We've previously remarked on the trend of female French singers influenced by Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground.

On the boys' side, however, the heroes seem to be Nick Drake and Elliott Smith. There's a notable surge in French English-language acts who draw on the pastoral folk of the former, the gorgeous melodies of the latter and the tragic melancholy of both. We've already featured the marvellous Cocoon, for instance, who were prominent in our 2007 end-of-year polls.

Now there's an early runner for our 2008 version who's clearly in thrall to Drake and Smith. His name is Jonathan Morali (right), but he trades as Syd Matters. Apart from the early-Floyd allusion of his nom de rock, Morali cites Radiohead's 'OK Computer' as a profound influence on his music, and his singing voice certainly has a touch of Thom Yorke's quieter moments.

That said, his overall sound is closer to Drake's 'Pink Moon' and Smith's 'XO' - intimate acoustic ballads that bypass the navel-gazing introspection of lesser singer-songers.

Syd's third album, 'Ghost Days', has just been released - and it's lovely. First single 'Everything Else' is a good representation of the album; crisp and clear writing in a warm, intimate folk-pop setting. Lyrically, it marries nervous introspection with self-assured smartness: "I thought I was dead, oh / Shot in the head, oh".

You can listen to snippets from 'Ghost Days' on Syd Matters' MySpace page. Here's the charming video for 'Everything Else', whose flying red house makes it strangely similar to the psychedelic opening credits to 'Wanderly Wagon'. Shine on, you crazy diamond!

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For years people have been talking about the day when we'd be able to access the internet on our mobile phones. The first technology that had a stab of bringing the web to a mobile phone was WAP ('Wireless Application Protocol'). It raised its clumsy head in 2000 or so and was - to be polite - an excruciating experience for users. In any case only a tiny number of sites (bless 'em) went to the trouble of providing a WAP enabled version of their website.

"Fret not", we thought back then, "glorious pocket-based browsing is surely just around the corner now that the telcos have splurged all these countless billions on 3G licences". Well it never really worked that way, did it? 3G is with us and a 3G-enabled phone is indeed quite likely sitting in your pocket right now. And how was the experience the last time you used it to browse the web? If your visit was to one of those mobile portals such as Vodafone Live (which have limited range of content on offer) the experience could be logged as something approaching 'tolerable'. Stepping out of the clutches of such a phone company's portal often gets very unpleasant, very quickly. One way out is to type in a web address on the phone but the less said about the complexities of doing so on many mobile phones, the better. The more usual route from a mobile phone to more interesting edges of the web is to run a simple a search on a search engine but, invariably, you end up quickly hitting some pretty ugly web pages that try to squeeze themselves into the tiny space on your phone’s screen (and any site that does look okay it is only because they have gone to the considerable lengths of creating a mobile compatible version of their website, something that is beyond the financial, time and technical resources of most webmasters, myself included). 

Boiling it down to its essential: browsing the internet with your mobile sucks. But that all changed recently with the arrival of Apple’s iPhone.

Thanks to the iPhone the 'internet-in-your-pocket' (well, a 13cm x 7cm pocket) is - at last - becoming a reality. With one glorious step Apple managed to do what so many previously could not: they managed to suss the 'how to get a website looking as decent on a mobile phone as it does on a computer' conundrum thanks to some very elegant and imaginative flourishes when it comes to the user interface and web navigation.

Much of the press has been (quite rightly) falling over itself singing the praises of these advances for users. But for me the real stroke of genius with the iPhone is not how it benefits users but how it benefits website owners: if your site’s design is smart and adheres to some well established best HTML practices you won’t have to create a second parallel version of your site for it to be accessible on the iPhone. Touché – all of a sudden the mobile web can now encompass, in very real terms, a significant proportion of the most interesting websites out there.

