French music fans were saddened to hear of the death yesterday of Fred Chichin, one half of cult pop act Les Rita Mitsouko.

Chichin, 53, succumbed to cancer and had suffered recurring health problems in recent years. Many shows on their current tour had already been cancelled due to Chichin's illness; he missed the group's Dublin concert on 17 October last.

Chichin is survived by his partner and collaborator Catherine Ringer, vivacious and combative in contrast with Chichin's more demure and cooler persona.

The duo were one of the most inventive and entertaining bands in France, combining eclectic musical influences with an energetic and colourful image. In their late '80s heyday they sold millions of records and worked with influential international names like Tony Visconti, producer of their 1988 album 'Marc et Robert'.

Their biggest hit was their 1985 single 'Marcia Baila', which topped the charts across mainland Europe.  The song is a tribute to Ringer's former dance teacher, who - by coincidence - had died of cancer. The chorus goes:  "Mais c'est la mort qui t'a consumée, Marcia / C'est le cancer que tu as pris sous ton bras" (but it's death that consumed you, Marcia / It's cancer that you took in your arms).

The single, rebellious and life-affirming, is a staple of French radio and a standard at French parties, wedding receptions... in effect, wherever two or more French people come together to dance to pop music. The joy and energy it inspires will be Chichin's legacy:

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This edition features Headgear; the Limerick band whose album Flight Cases has been shortlisted for the CLUAS Album of the Year 2007. The musical project of Dublin Born Daragh Dukes (DD); Headgear describe themselves as a ‘collage of folk, electronica and rock.’ Along with colleague Barra O’Toole (BO'T) - Headgear’s ‘Guitar Department’ - Dukes becomes the inaugural Key Note Speaker.

Favourite Songs from the Past Year
DD: My Body is a Cage - Arcade Fire; Atlas - Battles; 15 Step - Radiohead
BO’T: Sunny Sweeny's - I'm Gonna Be The Next Big Nothin

Favourite Song Ever
DD: Moon River - Henry Mancini
BO’T: Danny Whitten - I Don't Want To Talk About It

Favourite Headgear Song
DD: Generally it's the next one I'm going to write
BO’T: Will They Be Friendly? and the, as yet unwritten, At Least The Gun that's At My Head Is Mine

Favourite New Band/Artist
DD: Fight Like Apes sound like good craic
BO’T: Sunny Sweeny

Favourite Band/Artist Ever
DD: I would change this every day. Today, though, I will say Tom Waits
BO’T: Neil Young, Hank Williams and many others if I'm drunk and they happen to come on the music playing machine I'm hanging on to for dear life in the corner. And The Bothy Band   

Favourite Gig This Year
DD: Si Schroeder at The Electric Picnic
BO’T: Felonius A. Salt and the Bottle of Rum, Crawdaddy, Dublin

Favourite Gig Ever
DD: Radiohead at The Olympia
BO’T: Ron Sexmith at The Belltable, Limerick about 12/13 years ago

Favourite Headgear Gig Ever
DD: It's going on in my head at the moment
BO’T: Cherry Jam, London

Favourite Venue
DD: Guerin's Bar, Castleconnell
BO’T: Dolan's, Limerick

Favourite Piece of Musical Equipment
DD: My old Jazzmaster that i bought for 200 quid 16 years ago
BO’T: A finely polished Bugle

Download or CD/Cassette/Record
DD: They've all got something to offer but vinyl definitely has more to give
BO’T: No preference. Do people still use cassette?

Favourite TV Show at the Moment
DD: I don't know anything about it
BO’T: Just finished a couple seasons worth of the US version of The Office. FACT: Very funny. And before that 30 Rock. I don't watch anything week to week

Best Movie Ever Seen
DD: 2001 A Space Odyssey
BO’T: Singin' In The Rain...depending on my mood...Dead Man directed by Jim Jarmusch. Or if it's after midnight Key Largo or The Maltese Falcon or probably anything with Humphrey Bogart

Greatest Book Ever Read
DD: Pnin by Nabokov
BO’T: The Stories of Breece D'J Pancake and Tim Burton's The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy. And The London A-Z...obviously

Most Listened to Radio Show
DD: JK Ensemble
BO’T: I don't own a radio

What’s in Store for Headgear Next
DD: New version of To Heaven will be released end of January 2008 along with some live shows. A new album should be finished late 2008 - Headgear's Wild West - is the working title
BO’T: I can only speak for everyone ever connected with Headgear when I say that sobriety and surrender are not an option. The Treachery is too far gone. We will walk with The King next year. And maybe try for a guest appearance on Hall's Pictorial Weekly

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We told you a long time ago about how the new album by Johnny Hallyday (right) would feature a song called 'I Am The Blues' written especially by Bono. Some of our readers couldn't believe it. Others wondered if this were part of some mutual tax loophole they found.

