Today sees the launch of French Radio London which is aimed at the 400,000 strong community of francophones living in London.
As it is close to impossible to find a French radio station that plays anything other than a majority of anglophone music, I will be interested to hear the percentage of French speaking music played by FRL.
Switching on for the first time to Caroline Bodin’s show, the first track I heard was the very English “What The World Is Waiting For” by The Stone Roses, which was followed by “Le jardin d’hiver” by Henri Salvador. Not exactly my cup of tea, but things quickly improved with the very fine “San Francisco” by Maxime Le Forestier.
While early indications of the diversity of music is encouraging, we’ll have to wait and see what we get in terms of the variety of songs from the francophone world – let’s hope we get to hear some great French rock, ska, reggae, and all the genres within which we know Great French Songs can be found!
The station is available only on DAB in London or via the Internet so this unfortunately rules out listening in the car for most of us Londoners which means that, for those wishing to use it as a route to finding French music, the station will need to distinguish itself from the French stations freely available online or via applications such as iTunes.
I’ll be listening with an open mind for the next few days and weeks and hopefully I will be able to report that we have a great new addition to the London airwaves.