So how does the Apple iPhone do this? Here’s the quick answer. When you visit a website with your iPhone it downloads the page, as you’d expect. The browser built into the iPhone (Safari) then works out what the page would look like on a PC browser that is 980 pixels across. It then scales down the page as it would look on such a PC so that it fits into the iPhone screen. For most sites this means the iPhone user can then see the full webpage on their phone in one glance. The downside however is that for many sites some individual words will be difficult to read (as they will be too small after the page has been ‘shrunk’ down to fit on the iPhone screen). Apple have, of course, got this covered: all the iPhone user needs to do is just ‘double tap’ on different parts of the page and - if the web page adheres to established standards and best practices - the iPhone will zoom in and the user can now easily read the text / see the images on that part of the page.

While Apple is leading the way with these innovations, it’ll only be a matter of time before they inspire other handheld manufacturers to deliver a whole range of mobile devices that will, in similar, ways make it straightforward for the non-Apple masses to browse the web while on the move. I think it is finally safe to safe that the mobile internet is going to happen. Big time.

Those who run websites or blogs would do well to ensure their sites are ready for this iPhone-inspired era that is on its way. A few questions that any conscientious webmasters should be asking themselves...

• How does your site look on an iPhone?
• Does it adhere to established best practices? For example if you want the 'double tap' interaction described above to work you need to divide your web page's text into meaningful blocks using the 'div' tag.
• Is the full payload of your webpage reasonable or is it still going to take an age to download? Download times really matter on the mobile web, make no assumptions about your users' patience. Or the data limits set by their telephone company.
• Do you have content of your site embedded in a Flash file? Careful as the iPhone does not load Flash based websites.

With all this in mind I last month started to look into what it could all mean for CLUAS. While the CLUAS.com traffic stats showed that only 24 people visited CLUAS using an iPhone in the last 2 months of 2007 I knew that this figure could grow hugely in the future as the numbers of iPhones (and iPhone inspired handhelds) in circulation increases, but only if CLUAS has tweaked things to make it better for such visitors.

So in early January I focused my efforts, as a first step, on revamping the HTML code behind the most important page on CLUAS – the website’s home page. The result of this effort is that the CLUAS home page now not only loads perfectly in an iPhone but a 'double tap' on an iPhone screen will work as it should. There are other positive consequences of the change. For example this conversion meant that the HTML file of our home page was reduced about 25% in size (from a previously modest 20 KB down to a super slim 15KB). The content of the page is also better structured - logically and semantically - which means that search engines can more easily understand what our content is about and determine the relative importance of all text and links on the page (all the better for our permanent goal of getting CLUAS content to rank better and more widely).

I don't expect this to result in a massive increase in traffic to CLUAS from iPhones. However when mobile browsing à la iPhone takes off CLUAS aims to be well placed to capture a decent part of the action.

Do you you have a website or a blog? If so you too should look into its readiness for the sophisticated mobile web of the coming years. Excuse a brief descent into some technical details but here's a few quick concrete checks any webmaster serious about having an iPhone ready website needs to do:

• First up the obvious one: visit your website on an iPhone if you have access to one and see how it looks.
• If you don't have an iPhone but you own a Mac, no problem, you can test it using the iPhoney application (which partly emulates the browser function of an iPhone, but it can only be installed on Mac computers).
• If you have a Windows computer my advice would be to:
  • Download and install the Safari browser for Windows
  • Open up the Safari browser, visit this page which if you follow the instructions below will allow you to see how your website would look on an iPhone. On the page you just need to:
    • Enter your site's URL (i.e. web address),
    • then enter '980' for 'width' (i.e. this corresponds to the number of horizontal pixels the iPhone uses when it initally presents a web page),
    • in the 'height' box enter something like 700 or so,
    • Then click 'Test'.
  • This will then resize your browser to 980 pixels across and load up your site. What you see is how you can expect your site to look on the iPhone (i.e. 980 pixels across).
• Once you have seen how your site will look on an iPhone you may see changes you need to make in terms of its layout. Keep in mind:
  • Your site should not have key content embedded in Flash files, the iPhone will simply not be able to access such content. Same goes for Java applets (but Javascript is supported).
  • You should structure your web page's content in line with established best practices for laying out and structuring text on web pages (e.g. avoid HTML tables, instead use div tags to create blocks of content, lay it out using CSS styling and then structure the text using tags such (h1, h2, h3 tags for headings, p tags for main bodies of content and li tags for lists).
  • Check the size in KBs of the main page of your website using a web page analyser service. Ideally the main page of your site (its HTML + images + style sheets + Javascripts) should weigh less than 150 KBs. Anything more than that may easily test the patience of your visitor (especially important for new visitors, first impressions count, and all that).

