How was your weekend? Your Paris correspondent, still living under transport-strike conditions, covered a lot of ground on foot this weekend - mainly to reach the rare metro lines that were less affected than our own.

Nonetheless, we managed to catch Nina Hynes (left) in concert at the Flèche d'Or again (she played a gig there last April too). The Barbarella of Irish pop put on a fine show; her recent long-player 'Really Really Do' is a delicious pick n'mix of electro, glam and indie - one of the best Irish albums of 2007.

If you managed to see Nina on her recent Irish tour, you were lucky - she almost didn't make it. Her tour van broke down in Germany en route to Eire, and she had to hire an estate car (in American, a station wagon) to continue her trip. Hynes currently lives in Berlin, where there's a Paris-esque transport strike these days too. And there are no buses in the northside of Dublin either! Hmmm: she seems to be spreading bad transport vibes... next on her tour diary is Italy in December - let's hope those lovely intercity Italian trains survive the experience.

Nina's Paris concert reminded us that she lived her for a while, and her stay here obviously inspired her to write material. Her single 'Monoprix' is named after a well-known French supermarket. Your blogger does his hunting/gathering there, but it doesn't seem so astral or dreamy to us. Perhaps Nina's local Monoprix was cooler than ours...

Anyway, check out Nina Hynes' current material (with her band The Husbands) on her MySpace page. Here's the video for 'Monoprix', not filmed in a French supermarket, we're sorry to say:

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By any chance, has this song reached Ireland? It's being played all the time on French radio, and since it's in English we reckon it may spread Eire-wards very soon.

Yael Naim is a young Parisian singer-songer who mixes Hebrew folk and English pop. Her single 'New Soul' is a breezy little tune about how she's communing with the world (or something). First listen, it sounds sweet and cheery. After that, however, you want to kill it for its drippiness.

Our hunch about its world-domination potential comes because it's the perfect soundtrack for a commercial. You know the type: soft-focus beautiful people tripping through the daisies all hippy-like, eyes gleaming like deep pools of water, teeth shining like bathroom tiles. Then the logo for the bank or phone company pops up. All very soothing; you're literally begging them to take your money and make your world a happier place.

So, is Yael Naim the devil? Perhaps not. We just think that you'll soon be so sick of this song that you'll be kicking in your television. Here's the video, in which Yael moves into her new apartment and starts her new life - no doubt with the help of her friendly building society and their fantastically competitive rates:

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Key Notes doesn’t do politics. Well actually it does, but would be so inclined to rant and rave that it wouldn’t make for great reading material on a Friday afternoon. However, the current assault on the people of Pakistan and the swift and severe oppression of any form of protest against it, led your easily stirred blogger to consider protest songs and their history. 

A good table-quiz factoid for you is that the oldest protest song on record is The Cutty Wren, a composition from the 14^th century speaking out against the feudal system in place in England at that time. Despite the rumours however, I could find no evidence that it was actually written by Steve Tyler.

Though its origins were in England, it was in America where the protest song emerged as a beacon of hope for those tired of the status-quo (though many were said to have enjoyed Rockin’ All Over the World).  

The 20th century proved fertile ground for American musicians when it came to penning their protests. The lyrics "Southern trees bear strange fruit / Blood on the leaves and blood at the root / Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze" from Strange Fruit (famously recorded by Billie Holiday) were penned by Lewis Allen in response to the lynching of two black men. The songs impact was such that it was still being used in the Civil Rights Movement 30 years later, and was cited by Bob Dylan as an inspiration in (the excellent by the way) No Direction Home. 

Dylan himself was responsible for thousands of buskers inflicting the world with their version of Blowin’ in The Wind, one of the most recognisable and popular protest songs ever written. The fact that it wasn’t written about a particular event but simply posed a number of questions designed to make the listener question themselves and the world around them has allowed it to stand the test of time. Of course, this was before Dylan was hawking iPods and SUV’s, but the song struck a chord and was used as an anthem for protestors of the Vietnam war, and most wars since.  

Of course the Sixties produced a huge volume of protest songs from Respect to Give Peace A Chance and many of these are still used today. Indeed many commentators lament the lack of original protest songs emerging from today’ musicians. 

