You could do worse things right now than pay a visit to the Boutique area of the Vulgaires Machins website.

Today the band released an eleven-track acoustic album which they are allowing you to download for whatever price you would like to pay.

This includes the ability to download for free in exchange for your email address.

I can’t provide a review yet or any translations as I have only this minute finished downloading it myself and am currently listening to the second track.

Suffice it to say that Vulgaires Machins are one of my favourite francophone rock bands and I highly recommend that you get a copy of this album.

I’m off to the gym to try to cycle another 12 miles on one of those evil bikes.

Hopefully my mind will be somewhat distracted from the grim reality of my lack of fitness by La Ruda’s new album, Odéon 1014, which I have just picked up from the Amazon MP3 store, which, happily was £2 cheaper than on iTunes.

I’ve not heard any samples from this album yet, which you can do now by using the widget to the right, but given La Ruda’s track record I’m not expecting to be disappointed.

All going well, the next post will be brief review and a translation of at least one of the songs.

Update: The stand out track for me on this album (and by some way) is track nine “1982.”

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.

I’ve just performed my regular check for La Belle Étoile across the UK online music stores and it has recently become available on both iTunes and Amazon.

Unfortunately there is currently a problem with the Amazon widget creator which means that I have only been able to include seven tracks from the album on the widget. Luckily they are seven of the best.

Unless something spectacular happens over the next four weeks, I can confidently state that La Belle Étoile is the finest French language album of 2009. I love it.

I was privileged to be able to catch two performances by Babylon Circus (UPDATE: three – they returned several months later for another go!) while they were on the UK leg of their current European tour and given half a chance I fully intend to travel over to France and see them again in the new year.

They are one of the best live bands I’ve ever seen and I for one hope they gain the massive recognition they deserve.

La Belle Étoile, released in March 2009, is something of a musical departure for the band whose last album was release five years ago. Previous studio releases have been packed with hard ska and reggae beats and more than a dash of the revendicatif. This album is slightly more melodic and slightly more subtle and devastating with its attack on your whatever part of your brain is responsible for trapping catchy songs in the internal humbox.

Every base is covered from the thumping, concert-opening Perdu, the thumping, crowd-pleasing La Cigarette, to the understated Des Fois and Le Fils Caché Du Pape to the gorgeous voice of Karina Zeviani on Marions-nous au soleil and the embarrassingly-catchy Nina.

What can I say? I love it. I urge you to use the Amazon widget to the left to listen to extracts.

Tomorrow I will publish a translation of one of the tracks – haven’t decided which yet.

Babylon Circus, Bristol UK, Halloween 2009

I took the picture to the left at a Babylon Circus gig this Halloween just gone.

I’d seen them in London a few days previously and absolutely had to see them again before they left the UK to continue their tour in France where they were, incidentally, supported by another great French band, Les Gars Dans L’Coin.

It’s been nearly twenty years since I saw a performance so strong that I simply had to see it again as soon as I could.

Back then I was watching two or three gigs a week and back then I myself was touring the pubs and clubs of Southampton (UK) in a four piece cover band.

Having played guitar since I was old enough to say “can I play on your guitar dad?”, I found myself in the backseat position of drummer. There are two reasons for this. Firstly because I was offered the role by a band that already had their claws in the circuit and secondly, because if I had been allowed anywhere near the front of the stage I would have bored the audience to tears. Noone could ever have accused me back in the day of being a “people person.”

That’s not to say of course that the guy or girl behind the drumkit can’t be an entertainer – far from it, indeed in a live performance a talented drummer can take on the task of conducting the audience as well as the band. But that drummer wasn’t me.

Chris (me), Jason, Keith and Andy before a gig circa 1990

You can probably tell this from this photograph from when I was sixteen. I’m the miserable one on the left. That is the look of a guy who never got over not being the guitarist. Notice how even the lights around me are unimpressed.

So with this in mind I’ve been compiling the top ten things that make for a great live performance and I’ll be sharing them with you over the next couple of articles.

However before I do this, what I really want is some comments from you guys, so don’t be shy – leave a comment and let me know about some of the best bands you’ve ever seen and why they left such an impression.

