Bénabar’s songs are really great for anyone learning French – very lyrical, story driven songs with a great variety of vocabulary and natural expressions, and on top of that they are clearly sung by a man who’s voice is not intensely annoying like so many other French singers of the genre. I suspect his songs are in no danger of being labelled particularly cool, but most of them are catchy and often amusing.

Now, this song choice is not supposed to indicate in any way my political preference (not much), suffice to say that it feels quite pertinent.

Ok, so the comparisons break down on closer inspection, it feels a bit harsh to bring his mother into it, but we’ll find out on the first Thursday in May if this is broadly how the nation feels about our Great Leader Gordon Brown.

Il Faut Que Tu T’en Ailles (You really have to go) is the opening song on the 2005 album Inoxydable. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m a big fan of Quebec’s Marie Mai – I’m not aware of any female artists in the UK producing this quality of pop rock.

To start the new year here is my list of the ten best French language albums of 2009.

Broadly speaking we have one hip hop, two rock, three ska, one reggae and three humorous, which are predominantly rock-based.

There were several albums that I was expecting to put on this list but discovered were in fact late 2008 releases. It all goes by far too quickly for me.

In the next post I’ll highlight some of the releases that we can look forward to over the next year. While 2009 has been a great year for ska, there is promise from bands such as Vulgaires Machins that we’ll have some top quality rock to get our ears around in 2010.

Like all their albums, this release contains some of the worst singing you are ever likely to hear outside of the X Factor but sometimes the inanity of a record such as Dans Mon Corps is exactly what the moment calls for.

Dan Mon Corps came out in October and sees the band from Quebec in just as ridiculous and joyful form as ever. The track Croquer des cous is one of my favourites but gives the game away that these guys, despite their attempts to pretend otherwise, are in fact pretty talented punk/rock songwriters and musicians.

I would have liked to have included Diam’s S.O.S. here but her incessant talking, worse, her incessant whispering between tracks drives me bonkers.

I also considered Diam’s close friend Sinik’s album Ballon D’or in its place. I had wanted to translate the song 4-4-2 from Ballon D’or shortly after the world cup draw a few days after the release of the album at the end of November.

L’ecrasement De Tête is more intersting and enjoyable than either Diam’s or Sinik’s latest releases which I why I have chosen it here.

Their music is also fairly humorous and lighthearted but less shameless than either that of Les Singes Savants or their Canadian counterparts, Les Trois Accords, despite having represented France in the Eurovision Song Contest in 2007.

There are clearly strong influences from bands such as The Libertines and Arctic Monkeys (Black and Blue is almost obscenely Monkeyesque) and when you start listening to the key riff in Bouche B you will be forgiven for thinking you are listening to Queens of the Stone Age. At one point there is even a blatant, though probably unintentional, Pulp riff.

Although there are 15 tracks, over half of them are under three minutes and none of them are over four minutes. I listened to this album for the first time on my iPod while on the treadmill and it did a fine job of keeping me running. It’s rare that I outrun an album and have to “rewind”, but that’s what happened.

La Belle Étoile was their first release for five years and was a quite a different offering from the previous albums. This album would make my top ten albums of the decade. In any language.

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 to the left. Luckily they are seven of the best. You can hear samples from all tracks here.

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 absolutely adore it.

I was privileged to be able to catch two performances by Babylon Circus 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.

Yesterday, BB Brunes released their second album Nico Teen Love. Their first single from this album was released several months ago and was available to listen to free online. You can see videos of Dynamite (translated here) and others in the video section of their site. Extracts from three other songs from Nico Teen Love have been available for some time here.

It had been possible to pre-order the album in physical form and, unfortunately, for a physical price but, not wanting another CD in my life I decided to wait until the release date and download from either iTunes or Amazon depending on which was the cheapest (not that I’ve ever found an album that was cheaper on iTunes).

If you want to hear extracts from all the songs on the album you can hear them on the French Amazon store although you will not be able to buy the album outside of France. Alternatively, you can fire up iTunes, navigate to the store and then in the bottom right of your iTunes application select the round flag icon and then use the following list of countries to move to the French store. You can then search for the album and listen to the extracts, but again, unless you have a French iTunes account you won’t be able to get your ears on the full album. The iTunes price of 14.99 euros is horrific and is made worse when you see that it is priced at a much more sensible 9.99 EUR on Amazon.

Amazon have however got their hands on some of my money today after I bought Diam’s new release S.O.S. Voilà pourqoui the album in the widget is not the subject of this post. Unusually this was the same price (GBP 7.99) as in iTunes but I prefer to buy from Amazon so that I get the DRM-free MP3s and Amazon’s downloader integrates the album into your iTunes library for you without any hassle.

So, there will be two reviews coming shortly.

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.

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.

It stayed the same for a very long time as there was a bug in the Amazon system that meant that I had to start from scratch each time I wanted to change one of the songs. Happily, that bug was recently fixed and I was able to update the widget. Unfortunately not all my favourite groups are available but thankfully a great many are.

It is often the case when I find great new groups they are not available in the Amazon or iTunes UK stores, sometimes not even having made it as far as the French iTunes and Amazon stores, which means I can’t widgetise them here. Le Vilain Volatile is a good example.

So, to mark the long overdue update of the little fella over on the right I thought I would put up a poll for you to rate each track out of ten to see if we can find The Best Song in the Widget.

Unfortunately only UK users will see all fifteen songs in the Widget. French users will only see fourteen and everyone else will see just ten. This is due to the availability of the songs in the various international Amazon stores.

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.

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’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.

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.