While it’s true that there are some laughable attempts at protest songs around (Green Day or George Michael anyone?) there are some great examples of the genre emerging in response to US foreign policy. Neon Bible, for example, is littered with references to the state of paranoia created by the Bush government. Neil Young’s Living With War was even more blatant in it’s critique. However, perhaps the greatest protest song written this century (in Key Notes humble opinion) was penned by, the frustratingly inconsistent, Bright Eyes. 

Containing the stinging opening verse; "When the president talks to God / Are the conversations brief or long? / Does he ask to rape our women’s' rights / And send poor farm kids off to die? / Does God suggest an oil hike / When the president talks to God?" it is a powerful critique and its rawness touched a chord with a great of disillusioned and disgruntled people. It’s a pretty good song too which always helps. So to the people of Pakistan, and indeed anyone living under the pretence that democracy is for your benefit and not for theirs, Key Notes presents Mr. Conor Oberst, When The President Talks to God.

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Parisian chanson française singer Daphné (left) has won the 2007 Prix Constantin, beating high-profile nominees like Justice and Keren Ann to the honour. She was rewarded for 'Carmin', her second album.

The singer was presented with the prize by jury chairperson Rachid Taha at a ceremony in Paris last night. The presentation took place after a show featuring performances from all the nominees. The only absentees were Justice, who played their scheduled concert in Bordeaux last night.

The Prix Constantin, France's equivalent to the Mercury and Choice prizes, is awarded to the act considered to be the year's musical revelation. The two criteria for eligibility are that the act is signed to a French label and has never attained gold status in France (75,000 sales).

After last year's win by slam rapper Abd Al Malik, Daphné's success is a return to the prize's 2005 form, when idiosyncratic singer/voice artist Camille was rewarded for her quirky take on the traditional French chanson style, where a skiffly/jazzy sound is combined with Latino/manouche rhythms and carefully-crafted lyrics.

You can listen to some tracks from Daphné on her MySpace page. Here's the video for her recent single 'Musicamor':

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Anybody who tried to access the CLUAS home page, blogs or discussion board this morning (from about 6am GMT to 1pm GMT) would have seen a big fat 'sorry you can't access this website, mate' error.

These sort of errors happen once in a while around these part so it's - normally - no big deal, just a bit of an inconvenience. However this time around it was the first time that the ability to access parts of the site was deliberately blocked by our hosting company because there was too much traffic to the site (to be perfectly precise, access was not blocked to CLUAS but our website was disconnected from the database that contains the content of our blogs and discussion board; the other parts of the site not depending on the database were still accessible).

Being blocked for attracting too much traffic is good news (hey, hey we're attracting more users!) and bad news ("damn, we're going to have to toughen up the hosting infrastructure to deal with the increased levels of traffic").

While sorting out the problem in conjunction with CLUAS.com's hosting company I was curious to see that the increase in traffic was less becuase an increase in humans accessing the site and more because of a (big) increase in visits of the search engines 'bots' accessing CLUAS to retrieve our content for their own purposes (i.e. knowing what's on CLUAS so that they can present relevant results for their users when they search for various key words).

So what did I have to do to persuade our hosters that we would no longer completely hog access to the server which hosts our database (and databases of other websites) and so they would be confident enough to allow CLUAS to reconnect with its database? Basically I reduced the traffic the site will get from search engine bots by:

• Reducing the frequency with which the Google 'bot' visits CLUAS from the default of 'Normal' to 'Slower' (it's possible to set this via CLUAS.com's account on Google's rather good Webmaster Tools)
• Adding extra lines into CLUAS.com's robots.txt file that instruct the Yahoo bot (called 'Slurp') to stop crawling any files in the parts of the site that are database-driven.
• To be sure I also barred another major Yahoo bot ("Yahooseeker") from crawling the entire website.

Following these steps the site was reconnected by the hosting company and, bingo, CLUAS was working again around lunchtime today.

The steps I had to take have their obvious downsides - some CLUAS pages will be indexed either less frequently or not at all by major search engines, which in time is going to compromise the amount of traffic we get from search engines (which has always been very good). But it is a short term solution until I move the CLUAS site to a more robust hosting environment.

But one encouraging lesson I have learned from this is that the migration of CLUAS from its previous dated environment almost exactly one year ago is (finally!) paying dividends - at least if when I note that the search engines have decided what we have merits them to go and increase significantly the rate and frequency at which they trawl our site. I always knew it would be a long road but that, in long run, CLUAS would be much better equipped for the future. We are certainly not there yet. There is a ton more to do. But the tools to do what we need are at our disposal.