These are only a few of the most basic guidelines. Those looking for more detailed guidance should go to the horse's mouth: Apple have put together an extenisve 'Designing Content' chapter in their iPhone Developer Centre. 

Okay, time to wrap this up. The mobile web is going to explode. Not in the next month, not even in the next 6 months. But 2-3 years from now the web will be a radically different place and huge numbers of people will access it in ways - and with a frequency - that they do not do so now. If you have a website or a blog the time to get ready for this is not next year but now.

CLUAS is far from being where it needs to get to, but we are getting there. Want to join us?

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We were poking around on various video-sites trying to find for footage of a certain Irish popstar being cringeworthy on French TV (acting like an eejit, murdering the language - stuff we all like to see). Unfortunately, we haven't found it yet - and it's worth it, so we won't spoil the surprise for if/when we eventually dig it up.

(And no, it's not Damien Rice, who generally gives good French-language TV interviews which have all, alas, been removed from the interweb. Is there a conspiracy?)

What we DID come across, though, was the video for The Divine Comedy's 1996 French version of 'Alfie'. It's called 'Comme Beaucoup De Messieurs' (translation: Like Lots Of Gentlemen), and it's a duet featuring the Francophile Neil Hannon and a well-known French comic actress called Valérie Lemercier.

The French lyrics tread similar ground to the English original, though Hannon's character is chided for being bookish ("You quote Boris Vian, Camus / Your nose stuck in your songbooks"). There's an Alfie reference thrown in too.

Now, your Francophone Paris correspondent doesn't like to look down on the language problems of others - but we'll just point out that Hannon's French really isn't good enough to sing without cog notes (just like the ones you used in your Leaving Cert). We know this because at the Divine Comedy's 2006 Paris show he had trouble getting past 'bonsoir' and his terrible French was the running joke of the night.

(Hannon currently features in another Franco-Irish duet: a version of 'Favourite Song' with Vincent Delerm, from the latter's live album of the same name. Hannon, struggling with the French lyrics, loses the plot halfway through and the pair burst into laughter.)

Lemercier (left) had her own album, the kitsch-pop 'Chante', out around the same time as her duet with Hannon. More recently, she wrote and duetted with TV talent show winner Christophe Willem, runner-up in our Best French Songs Of 2007.

She's a fine comic actress, though she tends to appear as the same slightly deranged character in a lot of her work. That said, her typically frenetic perfromance stole the show in a gentle 2007 rom-com called 'Fauteuils D'Orchestre', for which she won a César film award during a ceremony she was actually presenting.

No awards here for quality of the footage - or of the singing:

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One of the newer pleasures of being a music lover is following in greater detail the goings-on in the business side of the industry. Who'd have thought that record company execs, with their end-of-the-world-is-nigh public statements and their loveably deluded sense of what their target punter might actually like to consume, would be such gas fun to watch? And often just as entertaining as their employees, pop stars?

But there they are, jumping from the arts to the business to the news sections of our press like clowns working a children's party. Meanwhile, the likes of Jim Carroll keep a Skibbereen Eagle-eye on the evil empire's every move and interpret it for our entertainment. It's great stuff altogether.

Anyway, this week Guy Hands (we can't read that name without thinking of Guy Smiley, greatest gameshow host EVER) and his colleagues have gathered in Cannes, conference capital of France, for the annual MIDEM music industry conference. As the event's brochure succinctly puts it, "delegates from the recording, publishing, live, digital, mobile and branding sectors will gather in Cannes to do deals, network, learn and check out new talent."

Jim recently gave a typically perceptive commentary on what may go down on the business side of things. But that last part of the event description above, the bit about 'new talent', made us very curious. What exactly will the music executives be listening to? And are these the acts they are no doubt plotting (with a mad cackle and hand-rubbing gesture) to foist upon our daytime airwaves and commercial breaks in 2008?

