

The exhibition is centred on Smith's photography. Unlike the sharp, provocative images of Robert Mapplethorpe (who took the famous cover shot of Smith for her 'Horses' album), her black and white Polaroid pictures are often blurred and impressionistic, making the viewer fill in the details and outlines.

One interesting series of photos depicts personal belongings of artists who influenced her: Mapplethorpe's slippers, Virginia Woolf's bed and Herman Hesse's typewriter. The viewer's instinct is to work back from the possession to its celebrated owner.

The show also features drawings and films made by Smith since her teens.

Though Smith and her music evoke late-'70s New York, her personal inspiration has come largely from Paris. Famously, she has spoken of Rimbaud as a major influence on her lyrics, creating new interest in the French poet. She first came to Paris in 1969, and drawings from that period can be seen in the show.

Among all the Frenchness there's an Irish contribution to Smith's exhibition. Kevin Shields has collaborated on an audio piece called 'The Coral Sea'.

As well as the visual exhibits, there are a number of live music events at the centre during the show's run. To kick things off, the lady herself will perform readings and music dedicated to Virginia Woolf. On 6 April Smith will be joined by longtime associates Lenny Kaye and Tony Shanahan for an acoustic concert. Other concerts during the exhibition period will feature Tom Verlaine and Jeffrey Lewis.

The show runs from 28 March until 22 June.  

Here's some vintage live action from Patti Smith, performing 'Free Money' live in Stockholm in 1976:

[Read more...]

Last Friday being March 21, this Easter weekend was officially the start of spring. Paris is famous for being beautiful in springtime - and your blogger can confirm that the city looks and feels fantastic at the moment.

At lunchtime today the sun was shining. We strolled down the Champs-Elysées, where the trees were beginning to show new leaves. Across Place de la Concorde to the Tuileries, with the Musée d'Orsay to the right across the river and the Louvre straight ahead. The Seine was swollen with brown water from faraway mountains; artists sat on the bank sketching the Ile de la Cité with swooping pencil strokes. Most of the weekend tourists had left for home, so both banks were relatively quiet. Bliss was it in that afternoon to be alive...

...and then around four o'clock a large black rubbish bag of a cloud tore open and spilled rain on everyone. Back to work tomorrow, then.

If you live in Paris, springtime is also when you start dreaming of escape from the city. If you listen carefully over the din of traffic on the boulevards, you can hear fresh new grass rustling in the mountain breeze, bicycle wheels whirring down country lanes, church bells ringing over villages and valleys.

There's a song on the radio these days which captures this longing to burst out of the city and into the country. Poney Express (left) are a duo, Anna and Robin. They make the sort of breezy acoustic pop that lots of French acts seem to be exploring these days (Cocoon being our favourite).

Aside from his Poney Express work, Robin is the bass player with popular French indie band Louise Attaque. Popular, that is, except with your Paris correspondent. In our very first French Letter article, back in January 2006, we named them as being among the chief culprits in making the tuneless, joyless rock that dominated the French scene on our arrival. Thankfully, we've found loads of brilliant French pop since then - and Robin's new act is higher in melodies and joie de vivre than his old one.

The song we're talking about, 'Paris De Loin' ('Paris from afar'), exudes this desire to escape the capital. It opens with a pulsating bassline full of adrenaline, and then bursts free with acoustic strumming and brushed drumming like those whirring bicycle wheels we described above. By the time Anna and her breathy voice gets to the opening line ("Quitter Paris..." - 'Leave Paris...') you're already miles away in some rural paradise, drinking wine and eating fine food in the sunshine.

Poney Express have plenty other nice songs which you can hear on their MySpace page. In May they'll be supporting Jonathan Richman when the great man tours France before visiting Ireland. Which reminds us that there's an Irish connection to Poney Express - Sean O'Hagan arranged the strings on 'Daisy Street', their forthcoming album. 

There's no official video yet for 'Paris De Loin', but someone in the YouTube community has obliged with the customary song + still photo home-made video. And here's an acoustic version of the song that the pair performed for the Takeaway Shows:

Paris De Loin

[Read more...]

No doubt the highlight of your ongoing Saint Patrick's celebrations will be Jean Michel Jarre's show at the National Concert Hall in Dublin on 18 and 19 March.
 

The Frenchman will be performing his classic 'Oxygène' album in its entirety. What's more, he'll be doing so on the same analogue synthesisers (around 50 of them!) he used for the original recording back in 1976.

