Bruce Springsteen has just been announced to headline the first day of the Vieilles Charrues festival in Brittany on Thursday 16 July, with The Killers and Fiction Plane as support that day.

Tickets for that day cost only €49, on sale Friday 30 January at 7 a.m. Irish time from usual French outlets like www.fnacspectacles.com and the festival website: http://www.vieillescharrues.asso.fr/

Springsteen's appearance at Les Vieilles Charrues will be his only French concert this year, according to the festival's organisers.

A four-day pass for the full festival will cost €114. More updates on the full line-up to follow.

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Their name almost put us off listening to them. However, our source insisted that My Internal Playground were worth checking out. Once again, our source was correct.

Apparently, they're a duo with names that even the Scissor Sisters would find suspicious: Jiim Burger and Kriis Mac 'otta. Yeah, right! But if that's what they name their group, you'd hardly expect them to come up with decent aliases either. We're not even sure they're from Paris. And there's no picture of him/her/it/them - only this bit of artwork (right).

But they make sunny '60s West Coast pop: they're obviously driving under the influence of Brian Wilson. But don't dismiss them as Justa Nudder Beach Boys Band. Those choons are charming and well-written in their own right.

(Our favourite is called 'Phantom And Desert': can these guys not name anything properly? For their children's sake, let's call a social worker right away.)

Check out a handful of those summery songs on My Internal Playground's MySpace page. No video, though.

 

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White Denim are a three-piece band hailing from Austin, Texas. Formed in early 2006, they specialize in tornado-belt rock & roll with a manic cut & paste energy. They released their first LP W...

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The last festival Short Cuts attended was so long ago that I'm not even sure what it was! I suspect it might have been Feile, 1995, when the sadly missed Irish festival moved to Cork City. My abiding memory of the event was feeling sorry for Kylie Minogue (who was mid transition from teenie bopper to dance icon and performing her first open-air festival). Her microphone didn't work for her first few tunes, but she battled on, manfully ignoring the crowd's cry of "Show us your arse!"...

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Depending on where and when you came in to the Irish music scene, Conor O'Brien will be known to you either as part of the much-lamented The Immediate, the guitarist in Cathy Davey's touring b...

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As you'd expect, the new U2 single is all over French radio. (Are we the only ones to find it similar to 'Diamond Hoo Ha Man' by Supergrass?) Even non-Anglophone French DJs find 'Get On Your Boots' and 'No Line On The Horizon' to be terrible titles.

The other big single on French rock radio these days is from a home-grown contemporary of U2. 'Little Dolls' is the first track off the forthcoming new album by Indochine.

On the go since the early '80s, Indochine (pronounced "Andosheen") remain enormously popular and respected in France - rare for a French guitar band. They tend to plough a similar furrow to The Cure, Depeche Mode, Echo & The Bunnymen - that sort of dark, epic alt-rock. We don't find them up to the same quality as those three mighty groups, but that's just us: their upcoming dates in Europe are selling out quickly.

That tour reaches its climax in summer 2010 with a show in the Stade de France, further proof of their enduring popularity. To publicise their concerts, the band have been appearing on posters (right) where singer Nicola (born Nicolas) Sirkis and the bravest of his bandmates are in the nip, modesty preserved by some well-placed type. Giant posters of nudie middle-aged men plastered on billboards and the walls of metro stations: if that doesn't shift tickets then nothing will.

Though Indochine's back catalogue is agreeable yet unspectacular, 'Little Dolls' is quite good. Similar to Muse's 'Starlight', it hangs off a pounding piano riff and swells to an epic chorus. You mightn't pay hard-earned recession euros for it, but it's catchy coming out of your radio. And it's better than the new U2 song.

From a recent French music awards show (the one where Katy Perry was accidentally presented an award meant for Rihanna), here's 'Little Dolls' by Indochine:

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Ireland doesn’t feature very often on the news here in France. When it does, it’s generally for the bad things. Your average Jacques le Frenchman knows three things about Ireland 2008-09:

 - We’re bankrupt

 - We Said No To Europe

 - Our rashers are poisoned

To counteract all that bad PR, it would take someone superhuman. But we’ll settle for mighty.

And so The Mighty Stef (right) is the first Irish act to visit France in 2009. The cult Dublin singer-songer is playing in Paris tonight (21 January).

The show at a venue called L'Alimentation Générale, which is how a Frenchperson would describe the stock of a local grocery. We haven't been there yet, so we can't enlighten you as to whether they also sell breakfast rolls and milk and the like. (No Irish rashers, that's for certain.)

Stef was in Paris not so long ago, playing on a converted Irish lightship called the Batofar that's docked Seine-side. The Batofar has recently been the scene of repeated public order disturbances and police visits. No connection implied between those two sentences, of course.