Well, the concert programme features an admirable geographical spread of pop, rock, electronica, classical and jazz acts. Irish and UK music fans will recognise the names of Richard Hawley and Reverend And The Makers, playing in a special British showcase concert. Despite the welcome development of Music From Ireland, the brandname for the Irish contingent at this year's SXSW festival, there's no Irish showcase concert at this year's MIDEM.

But if we were to pick one act from the line-up who's probably going to receive a massive corporate push to global stardom out of the MIDEM, it'd have to be Yael Naim (left). The Franco-Israeli chanteuse's photo is splashed all over today's Paris papers (yes, even edging out the Sarko/Carla photo-romance) as being the smash hit of the conference.

Our regular readers will remember that we featured her back in November 2007 and asserted that her marketing-friendly single 'New Soul' would be the soundtrack to ads the world over. We thought this happy-clappy new age folk-pop tune would be ideal for a bank or building society, but we understand that Apple have picked it as the jingle for their new MacBook Air.

The track is taken from Naim's eponymous debut album, and both have been chart-toppers in France. While she can certainly write catchy choons, she tends to spoil it all with her innate drippiness: 'New Soul' sounds great on first listen but quickly gets all icky and naff, especially on the fade-out when she gurgles and babbles like an infant. Perhaps that's a shout-out to France's lucrative infant demographic.

Still, there's little doubt that the song and its photogenic singer will be hugely successful worldwide in 2008. The music execs are no fools. Here's the video for 'New Soul':

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The first Irish band to announce a French show for 2008 are... [drum roll] ...The Dubliners, playing the Olympia in Paris on Saint Patrick's night.

But the second Irish* act to confirm a Paris gig are the reformed My Bloody Valentine (right), who have just announced a concert at the Zénith on 9 July.

The Zénith is a 6,000+ capacity indoor venue at the north-eastern edge of the city. As Kevin Shields and co. are something of a cult band here in France too, and given the likelihood of MBV trips to Paris by eager Irish and UK fans, we reckon this'll sell out toot sweet.

Tickets have just gone on sale and cost €42.80 from FNAC (in French) and the French equivalent of 'usual outlets'.

Start planning your summer holidays, MBV fans!

*The FNAC site calls them 'irlandais', so that settles that, then.

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'Un vague à l'âme' say the French in their wonderfully poetic way with expressions of feelings. A vagueness in the soul? Or a wave, like a spell of bad weather or the sea breaking on the shores of the soul? Anyway, it's what the French call the blues - not the type of music, but the type of feeling.

There's a Parisian way for everything, including feeling blue. After work you wander round town, listlessly down some boulevard or other. In a café or brasserie, tourists speak slow, loud English to streetwise waiters and you hope they don't recognise you as one of them.

The metro is full of tired, sad-eyed office workers going home; the Parisian working rhythm is metro-boulot-dodo (metro-job-sleep). In each station, drunks bed down on benches. Everyone seems down on their luck, daydreaming.

A famous scene in Louis Malle's 'Ascenseur Pour L'Echafaud' (Lift To The Scaffold) captures the vague à l'âme perfectly. You may know it: Jeanne Moreau traipses along la rue, dawdling in front of shop windows and weaving around strolling couples. The soundtrack - sad, worn-out trumpeting - is by Miles Davis, from the period when he held court in Saint-Germain, once the jazz strip of Paris but now a rosary of boutique after boutique.

Both the film and soundtrack are marvellous. Here's the scene we were talking about:

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Sound Waves wishes to congratulate Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová, who are nominated in the Best Original Song Oscar category for 'Falling Slowly' from 'Once'. It is a remarkable acheivement and, win or lose, places Hansard and Markéta in the company of previous winners such as Bob Dylan, Randy Newman and Bruce Springsteen. It's often said that we are a nation of begrudgers but when an Irish artist makes a breakthrough like this the right and proper thing to do is acknowledge it. Sound Waves will be watching the Oscars on the 24th February, fingers crossed, and will have a bottle of champagne on ice to celebrate in the event that 'Falling Slowly' takes the gong.

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