Babylon Circus are currently on their European tour and I was blessed to have been able to see them in Camden Town on Monday. They are in Liverpool tonight and then finish their UK dates in Bristol tomorrow.

Their other European dates can be found here.

So, to mark this, here is the translation of La Caravane which is the third translation on this site from the 2004 album Dances of Resistance.

You can see the band performing La Caravane in the top video to the left. The bottom video is Mister Conqueror from Woodstock 2006 – no translation necessary there but it is one of the higher quality clips of the band performing live.

If you have the opportunity at all to get down and see them in Bristol tomorrow, 31st October, I thoroughly recommend that you do so.

The French expression Les chiens aboient, la caravane passe means something in the area of “let people say what they will”, the image is of continuing to do something regardless of the noise being made about it.

Le Sens De La Gravité was released earlier this year. It’s not one of my favourites but it contains some fine tracks. It’s more serious than Les Fatals Picards’ previous studio album Pamplemousse Mécanique but still retains a fair dose of their humour which bears more than a passing similarity to that of Les Trois Accords.

Two of the better tracks on the album are re-recordings of songs from Pamplemousse Mécanique. The first, Seul Et Célibataire 2 is a reasonably heavy rock track which I intend to translate at some point, but for this post I have decided to go with the second Mon Pére Etait Tellement De Gauche, a light, very pleasant acoustic version of the previous recording. You can hear the versions from both albums using the MP3 widget above or by clicking the iTunes button to launch iTunes on your computer.

As you’ll see in a few paragraphs’ time, the translation has afforded me the delightful opportunity to pick up my fair share of left-wing general knowledge and vocabulary.

What would perhaps have been the best song on Le Sens De La Gravité is called Le jour de la mort de Johnny – a song about the death of Johnny Hallyday. Regrettably, Warner, with whom both Les Fatals Picards and Johnny Hallyday himself are signed, asked for the song not to be included on the album, apparently after Johnny Hallyday objected. I’m not sure how long it will remain on YouTube but this is the video of the song that was used to publicise the album.

You may have seen Les Fatals Picards representing France in the 2007 Eurovision Song Contest. I didn’t know this until today but then again I couldn’t name any of the acts that have represented the UK over the last twenty years either.

It took me a while to decipher the reference to “Chez Casto” – I believed for a moment it may have been “Chez Castro”, but no, it refers to these guys from whom you can indeed buy breeze blocks.

Kolkoses, or kolkhozes, were collective farms in the old USSR. L’Internationale is a revolutionary poem written in 1871 and given here in eight languages. Silicosis is a nasty lung condition and Andrei Tupolev was honoured three times as a Hero of Socialist Labour by The Russian Academy of Sciences.

The election of François Mitterrand in 1981 brought in the first Socialist president of the Fifth Republic and the Socialist Party remained in power until being ousted in 2002.

I still don’t know anything about Andrei Tupolev’s teeth, Brezhnev’s glasses, or why women would wear false eyelashes at a socialist church wedding.

UPDATE: Thank you Ariane for leaving the comment explaining that faux cils “false eyelashes” sounds like faucille “sickle”, and of course la faucille et le marteau “the hammer and sickle” is a communist symbol.

My cousin also came with me to this gig and as neither she nor my girlfriend speak French, have any interest at all in French music, and are at best sceptical about my taste in music, I was praying that the show would be fantastic.

One track from their 2009 album, Le Belle Étoile has recently become available on the UK store. This is one of my favourites from the album, and the track with which the band opened.

The support act had been a female-fronted rock band whose name I still do not know but intend to find out. Update: the support band was iCON Smash My Box! I thought they did a fine job and they sounded different enough from the all-to-common stock rock of our times to make me want to hear more. What’s more is that we knew from their performance that the sound in the room was great.

As the multitude of Babylon Circus band members squeezed onto the stage and launched in Perdu there was no doubt that this was going to be something special. Much as I have always rated their albums, particularly their latest release, the recorded tracks are yet overshadowed by how well the band look, perform and sound on stage. How on Earth do you get ten musicians sounding so great together without a conductor? I can only assume that enormous credit has to go to the sound technicians. I have seen truly great bands reduced to a total mess on stage due to bad sound levels and/or acoustics.