Two weeks ago I was searching for something fresh. I was really looking for some new French singing rock band. I didn’t find much – I came across one track by Bony Hide which, although pretty good and indeed like gold when compared with some of the horrors I’d been listening to that day, didn’t really get under my skin.

What I did find that day that did get under my skin was a group called Les Gars Dans L’Coin (The guys in the corner). Having listened several times now to The Radioactive Beets Show and to their #8604 EP, I am a very big fan.

A couple of weeks before that I had discovered, just in time, thanks to the invisible hand of the God of Ska, that Babylon Circus were playing London on October 26th, a gig which turned out to be so good that I went to see them again the following Saturday in Bristol.

Well as it happens, Les Gars Dans L’Coin weren’t the support act for Babylon Circus the very next day in Dunkirk, France.

Take a look at some of these photos of the guys on tour and tell me you don’t want to see them live!

Which leads quite smoothly into the fact that I’m currently working on something of an epic post which is taking much longer than expected. Regular readers may have noticed a half-cocked post called “Eight things that make a great live band” appeared accidentally on Sunday night. I have since revised the title to the 12.5% more exciting “Nine things that make a great live band” and hopefully I’ll be publishing it either tomorrow or Thursday.

Listen to the extracts above and consider getting a copy of The Radioactive Beets Show – it’s absurdly good value at £4.99 from the Amazon MP3 store which, as I’ve mentioned before, integrates flawlessly with your iTunes library if necessary.

Here are the links to the band’s pages on Facebook and Myspace.

I’ve just come across this YouTube video. It’s Babylon Circus opening the Prix Europa 2009 with Perdu from their album La Belle Étoile.

I was glad to see this as they had opened with this song in London on the 26th October and it was an absolute stormer which set the tone for the whole gig. For some reason they didn’t open with it in Bristol last night (31st October).

The sound on the video is very good even if the introduction is somewhat understated and the rows of seated audience members look a bit lifeless.

I’d like to see if I can find more footage of this concert to see what became of the crowd after a few songs. I do hope they were allowed out of their seats!

I’m not really focused enough to write much but I wanted to write something while I was still deaf.

It’s 5am here in London and I’ve just driven back from Bristol after seeing Babylon Circus on the final night of the UK leg of their European tour.

They were brilliant again as they had been in London on Monday at The Jazz Café.

Being so impressed by the London gig I had travelled down to Bristol to catch them before they left the UK and I found myself in the middle of a student fancy dress Halloween party. What I’m doing there is classifying anyone younger than me as a student.

The party was in fact the Boom After Party held to celebrate the success of the Boomtown Fair. I should try to find out a bit more about what that means.

Having arrived at around 7pm I discovered that the band wouldn’t be on until after midnight and unfortunately I was driving. At least I am now in a position to tell you that they are great when you’re drunk and great when you’re sober. And this time, having no beer distractions meant I could plant myself at the front of the crowd right at the start and stay there until the end.

Luckily the two support acts were very good and I allowed a very lovely young lady to paint my face and waited…

If you’d like to see a few pics, including my ugly mug, check out this link to a quick photo album I’ve uploaded to Facebook.

“Oh my God, they’re really good” were the words spoken by my girlfriend at the end of the second song of Babylon Circus’s appearance last night in Camden Town, home of Madness, who, if you didn’t already know, are one of the greatest bands of all time.

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.

It was, in fact, one of the best gigs I’ve been to in a long time. It’s a shame I’m not a better writer otherwise I may be able to give you sense of why I enjoyed it so much. I can tell you that I’m currently wondering if I can justify hauling myself over to Bristol on Halloween to see them for a second time. Tour dates available here.

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!

I mentioned in my last post that I had discovered two new albums while browsing XTrib.com.

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.

Having been brought up on a diet of Madness and Iron Maiden it is not surprising that the two styles of music that underpin many of my musical tastes are ska and rock. There is plenty to indicate here that this band, like La Ruda, may be able to tickle both hungers. Tracks Georges Clooney, Uranus, 8604 Code Lgdlc are just some fine examples.

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.