For those of you who don't know, Barretstown was founded in 1994 by the late, great, Paul Newman.  It was to be the first of his European Hole in the Wall Camps; established to provide seriously ill children with recreational and therapeutic camping experiences.  The camp has grown from serving 124 children in a marquee in 1994 to over 12,000 children and their families from 23 European countries  and is now equiped with excellent medical facilities.

Every child (and their family) visits Barretstown free of charge (including any travel/food costs).  In order to do this Barretstown must raise over €4.5 million every year, with 96% of this coming from donations from companies and private individuals.  Now, obviously we are in a 'Credit Crunch' (queue the spectre of George Lee behind your shoulder) and the first thing that people stop doing is donating to charity and those like Barretstown, with such a lack of government support, are the first to suffer.  Key Notes has seen first hand what a positive effect Barretstown can have on the life of a child diagnosed with a life-threatening disease and has always been a supporter of the venture. Now, you too can help them.

On the 27th of February The Academy will host Inspirations - Gig of the Year.  Acts already confirmed for the event include Republic of Loose, Ham Sandwich, Sinead O'Connor, Engine Alley, The Blizzards, The Kinetics, Fun Lovin' Criminals, Shane MacGowan and The Walls with more to be announced soon.  All the bands will be performing songs that have inspired them and influenced their music. 

Tickets are available from usual outlets for a very reasonable (considering the amount of acts) €28.  So go on, get down to The Academy on February 27; you get to have a good night out and do something worthwhile at the same time!  What more could you ask for?

Ham Sandwich: Running Up That Hill (Kate Bush cover)

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A review of the album 'Blue Lights On The Runway' by Bell X1

Review Snapshot: Uninventive indie rock dressed up in the too-large suit of Talking Heads, the new Bell X1 album has little in the way of invention or excitement. It would take a tectonic shift in their creative thinking for this band to become relevant or interesting again.

The Cluas Verdict? 5 out of 10

Full Review:
It’s a coincidence that the two major Irish album releases of spring 2009, ‘No Line On The Horizon’ by U2 and ‘Blue Lights On The Runway’ by Bell X1, have such similar titles. Apart from sounding alike, both titles evoke images of sky and travel. And both are aspirational and ambitious: they tell us that U2 know no boundaries and Bell X1 are revving for take-off.

In fact, the Kildare band’s fourth studio album is flat and unadventurous, like an interminable taxi round the runway without ever leaving the ground.

The funkiness of ‘Flock’ has been left off this new album. With its stylistic nods to arty post-punk and emotive indie-folk, the strongest influences this time around seem to be Talking Heads and a bit of Arcade Fire. The Heads comparison is most obvious on lead single ‘The Great Defector’, where Paul Noonan lapses into a David Byrne-style singing voice that pops up again at various points on the record. Lyrically, Noonan’s taste for yoking together random quips and images also recalls Byrne and Black Francis.

But all of that feels like fancy dress. This album falls flat because there aren’t any outstanding tracks on it; no catchy hooks or earworm choruses to help these songs stay in the memory. Chord progressions are safe and familiar. Verses feature long lines of bedsit-romantic lyrics delivered with little melodic variety; we can tell that there are choruses because some lyrics are repeated. And there are two instances of maudlin piano ballads: ‘Light Catches Your Face’ and ‘The Curtains Are Twitchin’. Noonan’s distinctive Kildare vowels, like on ‘One Stringed Harp’, offer rare moments of colour and individuality, and that’s about all.

Quite simply, it’s stale and boring stuff – far from the tuneful charm of their 2000 debut, ‘Neither Am I’. Today’s newly-prominent Irish acts, such as Jape and Fight Like Apes, are making music that’s inventive and exciting. Next to them, Bell X1 sound like a band whose time has passed.

All in all, ‘Blue Lights On The Runway’ is just one step up from the horrors of Snow Patrol. The last Snow Patrol album, ‘A Hundred Million Suns’, shares the luminous, aspirational title imagery of this Bell X1 release, and both bands deal in the same over-earnest indie that plays on emotion over excitement.

Worthy but unoriginal – by analogy with landfill indie, can we consider Bell X1 and their peers as recycling-centre indie?

Aidan Curran

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The early ‘80s are now seen as a golden period in English pop, but it doesn’t seem to have been a great time for French music. The Paris disco scene of the late-‘70s had faded away (to re-emerge in the 1990s as a profound influence on Daft Punk) while rock bands like Téléphone and Indochine were merely following whatever English bands had been doing years earlier.