Well, France's rock idol has just released said long-player, 'Le Coeur d'Un Homme' - and sure enough, the last track is 'I Am The Blues', sung in English by Johnny, written by Bono and... Simon Carmody!

The Golden Horde singer (below right), Dublin's greatest rock ligger, is sure to coin it from such a lucrative contribution - Johnny stills sells loads of records in France. Simon, make sure the two lads give you some tips on keeping as much of the royalties as possible.

As for the song itself, its lyrics feature a cri du coeur from the two ageing accountant-friendly rockers: "Falling through the cracks / The ticker tape and tax". The brazen chancers!

The rest of the song aims to capture Johnny's Frenchness (even while the man himself is busy looking into his Belgian/Swissness). "I'm as blue as the Cote d'Azur", Bono has him sing, forgetting that the Cote d'Azur is grassy-green and sandy-brown and that the Mediterranean would be better for a bit of blueness.

Eventually Johnny decides that passport-shopping isn't for him: "I stood up to dance / I lost my balance / But my faith in France / Some things you can't lose". True; but other things you can lose, e.g. up to 60% of your earnings under the French tax system. Maybe it was his bank balance that he lost?

No video yet, but thanks to the magic of home-made YouTube you can listen to 'I Am The Blues' while you stare lovingly at the cover of Johnny's new album. There are rumours of tour dates in Monaco, the Isle of Man, Andorra, Switzerland and Bermuda:

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So your blogger's long march is over; France's train drivers are finally back on the rails and Parisian commuters can get back to their beloved metro-boulot-dodo routine. And dear old CLUAS seems to have surmounted the techie problems that knobbled us for the last couple of days (if anyone can sort out techie problems, it's the gaffer) and we're back blogging again. Yay! 

Similarly, one of France's cult pop stars is shedding the stripey pyjamas of inactivity and slipping on the working clothes of music-making.

Sebastien Tellier's lovely 2004 single 'La Ritournelle' (from the equally fantastic 'Politics' album) received overwhelming critical adoration, loads of airplay and steady employment as a soundtrack to ads, promos, television reports, fashion shows and the like. Since then, Tellier has been conspicuous by his low profile, apart from performing the occasional small-scale Paris show.

A time-filling B-sides/odds n' ends album, 'Universe', came out last year, as Tellier was reported to be having difficulty in finishing the follow-up to 'Politics'. He collaborated on the soundtrack to (and had a cameo role in) a French comedy called 'Steak' directed by Quentin Dupieux, who in a past life was known as Mister Oizo and had an unlikely UK Number 1 in 1998 with a tuneless jeans-commercial jingle called 'Flat Beat' (both ad and video featured a yellow hand-puppet called Flat Eric. Remember?). Apart from that, no news of a new record.

The word in Paris was that Tellier was suffering something close to a nervous breakdown. Indeed, your blogger was witness to one act of bizarreness from Tellier - during a concert broadcast live on French radio station Radio Nova last year he revealed that his mother had died earlier that day. The shock and unease of his fans was nothing compared to that of Madame Tellier, alive and well and listening to her son on the radio.

Now, however, Tellier seems to have got himself in order. His new album, 'Sexuality', produced by Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo of Daft Punk, is due out in February of next year. The first single off it, 'Sexual Sportswear', has just been released.

On first listen, it's a disappointment. Swooshy synths, 'vintage' production (dig the whip-crack snare effects! The Kraftwerk-y keyboard riffs!) no vocals - all in all, it sounds like Jean-Michel Jarre. In other words, monotonous and boring. The SebastiAn Remix on the 12" has a bit more life to it, but it's still no great shakes. Let's hope it starts that mysterious process of 'growing on us' very soon, and that the album is better.

You can listen to 'Sexual Sportswear' and its remix on Tellier's MySpace page. There's no video yet, so here's Quentin Dupieux's video for the album version of 'La Ritournelle'. We're not asking Tellier to make exactly the same record again - just something new which is as entrancing as this:

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• All the CLUAS writers were invited to submit their top 10 albums of 2007.
• A list of favourite albums was then received, before the internally set deadline, from a total of 19 writers.
• Ten of these writers cast votes for a full top ten.
• A total of 159 'votes' (or album preferences) were received (i.e. on average 8 fave albums were voted for by a writer)
• Among these votes a total of different 100 albums were declared as a favourite.