The lead singer, who through energy-induced necessity had been rendered topless by the end of the night addressed the crowd in English while trying to whip us all up into a bunch of bouncing madmen and madwomen. I imagine this was one of the smaller crowds they will have played to this year but I think we held our own. Certainly there were very few people just standing back in mute appreciation. My girlfriend and I made our way through three bottles of red wine during the show and I am not entirely sure what work of witchcraft has managed to see me feeling fine today after the thorough shaking to which my guts were subjected.

Following Perdu were two songs that I have previously translated on this site, De la musique et du bruit and J’aurais bien voulu, both from the 2004 album Dances of Resistance. I had great confidence that my two companions for the night would enjoy most of the stuff from La Belle Étoile, but was less sure about their earlier music which was much more ska/reggae based, and much more revendicatif as I believe the French say. I needn’t have worried because, as I mentioned at the beginning of this blog entry, it was after De la musique et du bruit that I was relieved to hear the words “Oh my God, they’re really good.”

This is certainly a band whose live performance depends very much on the crowd getting on its feet and losing itself in the music.

I’ve always been a bouncer. A few pints and the arrival of Nightboat to Cairo at a friend’s birthday bash on Saturday night had been enough to make my night. Multiply that by some enormous number and that’s how I felt at The Jazz Café yesterday. Oh my God, they really were really good!

Two encores were not enough!

The first was the monkey album. The second is an album from 2007 called The Radioactive Beets Show by Les Gars Dans L’coin. You can listen to extracts from this album as well as extracts from their 2009 EP #8604 by using the widget to the left. I particularly recommend tasting the five tracks on #8604.

You’ll notice that the widget highlights most of the tracks from the first album as having explicit lyrics. I’m not quite sure about this, but I’ll take a closer listen and perhaps translate one of the tracks here at some point to see if we can find out what they’re getting at.

As an aside, it’s interesting to note that France provides all you can eat in terms of ska but if you are looking for French-language rock then you’ll generally have more luck looking towards Quebec.

I am currently searching from some new, inspiring rock band but am having little luck – indeed it was while searching for something with a bit of meat that I stumbled across these guys, and although not quite what I was looking for, I’m very glad I did, and there is enough distorted guitar to keep the cravings in check.

The Radioactive Beets Show and #8604 both merit a good listening. Oh, and did I mention that The Radioactive Beets Show can be picked up for 4.99 GBP on Amazon? I certainly don’t remember the last time I got as much bang for my buck, and the ink’s only two years dry on the album sleeve.

And now I should now start thinking about another translation for the next post.

J’achète is the debut album by Les Singes Savants and was released in May this year.

I know of many a musical gem that has been hidden beneath a cover of inanity but even so, as my “performing monkeys” were downloading it did occur to me that I may need to grow up.

I had listened to the samples on xtrib.com (you can listen to them by clicking the Amazon widget on the left or using the iTunes link to launch your local iTunes store), and with just one or two exceptions, I liked what I heard.

The second track didn’t do a great deal to change my mind but it was quite a foot-tapper so I kept listening (yes, believe me there are albums that I have bought and never listened to fully!)

I had to replay the third track because it was so catchy, track four held its head high and had me wondering what on Earth “tutto va bene” meant (it’s Italian for “tout va bien”, or “all is well”) and by track eight I realised that I was listening to an album that I was truly enjoying. Track eight, incidentally, is currently my favourite on the album is the reason for the title of this article (caboche being slang for “head”.)

Despite the monkeys and the foolery this album contains several songs of an impressive level of song-writing and production. And it’s fun. Even track one sounded fairly good the second time around.

I’m very familiar with albums that start really strong and tail off towards the end. I’m not as familiar with albums such as J’achète which almost got gonged at track two.

Oh, the other album! Yes, I’ll tell you about that tomorrow.