Nouvelle Vague (or 'new wave' in English), playing in Dublin this weekend, scored a surprise hit album with their eponymous 2004 collection of acoustic versions of - voilà! - new wave and punk classics by acts like The Cure, Depeche Mode and Joy Division. (Sacrilegiously, they also covered 'Teenage Kicks'.)
Their gimmick was to have the songs sung by young female French singers familiar with neither the originals or the English language, hence the (at the time) freshness of their versions (their cover of 'Too Drunk To F**k' by The Dead Kennedys is quite fun to listen to).
One of these singers, Camille, went on to release a smashing 2005 album called 'Le Fil', full of quirky pop songs and inventive vocalising.
By the time of last year's second album, 'Bande A Part' (the title of a nouvelle vague movie by Jean-Luc Godard), the joke seemed to have worn a little thin.
Still, here's their version of New Order's "Blue Monday", recorded for a TV show backstage at Glastonbury:
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2003 - Witnness 2003, a comprehensive review by Brian Kelly of the 2 days of what transpired to be the last ever Witnness festival (in 2004 it was rebranded as Oxegen when Heineken stepped into the sponsor shoes).