Anyway, more Stef info and tunes on his MySpace page. Here's the video for 'Death Threats':

 

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Our first French pop discovery of 2009, and if the rest of the year is as good as this then it'll be a vintage year here Seine-side.

Those two girls in the photo on the right? That's Nadège and Lucille, and their nom de rock is Andromakers. We believe they're originally from Aix-en-Provence but now based in Paris.

What are they doing under the tree in that field? They're making lovely electro-pop that the marketing guys will surely sell as "if you liked Au Revoir Simone, you'll love Andromakers!"

Anyway, we're smitten by what we've heard so far of them. Best of all is a track called 'Electricity', which we reckon will smite you just as much.

No news yet of any albums or EPs or other product, but you can listen to a few tracks at Andromakers' MySpace page. Sorry, but there's no video of them for the moment, so this post just ends here. Au revoir!

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Did you ever do a Google search and see that, just below the number one result, there is a set of supplementary search results? These are what Google calls "site links", basically about 8 or so extra links that can take you to some specific pages on the no. 1 ranked site for your search. Google does this for a small proportion of sites, those it considers more important and CLUAS, for many years now, has been one of them (hooray!).

Every few months Google updates the links that it places as "site links" and I recently noticed that if you run a search now on Google for 'CLUAS', 5 of the 8 "site links" for CLUAS point directly to pages we have that list our gig reviews by venue. These pages actually have been a big success, even before Google decided to highlight them among the "site links". They bring a lot of traffic to the site via all the search engines (and not just google) and a lot of this traffic are first time visitors to the site.

In total we have pages for 8 venues and last year these pages alone were visited a total of 16,787 times, about 50% of these visits were referred to us by - indeed - the Google search engine. In the table below I dig out (thanks to the Google Analytics service):

• the number of visitors who were referred to these pages by search engines,
• the average numbers of pages each of these visitors went on to read on CLUAS during their visit, and
• what percentage of these visitors were hitting CLUAS for the first time.

As you can see the pages have been a fruitful source of new visitors, some of whom may go on to be regulars, increasing the overall CLUAS visitor base:

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2009 is a year that will see the roll out of a large number of major changes to CLUAS. For the moment I confidently say that the CLUAS.com site, within a few months, will look hugely different and will offer new services to visitors. But the changes are not only visible ones, almost as important will be changes that will be put in place behind the scenes.

The first changes of the year were already put in place last week when the software that runs the CLUAS Discussion board ("Active Forums") was upgraded to the latest version. Such an upgrade usually delivers an incremental improvement. However this time the upgrade has delivered a quite dramatic improvement of the discussion board (especially in terms of speed) compared to the previous version. This is simply down to the fact that the guys who developed the software (Active Modules) started again from scratch and, for the latest version, re-built it from the ground up. The result is a discussion board that loads up in the browser so much faster than before. This is thanks, for example, to:

1. a big reduction in the number of round trips the CLUAS website would have to make to the site's database each time a discussion board page is requested by a user; and
2. a reduction in the memory 'footprint' of the discussion board (i.e. the amount of web server memory that is 'hogged' by the discussion board).

See the table below for a few examples of the reductions that have been put in place.

	old version	new version
Server Footprint
Memory Utilization	64-128kb+	0
Session State	~2kb/user	0
Trips to the Database
Main discussion board page	4 + 2 per forum	1
List of Topics View	4 to 6	1
Single Topic View	4 + 2 per reply	1

This sort of reduction in 'demand' on the database is vital for a site such as CLUAS that is hosted on a 'shared server' where there are many other websites (possible even over 100 other sites) hosted on the same server. A potential consequence of this is, if CLUAS was to hog too many of the available resources (CPU, memory, etc), we could be booted off the shared server (where we are charged the modest amount of US$16/95 a month) and asked to move to a dedicated server which would cost over US$200 a month (a minimum of USD$130 for the web server + US$75 for the database). Needless to say the more CLUAS can do to decrease its use of the CPU and memory resources on our shared server, the better.

But it's not just performance improvements. There are lots of other improvements, which I'll be exposing on the discussion board in the coming while. All in all, the upgrade was well worth the approx US$100 the software cost (paid for out of the CLUAS Google Ads revenues of last year).

That said there still remain a few things that, post-upgrade, still need to be fine-tuned. For example we have always had a script of code that automatically pulls the latest discussion threads and puts a link to them on the home page. This 'script' no longer works because of changes to how forum hook into the database but - with the help of Stephen McNulty - the script on the home page will soon be updated to work with the new version of the discussion board software.

While the last month on the board has been quieter than normal I am fully confident that with time the changes described above, and those in the pipeline, will ensure the board gets back to its usual levels of activity.

Update 15 January: Something during the upgrade broke the RSS feeds on CLUAS and I had to totally roll back the upgrade and re-apply it. This meant some of the content added to the site in the last week (in particular some discussion forum replies) was lost. For more details on this see this thread on the CLUAS discussion board.

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