In the background, though, The Clash’s 1981 Paris shows inspired kids like Manu Chao and Rachid Taha to dream up the sounds they’d produce in the late ‘80s and beyond. That series of concerts in the Theatre Mogador has become a creation myth for French rock music. Chao formed Mano Negra, perhaps the best French band ever. And backstage at the Mogador one night, the story goes, young Taha gave his demo tape to Joe Strummer. The following year The Clash released ‘Rock the Casbah’ – influenced directly by Taha, boast French music fans. This may well be true, as Mick Jones and Paul Simonon have often joined Taha on stage for his rousing Arabic version of the song.

So, 1981 saw seeds sown in French music – but that harvest only comes many years later. From the music released at the time, as we said, there isn’t much that has endured. However, listening to the radio lately we discovered a rarity: a fine early-‘80s French single.

‘J’aime Regarder Les Filles’ (in English, “I like watching girls”) was a hit in 1981 for Patrick Coutin (right). Who? Well, he’s a French singer who hasn’t done anything else of note since then. But it doesn’t matter; one good song is one more than most acts can manage.

It’s an edgy, jittery sliver of punk-pop. The whole song hangs off a pulsing two-note bassline, with a sparse arrangement of guitar shards and very basic drumming. This sinewy sound sets up Coutin’s twitchy vocal delivery, which perfectly complements the lyrics about leering at girls. (Sample lyric: “I like watching girls walking on the beach/When they undress and pretend to be sensible/Their eyes asking ‘Who’s that guy?’”) The song teeters between strutting machismo and sinister perviness, and its catchiness has you humming along, making you complicit.

The song was recently covered by a French band called Astonvilla (one word), which conjures up a worrying mental image of Martin O’Neill at the beach with his binoculars out. Also, another mark of classic-pop-single status: it gets covered by contestants on TV talents shows.

There’s no video, which is probably just as well. So, while looking at a montage of the singer’s record sleeves, here’s ‘J’aime Regarder Les Filles’ by Patrick Coutin:

 

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Oasis will play in Beijing on April 3 - at the Capital Gymnasium, not the Worker’s Gymnasium as preferred by Kylie and Kayne West. It’s not clear what the band’s reasons for coming are but they shouldn’t have high expectations, nor hopes of making money. Their arrival hopefully marks the end of a long period of paranoia in China’s Department of Culture which issues performance licenses: pro-Tibetan chants by Bjork at her Shanghai show last year annoyed the bureaucrats, already worried about blemishes to China’s Olympics year. 

I can’t see how Oasis will make any money off this tour, considering the band has never had the cachet of Suede or Sonic Youth among China’s tiny rock community. Granted, those two groups solidified their local reputation by actually coming and playing here. Ticket prices range from RMB200 to RMB1600: 20 to 160 Euros.

I reckon there’ll be tickets for RMB50 – five Euros – on sale outside the venue on the night.

The band’s tour China:

• April 3rd, 2009 - Beijing Capital Gym
• April 5th, 2009 - Shangai Grand Stage
• April 7th, 2009 - Hong Kong AsiaWorld Arena

 

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The town, Chelles, is half an hour by train from Paris. The venue, Les Cuizines, is another half hour on foot from the station. And the bus service stopped at 9:30 in the evening. This is one of the reasons why the place was only about a third full for tonight's show.

The satellite towns round Paris have many such venues: cultural spaces or community centres hidden in hard-to-reach residential areas. Luckily there’s local government funding (and pricy beer) to offset the meagre door takings of some shows.

Tonight's concert featured Bertrand Burgalat (right). While certainly not famous in France (the other reason for the low turnout), Burgalat's name is familiar to most French alt-pop fans. He played a show at classy Paris jazz venue New Morning the previous week, but the CLUAS Paris Correspondent couldn’t swing a pass. And so we’re in the middle of nowhere to see him. The bus, last of the evening, swung by industrial estates, shopping centres, motorways and other isolated landmarks that we tried to remember for the 30-minute walk back to the station and the last train back to Paris, departing 30 minutes after the show ends. This would want to be worth it.