• The 30 albums that got voted by more than 1 writer (2 of these albums were Irish releases)
• The 5 Irish releases that got 1 vote (i.e. making a total of 7 Irish albums in the shortlist, a healthy number in my opinion)
• The 3 albums that were only voted by one writer but that writer gave it their no. 1 vote

•  A Lazarus Soul - Graveyard of Burnt Out Cars
•  Animal Collective - Strawberry Jam
•  Arcade Fire - Neon Bible 
•  Battles - Mirrored
•  Blonde Redhead - 23
•  Bruce Springsteen - Magic   
•  Cathy Davey  - Tales of Silversleeve
•  Damien Dempsey - To Hell Or Barbados 
•  Editors - An End Has A Start
•  Elvis Perkins – Ash Wednesday 
•  Explosions In The Sky "All Of A Sudden I Miss Everyone"
•  Feist ''The Reminder'' 
•  Future Kings of Spain - NervousSystem 
•  God Is An Astronaut ''Far From Refuge'' 
•  Handsome Furs - Plague Park 
•  Headgear - Flight Cases
•  Interpol, Our love to admire
•  Iron and Wine "The Shepherd''s Dog" 
•  Jens Lekman - Night Falls Over Kortedala
•  Laura Viers 'Saltbreakers'
•  LCD Soundsystem - Sound Of Silver
•  Low - Drums and Guns
•  Manic Street Preachers - Send Away The Tigers
•  Mark Ronson - Version
•  MIA - Kala
•  Modest Mouse - We Were Dead Before the Ship Sank 
•  Mumblin'' Deaf Ro ''The Herring And The Brine'' 
•  Nina Hynes - Really Really Do 
•  Of Montreal ''Hissing Fauna, Are You Listening?'' 
•  Panda Bear - Person Pitch 
•  PJ Harvey White Chalk 
•  Radiohead - In Rainbows
•  Robert Plant and Alison Krauss - Raining Sands 
•  Robert Wyatt - Comicopera 
•  Sunset Rubdown - Random Spirit Lover 
•  The Field - From Here We Go Sublime 
•  The Kings Of Leon - Because Of The Times 
•  The National - Boxer 
•  The Shins - Wincing The Night Away
•  Wilco - Sky Blue Sky

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The Telegraph, on 14/11/2007, published an article about the surfer and physicist Garrett Lisi which stated that he had come up with a theory for everything and that this theory is being taken very seriously by the science community. Lisi describes surfing and snowboarding as being about bending gravity. I am not going to even attempt to describe his theory but if you want to check him out you can click on one of the hyperlinks of his name above or the Telegraph article.

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If Sky Sports had the rights to show live French industrial action, then Richard Keys would surely be calling today 'Super Grand Slam Strike Showdown Tuesday'. The striking transport workers will be joined on the streets of Paris today by the civil service. Many schools are closed today; communications and electricity employees are also being called out by their unions. Workers in all sectors are being invited to join the industrial action.

However, there's a general feeling that today will be the last day of France's current strike. Popular support for the transport workers is low (perhaps due to consistent anti-strike mainstream news coverage), and many of the smaller bus and rail unions have already gone back to work on the basis of negotiations offered by the government. There are enough trains and buses for people to move around with only slight delays and discomfort. And the civil service strike is just a one-day stoppage which happens to coincide with the transport workers' ongoing action.

Nonetheless, for today at least the stoppages and walkouts are continuing - and there are interesting repercussions. Many journalists and broadcasters have joined the industrial action. Quality broadsheets like Le Monde haven't been published today, and last night radio and television stations were warning their listeners and viewers of possible disruption.

Most people, on hearing that news, probably saw the advantages to the strike at last. Today our favourite alternative radio station, Le Mouv', has no DJs - as a result it's playing non-stop music, with the only interruption being the occasional public service message to apologise for the disruption to regular programming. No need to apologise, monsieur! Let there be strikes every day! Your blogger will bring soup to the barricades if needs be! (Cultural difference: French workers on strike don't stand in picket lines outside their premises.)

It reminds us of the RTE strike in 1991, when the TV and radio schedules were filled with loads of movies, brilliant repeats (Sports Stadium that weekend featured the epic France-Brazil 1986 World Cup quarter-final in full), and wall-to-wall music.

