Thylacine - Live set @Château de Versailles

The era of lockdown and social distancing has been a challenge for musicians on many levels. Lack of income from live performances, lack of access to their audience and isolation from their normal social and artistic circles are just a few.

However, difficult times have also led to some interesting solutions. Musicians are nothing if not creative.

This live set by Thylacine has been one of the most enjoyable sessions I've seen for a while, showcasing one of the most innovative figures in French electronic music on a unique stage. Versailles provides a  spectacular backdrop, its opulence, grandeur and sheer size contrasting with the solo figure filling the air of this historic monument with the most modern of sounds.

But the size of the setting and the empty spaces also suggests the lack of an audience, he's facing empty space and alone on stage. No surprise that a live date he had scheduled in Paris for next month has been postponed until November.

Thylacine's recently released a new single 1978, a collaboration with Yan Wagner, from the soundtrack for the French TV show OVNI(s).

The (welcome) return of Feu! Chatterton

 Ready for the new world?

We've been waiting for something new from Feu! Chatterton for a while. It's not that they've been away for long, just we've been impatient.

With good reason. Their two albums, 2015's Ici le jour (a tout enseveli) and 2018's  L'Oiseleur are among our faviourites in recent years, each a heady mix. Rooted in French poetic lyricism, but inhabiting a jazz-informed indie rock landscape that few others dare venture into without falling face first into the swamp of pretentiousness or tumbling into the chasm of joyless self-indulgence.

Yes, it's a bit arty, but they walks that fine line with a swagger and don't take themselves too seriously. It's hard to imagine a band like this from any other country.

If anything makes us hopefuly for 2021, its that fine bands like this have started to re-emerge from isolation and hibernation. The world might be new, different and unfamiliar, but it's been waiting for them to make it a little bit better.

La Femme - Foutre le Bordel

Another winner from La Femme, a band who have over a few years become one of this blog's favourite acts.

There's more than a little flavour of late 70s/early 80s electro-punk going on here, reminiscent of acts like Metal Urbain, Jacno or KaS Product. It's hard not to like it.

The eye-melting video was put together by the band themselves.

The new track follows the singles Cool Colorado and Disconnexion which came out in November and December last year.

Foutre le Bordel and the other two tracks all feature on their forthcoming third album Paradigmes, due out on April 2 and available to pre-order now.

-M- : Les mots bleus at ho-m-e

 A cracking cover of Christophe's classic Les mots bleus by Matthieu Chedid, performed at home during lockdown.

The song, the title track of Christophe's 1974 album and top ten single, was co-written by Jean-Michel Jarre who was then a musical collaborator with Chrstophe. He'd already worked as lyricist for Christophe's 1973 album Les Paradis perdus. For an artist now best known for producing instrumental electronic work, it's quite an achievement to have been involved in creating two songs regarded as French language classics,

M's cover follows other artists such as Alain Bashung. 

It's a lovely version, performed during a live stream in April last year and it appears as one of the 35 tracks on his Le Grand P'tit Concert -M-aison streaming album that features cover versions and stripped-down arrangements of his own work. It's a great collection and well worth a download.

Woodkid covers Cabrel

Although I somehow didn't get round to organising any kind of formal award ceremony in the closing months of last year, Woodkid's second album S16 was probably this blog's album of the year. 

It's an album that somehow fitted perfectly with the strange year we had. For all the grandeur of the textures he plays with, there's fragile humanity at the centre of it. While apparently inhuman and gigantic forces surround us and bewilder us, rather than simply focusing on the large-scale drama and celebrating it, his focus remains on the human dimension throughout.

For all the industrial-scale mechanics of Goliath, with its epic orchestral and electronic flavours, it asks simple personal questions: Where are you going boy? How did you get so lost?  Amidst the apparently overwhelming situation, with its depersonalising, uncertain and strange unfamiliarity, these questions remain pertinent and unanswered.

Meanwhile, the In your likeness video is set in the inhospitable and unfamiliar environment of an oil rig, lit as strangely as an alien space station in a Hollywood movie. But a song that focuses on one human voice, illuminating the darkness like a distress flare.

A lot of us have been moving towards personal reflection in a year that has seen us confronted by circumstances that are alien to us, frightening and beyond our control. A year where, for many of us, what once were optimistic horizons have become distant battlefields.

With his cover of Francis Cabrel's things are even more personal. The song by Cabrel from his 1994 Samedi soir sur la Terre is one of the songwriter's key works, a love song to his partner and to his child. With Woodkid's version, almost everything is stripped away, the focus is on voice on piano, and it's incredibly affecting.

If Cabrel was at the time thought to be one of the standard-bearers for the French chanson tradition, Woodkid has quietly established his own claim to the title.

Jean-Michel Jarre: New Year's Eve performance

 This year got off to quite a start for French music, with Jean-Michel Jarre, whose new year's eve virtual performance Welcome to the Other Side attracted over 75 million viewers from around the world.

Jarre is no stranger to large audiences, with many of his open-air concerts attracting crowds of over one million. His concert in Moscow in 1997 attracted 3.5 million people - a world record - while his show at La Defense Paris in 1990 was attended by 2.5 million.

While Jarre's always been at the pioneering end of electronic music, he's also probably done more that any artist to popularise it. I've no doubt he played a huge part in electronic music becoming popular in the 70s, leading to it being adopted by other artists at the end of that decade.

For the New Year's Eve show Jarre performed in a studio in Paris, the Notre Dame staging being created virtually. It was staged across a wide range of online platforms, including Facebook and YouTube, virtual reality headset devices, as well as on TV and radio. A team of 50 were involved in preparing the event over three months.

Speaking ahead of the show he said: "Virtual reality is to the performing arts today what cinema was to the theatre in its early days, a kind of curiosity.

“I believe that VR will become tomorrow, a mode of expression in its own right.”

The performance has been released as a digital album, and is now available on streaming platforms.