Why go to all the trouble? Well, Burgalat has said that his current series of shows will be his last live appearances, so we wanted to see a genuine French cult pop star while we had the chance. Also, his guest on these shows is April March, another idiosyncratic pop figure that we thought worth seeing. (In fact, she merits a blog post of her own: we’ll tell you all about her very soon…)

Burgalat’s brand of retro-futuristic electro-pop, not to mention his nationality, invites comparison to that of Air, but it might be more accurate to compare him to his Finnish counterpart Jimi Tenor. As well as making dreamy electronic pop, they both have the carefully-crafted persona of a kitsch electro-nerd. Burgalat wears your granddad’s clothes and the NHS-style square glasses popularised by Jarvis Cocker. But tonight he is also sporting the same kind of five-day beard as his indie-kid backing band, thus giving away the fact of his hipness. (In the same way, Tenor's nerdy image is somewhat undermined by the fact that his ears are pierced.) That, and the news that he’s just agreed to design a collection of clothes for fashion house Azzaro.

Burgalat's back catalogue is pleasant, though undemanding and familiar-sounding to fans of retro-pop. His plain, unaffected singing style evokes both Kraftwerk and his compatriot Laetitia Sadier of Stereolab. And yes, if you like ‘Moon Safari’ you’ll like Burgalat too.

But while his albums haven't made him hip, Burgalat's in demand outside France as a remixer, arranger and collaborator. He's worked on records by Supergrass, Depeche Mode and Nick Cave, and his lovely 2007 duet with Robert Wyatt, 'This Summer Night', has become something of a cult favourite.

He has his own label, Tricatel, which features acts as diverse as one-hit-wonder DJ Mr Oizo, French comic actress Valérie Lemercier (his partner), our own The High Llamas - and Michel Houellebecq. In 2000 the controversial writer and film-maker released ‘Présence Humaine’, on which he sings his lyrics to music by Burgalat. It sounds quite… no, actually, we’ll let you find out for yourself.

Anyway, we enjoyed the show very much and just made it back in time for the last train home. We believe there's a Burgalat/March album coming out soon; in the meantime, check out Bertrand Burgalat's MySpace page to hear tracks from his previous albums.

Though it’s still wintry in Paris, here’s a Bertrand Burgalat song for the season to come; ‘Spring Isn’t Fair’:

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Some pretty major changes are to be rolled out next week on CLUAS. One small part of this is a new logo. Below are three candidates in contention. The first two were developed by 50dollarlogos.com, the 3rd one by CLUAS blogger Stephen McNulty and Matt, a designer colleague of his. Let me know which you prefer:

Candidate A: 

 

Candidate B: 

 

Candidate C:
(click on it to see a higher resolution version of it)

 

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What a week. Short Cuts managed to score tickets to the Sydney Entertainment Centre to see these living legends within 5 days of each other, supported by US reverb-rockers My Morning Jacket (Neil) and Australian singer-songwriter, Paul Kelly (Leonard). The proximity of both events to each other presents an opportunity to compare the late career trajectories of these extraordinary men - probably a flawed premise, I accept!

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Around this time last year Declan de Barra played in Paris, as support to Nina Nastasia.

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We had mentioned recently how Ireland’s reputation in France is quite low at the moment. Well, if it’s any consolation to you all in Eire, today sees the return of a classic French negative image: the strike.

Public servants, teachers, transport workers and state broadcasters have been called out by their unions. Many private sector workers from large factories like Renault are expected to join them, and most daily papers are off the news-stands. Cities and towns across France will witness massive protest marches and public meetings on the streets. At present it’s just a one-day strike, but it could be repeated in the coming weeks. President Sarkozy’s tactless boast last year that “nowadays when there’s a strike, no one notices” may come back to haunt him.

The rationale for the strike is a general air of dissatisfaction rather than any specific government action. Public service employees fear cutbacks; some primary school teachers are already taking home less pay for more responsibilities. Then there is the constant French worry about “le pouvoir d’achat” – purchasing power. While the economic crisis has hit France less hard than Ireland (no crazy mortgages here), the cost of living is rising. A baguette, that symbolic and reliable barometer of French prices, has become shorter, thinner and dearer.

The most visible signs of the strike are school closures and transport problems. Here in Paris, buses are running almost normally but on average only 1 in 3 trains and metros are operating. This presents less of a problem in the morning, when commuters are spread between 6  and 10 a.m., but the evening rush home tends to be a concentrated heave of panic. Your blogger had no problems getting an early train this morning, and an hour-long stroll home through Paris is no hardship.

(Today’s strike in France and last week’s disturbances in Iceland make us wonder why Irish people haven’t yet hit the streets en masse. Yes, we’re generally apathetic, but surely even the apolitical Irish have a boiling point?)

We’re reluctant to suggest that anyone profits from today’s transport disruptions, but for some there’s certainly a strike dividend. Cafés near our workplace were full with early risers who skipped breakfast at home in order to catch a crack-of-dawn train.