Your blogger is resting in Château French Letter today, the day job being indirectly affected by the strikes. Sitting at home, listening to non-stop great music on the radio and watching football highlights on Eurosport (too essential to be allowed to go on strike), we are in complete solidarity with our fellow workers who are marching to Place de la Bastille this afternoon. Wrap up well, mes comrades - it looks freezing outside.

As a big shout out to our beloved transport workers, here's the Blondie/No Doubt power-pop of Superbus (honoured in our Best French Music Of 2006) and their current single 'Travel The World'. Like the Yael Naim song we featured recently, this song's chorus is a no-brainer for an ad campaign:

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Have our Dublin readers been along to the French Film Festival at the IFI? Seen anything interesting? Looking over the programme online, we saw that there's a screening of 'Ensemble C'est Tout' starring the lovely Audrey Tautou (Ah, if only everything in life were as lovely as the lovely Audrey Tautou). Also showing is petulant French footballer Vikash Dhorasoo's 'Substitute', where the ex-PSG player filmed (from the bench) les bleus' epic 2006 World Cup adventure.

Not forgetting romantic comedy 'Prête-Moi Ta Main' (here given the bland English title of 'I Do'; surely the literal translation - 'Lend Me Your Hand' - would have been better, given the film's storyline of a woman pretending to be a man's fiancé?) with the über-cool Charlotte Gainsbourg.

As it happens, Charlotte's mammy has a film at the festival too - 'Boxes' is Jane Birkin's directorial debut. It's autobiographical; Birkin stars as an Englishwoman looking back over her French life and loves. The film features John Hurt, Geraldine Chaplin and model/actress Lou Doillon - Charlotte's half-sister and Birkin's youngest daughter. Despite the mixed reviews it got from French cinema critics, it may still be of interest to Francophiles.

Birkin is, of course, famous for being the collaborator, muse and partner of Serge Gainsbourg. Regardless of how her directing career unfolds, her most celebrated contribution to popular culture will probably always be the long orgasmic groan that fades out 'Je T'aime (Moi Non Plus)', still pop's most notorious single.

The BBC banned it, the Vatican condemned it; unsurprisingly it shot to number one across Europe in 1969 and 1970. Apart from Birkin's suggestive sound effects, the lyrics are surprisingly unerotic - the most offended were probably ultra-Catholics ("l'amour physique et sans issue" - physical love without offspring, or without exit) and consultant proctologists ("je vais et je viens / Entre tes reins" - I come and I go between your kidneys). Gainsbourg wrote the song as a glib throwaway, and later regretted that outside France his entire career and work was reduced to this one single.

We've been told that the strange title - I Love You (Me Neither) - was apparently inspired by a French politician, perhaps Georges Pompidou of the ugly art gallery in Paris today, who hit upon the phrase 'moi non plus' as a way of worming out of a difficult question by appearing to both agree and disagree with the proposition - or at least to confuse the interviewer. But we haven't found any confirmation of this theory.

The song was originally written for Gainsbourg's previous lover/muse, Brigitte Bardot, in the manner of their 1967 duet 'Bonnie And Clyde', one of the greatest pop singles of the 1960s. However, Bardot objected to the finished version's sauciness and put her foot down; the single was never released. Today, listening to it on Serge compilations, perhaps she was justified on purely musical grounds - the poppy, jangly Bardot version is vastly inferior to the lush, soulful Birkin one.

But how did the English girl come to sing on France's most famous pop song? Well, Gainsbourg and Birkin met in 1968 when the actress screen-tested for a part in a French movie called 'Slogan'. She had previously caused moral outrage for her role in Michelangelo Antonioni's classic Swinging London film 'Blow Up', where she became the first mainstream cinema actress to appear as a full-frontal nude on screen. Once she moved to Paris and played Gainsbourg's muse, Birkin became an icon in France; Hermès named one of its luxury handbags after her.

In 1975 Gainsbourg made a film starring Birkin called 'Je T'Aime (Moi Non Plus)': a Lars von Triers-esque tale of passionless sex and confused sexuality in a dreary small town. Birkin received great praise for her performance; from that point on she seems to have been taken more seriously as an actress by the French cinema establishment.

Birkin continues to sing and act. She was a special guest of the Dublin French Film Festival in 2003, and while in Ireland she performed a concert of Gainsbourg re-interpretations at Liberty Hall. Her solo albums are also critically acclaimed in France; in 1992 she was named Female Artist Of The Year in the French music industry's prestigious Victoire de la Musique awards.

