French pop
Kieron Tyler
In terms of cinema history, 1969’s Les Chemins de Katmandou is a footnote. Directed by André Cayatte, whose most interesting films were 1963’s interrelated marital dramas Jean-Marc ou la Vie Conjugale and Françoise ou la Vie Conjugale, it was a period-sensitive immersion into the world of a group of Nepal-based hippies. Though ostensibly a crime drama, a focus on drugs and free love brought an exploitation allure.For French cinema goers, the titillation was supplemented by Jane Birkin featuring alongside Serge Gainsbourg at the time they were establishing themselves as the nation’s couple to Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Un Voyage Á Travers Dans Le Paysage Électronique Français, the French subtitle, goes further. French Touch is the first exhibition to celebrate and dig into France’s electronic music heritage: exploring the lineage which laid the ground for the world-wide success of Daft Punk.French Touch traces electronic music back from now to when the Futurist musician Luigi Russolo performed in Paris in 1914 – his home-country Italy had not received him warmly – and on through Maurice Martenot, Edgard Varèse, Pierre Schaeffer, Pierre Henry, Jean-Jacques Perrey (pictured below right in 1997), Jean-Michel Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Anthologie 1953–2002 is a monster. A 20-disc set spanning almost 50 years, it tracks one of France’s most beloved singers and songwriters. Gilbert Bécaud died in December 2001, but songs from his posthumously released Je Partirai album are included. Fitting, as his music lives on and the release of this box set marks the 15th anniversary of his death.Outside France, Bécaud is less well known. Though his “A Little Love and Understanding” single charted in Britain in 1975, he did not make a Charles Aznavour-style crossover to mainstream recognition in the Anglophone world. He’s never been given Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Anyone looking for some psychedelic pop to at least give the illusion that we might now actually be in the middle of summer could do much worse than try out the debut album by Anglo-French duo Bosco Rogers. Their 21st century twist on the Monkees’ good grooves is just what the doctor ordered, and Barth Corbelet and Del Vargas’s sun-drenched harmonies and catchy, fuzzy guitars are guaranteed to generate big smiles and some serious rump-shaking from even the most unconfident of dancers.Post Exotic comes straight out of the traps with a bucket load of swagger and the knowing smirk of “Anvers”. “ Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Lizzy Mercier Descloux was an early adopter. In 1975, she travelled from her Paris home to Manhattan and saw The Ramones, Patti Smith, Television and the Richard Hell-edition Heartbreakers. Although the first issue of the New York fanzine Punk came out at the end of the year, punk rock was not yet quite codified. Nonetheless, there was a scene and something new was in the air. Descloux had to check it out and on her return to France, she co-founded the new music monthly Rock News.The new magazine was dedicated to The Velvet Underground. Iggy Pop was its first issue’s cover star. There were Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Sometimes appearances can be deceptive. The frontman on stage looks as generic it gets. His scruffy beard, retro specs, baseball hat, shapeless jeans and the bulging outline of a mobile phone stuffed in his trouser pocket don’t add up to suggest that his band Tahiti Boy & the Palmtree Family are going to be anything distinctive. But the studied casualness belies what actually takes place musically. This is exceptional.The all-purpose hipster is multi-instrumentalist/singer David Sztanke (pictured below, photo © Johanna Cafaro), who has also played as a sideman with Lenny Kravitz, Iggy Pop Read more ...
joe.muggs
There's a current running through the underground club / electronic music of the 2010s that cares not a jot for progress – but neither is it retro as such. It's been called “outsider house”, which is a pretty lame name for stuff that is often extremely accessible and welcoming, and is certainly not just house music. Rather it's a kind of neo-psychedelia, a sound that plays tricks with memory and expectation, collapsing oppositions between sophistication and naiveté, between kitsch and sincerity, and between low and high fidelity in the pursuit of beautiful discombobulation. And as the none- Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Little Bob Story: Off the Rails + Live in ‘78Aki Kaurismäki’s 2011 film Le Havre features a cameo from a hard-rocking band fronted by a grey-haired gentleman who crops up elsewhere in the action. He is Roberto Piazza, and trades under the name Little Bob. Although born in Italy, his family moved to France in 1958 when he was 13. Integral to and at one with France’s perennial love affair with classic rock ‘n’ roll, he formed the band Little Bob Story in Le Havre in 1974.Kaurismäki recognised that the wilful Little Bob is the genuine article: a man forever marinated in the spirit of high- Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
According to the press release for Contrepoint, “AIR have not split up.” Nicolas Godin, one half of the French duo, goes on to say: “We weren’t surprising ourselves anymore… I’d made a statement with AIR and I wanted to go back to the classical world, to grow up musically; to renew myself.” What that actually reveals about his attitude towards the supposedly still-extant AIR is moot, but the result is Contrepoint, his first solo album. It is based around the music of Bach.It’s best to ignore the silly opening cut, “Orca”, a synth-and-metal hybrid reminiscent of a speed-induced Rush and begin Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
A film about 20 years in the life of a character acknowledged as peripheral to a movement in popular culture which spawned global stars is a difficult sell. Audiences are going to wonder whether the chronicling of a minor player not central to the bigger picture is the wrong focus. With Mia Hansen-Løve’s Eden the light is on Paul Vallée, a club DJ trying to make his way in the fertile early Nineties French electro-dance music scene from which Daft Punk became the global breakout phenomenon. And it’s the helmet-wearing duo which loom large over Eden.Eden takes the factual and merges it with Read more ...
Barney Harsent
The problem with many music documentaries is that they suffer from over-familiarity. In a bid to appeal to as wide an audience as possible, they end up spreading themselves too thinly on an area already well covered. Viewers tune in and, largely speaking, have their knowledge reaffirmed while they hang around on the off-chance that there may be some newly uncovered archive footage to make their investment worthwhile. There are notable exceptions to this, of course, and generally they crop close on their subject, or as in the case of Je t'aime: The Story of French Song, focus on an area that Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Whether intentional or not, the third album by French chart-topping duo The dø is effectively a renewal of “Sweet Dreams”-era Eurythmics. The synth bubble-‘n’-pulse and vocal lines nodding towards the choral and gospel inescapably evoke what Annie Lennox and Dave Stewart fashioned in the mid-Eighties. Shake Shook Shaken’s third track “Miracles (Back in Time)” suggests so much of Eurythmics’ “Here Comes the Rain Again” that it’s possible Dan Levy and the Finland-born but France-dwelling Olivia Merilahti are actually paying tribute to Eurythmics.Shake Shook Shaken – with its bizarre sleeve Read more ...