Then, of course, there are the taxi-drivers, who’ll be in greater demand this evening. Scorned in Paris like in every city, doesn’t anyone have love to give to them? Why, yes!  

To prove it, here’s one of the most famous French pop singles ever: ‘Joe Le Taxi’ by the young Vanessa Paradis. Listening to it after all these years, it actually sounds great – the sparse production and breezy arrangement are refreshingly easy on the ear compared to today’s cluttered and compressed radio hits.  

And there’s nothing sleazy about it after all: it really is just a song about a taxi driver! (Sorry to disappoint you.) Mademoiselle Paradis, or Madame Depp if you prefer, is still making music. In collaboration with French rocker M she released ‘Divinidylle’, a likeable album of catchy guitar pop, back in 2007 and toured successfully all last year. But outside France she’ll be forever associated with this 1988 single.

So, for the day that’s in it, “tous ensemble!” and “vas-y Joe”:

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According to a number of sources, including Drop-D and On The Record, the Meteor Music Award nominations were leaked online yesterday.  Though they will be officially announced today (28th) it would appear that the people behind the Meteors haven't figured out that the secret to a good awards show is variety.

This is Key Notes second draft of this particular blog.  The first draft was your typical 'how come my favourite band wasn't chosen' blog.  However, while writing that, Key Notes had something of a 'Road to Damascus' moment.  Not that I'm suddenly a God botherer or anything of the sort, but this blog now realises what 'normal' people have be trying to tell him for ages; music awards don't really mean all that much.  Of course, Aslan winning best band at last years Meteors should have been enough for Key Notes to lose all faith with music awards but no, it was something else entirely.

Looking through the nominees for this years Meteors there is a distinct feeling of 'Meh.'  There is far too much overlap for an award night that only has 8 categories.  For example, The Blizzards and The Script are nominated for both Best Irish Pop Act and Best Band.  Indeed, it seems that The Script are nominated in every category except best regional DJ and that's probably because not even Zach in the Meteor Music Marketing Department could convince his bosses that LA could be considered a region. 

Now, obviously Key Notes is being facetious but it's difficult not to be.  Perhaps it's a sign that we just don't have the quality and diversity of music in Ireland that those of us who write about it, talk about it, live it and breathe it think we have.  Or could it be that, shock/horror, the peope that run these awards (other than the Choice) don't actually do the dirty work and go to gigs on cold, wet Monday nights where the only other audience members are the support band and the barman.  Indeed it's difficult to see anyone from Meteor thumbing their way through the tiny (but important) Irish Independent Music Section in Tower when they've got all those Kings of Leon records to get to.  As an aside, Kings of Leon are set to headline OXEGEN again!!! Are they the new Red Hot Chili Peppers for the GAA-jersey-wearing-Tayto-munching-not-there-for-the-music-but-for-the-craic/crack festival goer?

Now, this isn't a 'Key Notes is indier-than-thou' blog.  Those sort of blogs I'll leave to the Skins-watching-skinny jeans brigade.  No, this is just one man finally realising that music awards mean nothing when there is so much great music produced that goes unrewarded.  It's only taken 26 years, but hey, better late than never.

For those of you who care/are interested here is the list of nominees:

Best National DJ

Tony Fenton - TodayFM
Dan Hegarty - 2Fm
Alison Curtis -Today Fm
Dave Fanning - RTE Radio 1
Ray Foley - TodayFM
Rick O’Shea - 2FM

Best Regional DJ

Dermot, Dave & Siobhan - Dublin’s98
Keith Cunningham - RedFM
Leigh Doyle - Beat 102.103
The Zoo Crew - Spin South West
Mark Noble - FM104
Jon Richards - Galway Bay FM

Best Irish Band

The Blizzards
Republic of Loose
Fight Like Apes
The Script
Snow Patrol

Best Irish Male

Mick Flannery
Damien Dempsey
Duke Special
David Holmes
Jape

Best Irish Female

Enya
Lisa Hannigan
Gemma Hayes
Imelda May
Tara Blaise
Camille O’Sullivan

Best Irish Pop Act

Boyzone
The Blizzards
The Coronas
The Script
Westlife

Best Irish Album

Fight Like Apes - Fight Like Apes & The Mystery of The Golden Medallion
Snow Patrol  - A Hundred Million Suns
Lisa Hannigan  - Sea Sew
Messiah J & The Expert  - From The Word Go
The Script  - The Script

Best Irish Live Performance

The Coronas
The Blizzards
The Swell Season
Fight Like Apes
Republic of Loose 

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