The masterpiece of Serge and Jane's collaboration is unquestionably Gainsbourg's electrifying 1971 album 'Histoire De Melody Nelson', one of the few absolutely essential and globally influential French records. That said, the wider world will probably always hear their name and think immediately of a soulful bassline, a wistful organ melody and an English girl's groans. Here's the video for 'Je T'Aime (Moi Non Plus); sorry, but it's not a 'making-of' film:

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It would come as a surprise to regular visitors but CLUAS is - for the moment - Ireland's no. 1 website for Jazz music. Official.

Well, official at least in the eyes of Yahoo, or Microsoft's 'Live' search engine because, at the time of writing, those two search engines are ranking CLUAS as the number one result for searches for 'Irish Jazz Music' (see Yahoo's results here, Live.com's here). What's more Google was also ranking CLUAS as the number one result up until last week when they (getting a dose of common sense or something) decided to rank another website for these vital key words (Update: After dropping CLUAS from the no.1 spot, in fact dropping us from their entire list of top 100 'Irish Jazz Music' websites, Google has decided that CLUAS is, once again, a top website for Irish Jazz Music).

How did this happen? It is the result of an experiment I undertook at the beginning of October to see if I could get CLUAS to rank highly for a genre of music we usually do not focus on. Jazz music was a good candidate I thought. While it is certainly not something the site focuses on, there have been a tiny number of articles published in our 8 years history that can be classified as being about jazz (or something vaguely jazzy), so there was something to work with.

So what did I do? It was just a few simple steps. I first created a brand new page on CLUAS for Jazz music, let's call is the CLUAS 'Jazz Music home page' (this is the page now appear as the number one result for Yahoo and Live). I then set about making this the strongest page about jazz on CLUAS by doing the following:

• I put a link to each of the jazz articles on CLUAS on this 'jazz home page' (there are a total of about a 10 articles for jazz, definitely not comprehensive coverage).
• I then added on each of these articles a link back to the CLUAS 'jazz home page'.
• I did a site wide search for all occurrences of the word ‘jazz’ on CLUAS and then linked each of them back to the 'jazz home page’. I also added a link as well to the CLUAS sitemap page (a page the search engines visit regularly, this meant I could be confident the search engines would find the jazz home page).

I then sat back and waited for the search engines to do their stuff. Within a week I started to see results. Google was the first to rank CLUAS as no. 1 for Irish Jazz Music (and also the first to drop it! Update Nov 19 - it's back as the no.2 site now). The Yahoo and Live search engines soon followed.

But once I saw the result I set about creating other thematic 'home pages' using exactly the same method, with a view to getting them to also rank well for relevant key words (and so drive more traffic and new users to CLUAS).

The first 'thematic target' I set was Dublin gig venues. A lot of people search for info on gigs by searching for the venue name. Maybe CLUAS could grab some of that search engine traffic by creating some relevant pages that could rank highly for different Dublin venues? With this in mind a month or so ago I set about creating a home page for each of the main Dublin venues where, over the years, the CLUAS writers have reviewed gigs. There is now a page on CLUAS for Tripod, Whelan's, The Village, Vicar Street, The Point Theatre, Olympia, Ambassador and the former Temple Bar Music Centre). Each page has links to the gigs we have reviewed over the years in that venue.

The result? Across all three of the major search engines (Google, Yahoo and Live) CLUAS is now one of the top 10 sites for various key word searches relating to these Dublin venues. The only downside is that we are not appearing in the top 5 results (where most people click on a result), when we appear it is more typically between the 6th and 10th spots.

Nonetheless this is bringing a healthy and steady level of brand new first time visitors to the CLUAS site. For example the traffic analytics service that CLUAS uses show that over the first two weeks of November 2007 a total of 44 visitors (i.e. an average of 3 a day or appox 100 a month) reached the site after they searched for something relating to Vicar Street. Not a huge number at first glance but is encouraging is that 97% of these visitors had never visited CLUAS before and once they get to the site they, on average, ended up choosing to view 2.8 pages on their initial visit. I am seeing similar levels of new visitors (and pages that they then go on to view) for people searching for info on the Point Depot, Whelan's, the Ambassador and Olympia.

In a nutshell these new venue pages are bring a minimum of 300 brand new first time visitors to CLUAS every month and these visitors don't just bolt for the door when they hit the site, they hang around and browse an average of about 3 pages each.

Expect some more themed 'home pages' on CLUAS that aim to rank highly in the search engines and, in so doing, rope in more first time visitors to the site. If even only 10% of them then go on to be regular visitors, it will result in a long term growth in our visitor base. 

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