Anyways. To mark the 1 year anniversary of the beginning of the massive (and ongoing) operation to bring CLUAS (kicking and screaming) into the 21st century I am going to, this week, start a series of blog entries that outline what CLUAS has done in the last year, with what technologies, why, and where this all may lead the site in the future (and, er, you can wake up from your slumber now).

Fret not, though I will also be getting back into posting, in parallel, some more blog entries about music and technology and what is going on out there. Watch this space, etc.

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Having been living in France for almost three years now, your blogger has become as cultivated as any Jacques le Frenchman. For instance, like Blur's Charmless Man, we know our claret from our beaujolais. It's simple really; you blow into a claret, whereas a beaujolais has strings.

Today is the annual celebration of the Beaujolais Nouveau, the first wines of the 2007 harvest. Bottles were ceremonially delivered Harry Potter-style at the stroke of midnight to bars and bistros around the country (notwithstanding the current transport problems), and bars are offering Beaujolais to its customers. It all reminds us of our recent stay in Beaune and the Côte d'Or, where we drove through endless acres of vineyards (well, not literally - we stayed on the roads) and sampled the merchandise.

The Beaujolais Nouveau celebrations bring back sad memories for many in the Irish media community. In 1984 four Irish journalists were killed when, flying back from France in an effort to bring the first bottles of new wine to Ireland, their chartered light aircraft crashed near Eastbourne on the southern English coast. The pilot and four other passengers also died.

Anyway, less of the new wine - let's get to the new tunes.

Many French music fans were disappointed at the news last autumn of the break-up of a Nantes band called The Little Rabbits. We especially liked their 1998 album 'Yeah', a catchy and cheeky collection of lo-fi alt-pop in the same vein as 'Western Sous La Neige' by Dionysos.

The good news for Little Rabbits fans is that lead singer Federico Pellegrini is back with a new band. French Cowboy (left) sees Pellegrini (under the hat) continuing in the English-language lo-fi-pop line of business, but now with added country influence. The group's first album, 'Baby Face Nelson Was A French Cowboy' has just been released. Wherever it finishes in the end-of-year album polls, it has Best Album Title all sown up.

If you're curious as to what a French cowboy sounds like, you can listen to some of the band's tunes on their MySpace page. Here's the video for their single 'Shake', directed by bassist Gaetan Chataigner and featuring the Cabaret New Burlesque; there's at least one CLUAS writer who'll love that:

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In French a nuit blanche (literally, 'white night') means an all-nighter. Paris celebrates an annual Nuit Blanche every October - museums and cultural spaces stay open until the wee hours and everyone gathers outdoors regardless of the autumnal weather.

All year round there's a more familiar Paris version of the all-nighter; the last metro being at 1 a.m. (an hour later on Saturdays), you miss it by accident or design and you resolve to stay out and awake until the metro re-opens at around 5:30 a.m. To this end many Paris bars stay open until five in the morning to exploit/shelter the weary metro-lingerer. This scenario is becoming less common thanks to the Vélib' public bike scheme and the improved Noctilien ('night-link', like in Dublin) late bus service.

Dublin's French and French-lovers can enjoy their own 'white night' this weekend. La Nuit Blanche is a live music event taking place at The Button Factory (all together now: "formerly known as the Temple Bar Music Centre") on Friday 16 November.

The soirée bills itself as 'the bohemian alternative to French chic'. So, we guess that there'll be little in the way of posing, pouting, swaggering or searing electro-punk soundclashes. Instead, the menu features "an often misunderstood side of the Parisian scene, where nostalgia and folk music confront contemporary and abrasive lyrics." What this means is that there'll be Django-inspired folk-jazz from Akim and skiffle-backed slam poetry from T'Inquiète Lazare.

Now, your blogger knows that you're quite the fan of French chic and posing on the dancefloor. Never fear: France-and-dance fans will be catered for by the DJs of French Friday, which recently finished its monthly residency at Thomas House. It'll finish late, you'll miss the last Nitelink and voilà! A real nuit blanche à la parisienne!

Tickets for La Nuit Blanche are yours for 12/14 euros from www.tickets.ie and when you arrive (doors are at 8pm) you're promised a complementary glass of Mr Hennessy, your blogger's illustrious Irishman-in-France predecessor.

Further details are available at the Nuit Blanche MySpace page.

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