French pop
Kieron Tyler
Definitely not the M that hit with “Pop Muzik” in 1979 and then swiftly vanished. This –M- is a bona fide, stadium-filling superstar. In France, that is. In Camden though, last night, Mathieu Chédid confounded any expectations of what stadium rock ought to be. The evening was rounded off by Chédid and his band dancing in a line to a playback of last year’s single “Mojo”, just as they’d done in the video. They make open and shut gestures with their hands, mimicking a mouth. The audience do the same. Pity that this often bewildering and sold-out show, the first of –M-’s two-night London run, Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“Cut Copy me”, the opening track of Petula Clark’s first British studio album in six years, is beautiful. It could have been created by Saint Etienne at their most melancholy. Her voice almost a whisper, it’s the sound of shadows and uncertainty even with what sounds like a light touch of autotune. The title track follows. Similarly assured, it’s sparse and centred around a rippling piano. Then a by-rote, in-the-shadow-of-Adele version of Gnarls Barkley's "Crazy" breaks the spell.Accompanying “Crazy” are versions of “Imagine”, “Love me Tender”, Gershwin’s “He Loves and She Loves” and a Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The notice saying “table reserved for Lord Chelsea” in Cadogan Hall’s foyer bar instantly signalled this show was likely to be more rarefied than your normal pop concert. It was in keeping with the grandeur of this early 20th century, Byzantine-style former church a minute from Sloane Square. The tone was further elevated by this being a rare, small-venue British outing for Jane Birkin, an actual, proper star.Arriving on stage, head bowed, Birkin began the evening with “Requiem pour un con”, a song her former partner Serge Gainsbourg wrote for the film La Pacha in 1968. Over 90 minutes, she Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Marianne Faithfull: Broken EnglishIn 1979, there was no obvious place for Marianne Faithfull. Identified with the Sixties and the baggage which came from her relationship with Mick Jagger, she had spent part of the decade living on a wall in Soho, a drug addict with few prospects, a period harrowingly detailed in her autobiography. There was an album in 1976, the humdrum, country flavoured Dreamin’ my Dreams, but punk, surprisingly, offered a life line. She appeared on stage with pop-punkers The Boys and, in 1979, issued the extraordinary Broken English, which sounded of its time yet Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
It was predestined that Lou Doillon would shadow her half-sister Charlotte Gainsbourg and their mother Jane Birkin by going into music. More surprising is that her full-length calling card, debut album Places, is entirely written by her. The female members of her clan have generally relied on material from outside, so Doillon is a trailblazer. Part of the annual Trans Musicales festival, this show at Salle de la Cité in Rennes, Brittany’s rain-soaked capital, was an opportunity to discover what she’s about before the UK release of Places next spring.Equally foreseeable is that Doillon’s Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Before approaching any Céline Dion album, a number of obstacles have to be navigated: the anticipation that over-singing is on the horizon, or the knowledge of her Trilby-like relationship to Svengali René Angélil. Most of all though, it’s the fact that she’s so far off the cool scale she might as well be from the Planet Naff rather than Québec. And the album’s slightly cheesy chick lit-style graphics don’t help. But life is strewn with moments which confound. Sans Attendre, her first French-language album for five years, isn’t going to stop the world turning. But it is good.In general, Sans Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The Royal Albert Hall is pretty big. It's a prestige venue, but everything is relative. For the overwhelmingly French audience, the first British headlining show by Johnny Hallyday was the equivalent of seeing Paul McCartney, Tom Jones and Cliff Richard sharing a bill at the back room of the Dog & Duck.Hallyday is a stadium-packer in France and the French-registered cars and coaches parked around Kensington Gore testified that this was an international draw. He sang mostly in French, spoke in French and was, well, French, even though his music is very firmly a blues, soul and rock'n’roll Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Sometimes, it doesn’t matter who you are. You might be a charismatic performer, or the most energetic band in the world. But some settings can’t be outperformed. Holding Berlin Festival at the city’s astonishing out-of-commission Tempelhof airport sets a challenge that’s almost impossible to rise to. Although it began working in the late 1920s, the surviving buildings were completed in 1941 and form a single block over a kilometre long, wrapped around an open quadrangle. The gleaming, pale buildings dwarf anything.The entrance hall is a cathedral to Albert Speer’s vision of a modern, world- Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Ride: Going Blank AgainKieron TylerWhen Oxfordshire’s Ride arrived in the shops via Creation Records, they were the sonic little brothers to label-mates My Bloody Valentine. But their second album, 1992’s Going Blank Again, ploughed its own path, leaving the competition behind. Twenty years on, this smart, book-bound reissue adds most of the tracks from contemporary EPs and teams the album with a DVD of a March 1992 Brixton Academy live show.In the liner notes, guitarist – and future Oasis bassist, and current Beady Eye member - Andy Bell admits Ride were initially an “an amalgamation of the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Claude François doesn’t have the hipster cachet of Serge Gainsbourg, but he did lead an extraordinary life and died young. He also wrote “Comme d’habitude” which was Anglicised to become “My Way”. His live shows were spectacular, the women he married, dated and flirted with were striking, he had tax debts, a father who rejected him and his chosen career, and a mother addicted to gambling. It’s more than enough to fuel this two-and-a-half hour biopic.But Cloclo isn’t going to lead to an Anglophone embracing of François – universally known by the nickname Cloclo. However strong the image, his Read more ...
theartsdesk
Sandy Denny: Sandy (Deluxe Edition), Like An Old Fashioned Waltz (Deluxe Edition), Rendezvous (Deluxe Edition)Graham FullerSandy Denny completists unable to drop a thousand to acquire the now scarce 2010 19-disc box set can fill their collections another way. They can add to their Denny-era Strawbs, Fairport Convention, and Fotheringay CDs last year’s remastered The North Star Grassman and the Ravens, the melancholy 1971 masterpiece with which she launched her solo career, and these three newly spruced and expanded albums: Sandy (1972), another classic full of loneliness and yearning; the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
If you’re not French, there are probably two things you know about Claude François: that he wrote “My Way” and that he died from electrocution when fiddling with a lighting fixture while in the bath. In France, however, he’s been part of pop-cultural furniture since the mid-Sixties and has remained so since his death in 1978. He’s even more ubiquitous right now due to a biopic, DVD box set and TV specials dedicated to the constantly dancing dynamo known as “Cloclo”. Posters for Cloclo line Paris’s streets.Unlike Serge Gainsbourg, François has remained a local delicacy. It’s unlikely the film Read more ...