Listening to 'Oxygène' today, it sounds surprisingly solid and contemporary. True, it lacks the electricity of fellow electronica-pioneers Kraftwerk's best tracks -
but Jarre's masterpiece has none of the swishy panpipe-moods blandness typically associated with his later work. The career of Jarre-lovers Air seems to have followed a similar path; where 'Moon Safari' was fresh and well-written, later albums such as 'Pocket Symphony' are ghastly elevator music.

If you're heading along to see Jarre this week, you're lucky to see him in such an intimate setting. The typical JMJ live show involves hundreds of thousands of punters, one of whom tends to be a Guinness Book Of Records person doing a quick head count.

In 1990, 2.5 million fans watched him perform beside the Grande Arche at La Défense, the business district at the edge of Paris. He topped that with his 1997 Moscow concert, attended by a mindblowing THREE AND A HALF MILLION PEOPLE. In other words, the entire population of the Republic of Ireland.

Here's a recently-made video for the most famous track off Jarre's greatest album - the instantly-recognisable 'Oxygène IV':

[Read more...]

The annual South By Southwest (SXSW) music convention opens today in Austin, Texas. Acts from around the world will perform in showcases and hope to catch the eye of record industry figures.

There's a sizeable French presence at this year's event. The French Music Export Office will hope to capitalise on a successful 2007, which saw worldwide sales of 27.6 million units for la musique française. As we noted in our recent Victoires de la Musique feature, though, that figure includes French-made albums by non-French acts like Feist.

Intriguingly, the French delegation will take part in what they call "a speed-dating session involving French and American music professionals." Always the old 'French lover' routine; works every time.

At the time of writing, 13 acts have been confirmed as representing la hexagone in Austin this week. However, like with Feist, the definition of a French act seems quite broad and almost arbitrary on the part of the French Music Export Office. The criteria is that the act's releases be produced in France, thus representing the French music industry. For instance, the French delegation is putting forward Digitalism - who are from Germany. But as their 2007 album 'Idealism' was released on the Paris-based Kitsuné label, the Teutonic techno duo find themselves on the other side of the Maginot Line for SXSW.

It's the same story for two other non-French Kitsuné acts. First, the LCD Soundsystem-esque Thieves Like Us. Two of their three members are Swedish and one is American, and the three met up in Berlin. And Los Angeles-based producers Guns n' Bombs were born in places like Italy and Denmark. No matter: for SXSW they'll all be wearing berets, going "ooh la la!" and so forth. Le French touch is certainly a useful flag of convenience for electronica acts hoping for an easy sale worldwide.

Similarly, many pop fans will be surprised to see the gentle indie-folk-pop of Herman Dune (left) lining out for France. Surely they're Swedish too? Well... no. The Herman Dune family have a French father and a Swedish mother, that's for sure.

But they see themselves as Gallic as Edith Piaf eating croissants while strolling down the Champs-Elysées: "The band is French," they unequivocally told Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet in January 2007.

There's also some confusion about the nationality of Yael Naim, also representing France in Texas. Born in Paris, she moved to Israel at a young age and grew up there. Naim returned to Paris in 2000 to begin her music career. The matter is complicated by current anti-Israeli feeling in France, including a call to boycott a prestigious international book fair in Paris because it features Israel as the country of honour.

In any case, Naim can claim dual nationality and as a French-based recording artist she (like Feist) also won a Victoire recently. Enjoying priceless exposure as the soundtrack artist to the current Apple MacBook advertising campaign, Naim is primed to be one of the big hits of SXSW.

No such nationality doubts about The Parisians. We featured their Libertines-influenced garage-indie back in 2006 when they appeared on the influential 'Paris Calling' compilation of new French bands. Continuing the Libertines connection are US-based Rock&Roll, chosen by Pete Doherty himself (so the story goes) to provide the music to fashion designer Roberto Cavalli's spring-summer 2008 collection.

Other French rock acts at SXSW are the Strokes-like Neimo and two Paris guitar bands with an eye to the dancefloor: Adam Kesher (actually a six-piece band with no member of that name) and Cheveu. The electronic contingent is completed by Fluokids, while The Rodeo (anagram of Dorothée, the singer's name, who also fronts a band called Hopper) will provide indie-folk back up Herman Dune (who are French, okay?)

So, those are the acts officially being presented at SXSW by the French music industry. But that's by no means the end of the Frenchness in Austin this week. Another 'Paris Calling' band, Brooklyn will be there, looking to build up momentum before the release of 'Clandestine' their debut album.  And you can count in yet another French electro act, The Toxic Avenger.

Here's our pick of the French acts at SXSW 2008: The Rodeo, performing 'I'm Rude':

[Read more...]