Their latest release, A Tout Moment, released in October this year is contained within the Amazon widget to the left. I’ve just bought this album today and as I write this have not yet listened to it – this is today’s motivation to get to the gym. A treadmill full of Eiffel awaits me once I’ve published this post. Or should that be “an Eiffel of treadmill?”.

UPDATE: I’ve had my first listen to the album and there are a two or three tracks that sound great – in particular there is some blinding drumming and some truly dramatic sections of the film soundtrack kind. The clean guitar on Mort J’Appelle put me in mind of the acoustic sections that intersperse W.A.S.P.’s The Crimson Idol, an album which is one of my guilty pleasures and is currently coming nostalgically through my computer’s speakers. God, I’d forgotten how much I loved that damn album. When it finishes I am going to listen to Eiffel’s offering again and see if I can’t write a readable review.

The song I am going to translate here is A Tout Moment La Rue which you can listen to in its entirety online on their website where you can also find the lyrics.

We find another left-wing reference à la this song. Thanks to the community at the Word Reference Forums I now know that the “trois cent familles” is a reference to the concept that a small number of privileged and wealthy families are running the country.

We have a problem in the translation. Avoir pignon sur rue means to be well-established. In the lyric “ces trois cent familles qui sur la rue ont pignon à tout moment elle peut aussi dire non” the “elle” refers to “la rue” so we have to keep the word street in the translation of the expression. Which frankly isn’t possible so the translation is rather a hack. Ideas welcome.

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.

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.

The time will come when I decide to write my top ten list of the best French language albums of 2009.

You know what it’s like when you make a list like that – you’ve probably got three or four “no-brainers” which are going to be in there no matter what, and then you may have a dozen or more other albums from which you’re going to have to choose for the remaining spaces.

One thing I didn’t think I would have to think very hard about was the number one spot. Until today one album had towered above the rest – La Ruda’s Grand Soir.

Today I heard Babylon Circus’s 2009 album La Belle Étoile. Now I have a decision to make.

It’s incredibly good, in my opinion their best album yet. I was looking forward to seeing Babylon Circus live on the 26th October before I heard the album. Now I can’t wait.

All that whittering aside, here is a translation of one of the really catchy numbers on Grand Soir, possibly the best album of 2009.

The lyrics of La Parade de Gordon Banks refer to one of the most memorable moments in English football history – a superhuman, physics-defying save by Gordon Banks against Brazil in the 1970 World Cup Finals in Mexico. A game, unfortunately, that we (England) went on to lose 1-0.

I have embedded a YouTube video of the save below.

Thanks to the WordReference forums I was able to get my mind around the following bizarre lyric…

Ressortir du ventre is being used in this context to mean something similar to prendre aux tripes which means something that is gut-wrenching, gripping, in the sporting sense – for further detail you can read here.

I suspect that there is more of a story behind this song than I am aware of and I would be delighted if anyone has anything to say on the subject – please let me have your comments!

As promised, I’m following up my previous post with a translation of the final track on the album Pépé Goes Français.

Extracts of all the songs on the album are provided in the previous post.

La ballade des gens heureux was originally written and performed by Gérard Lenorman. You can compare and contrast five different versions of the song by clicking the Amazon widget to the left.

Pépé’s is the second on the list, and by far, far, far, in my opinion, the best version.

Given that Pépé’s version was the first time I’d heard this song, it’s quite strange to hear that it really was a “ballad” originally, but, as you can hear, it clearly was.