Vive La France

This week there is a music festival in Brighton - the Second Annual Vive La France Music Festival. There are events in several venues and representatives of several different styles of French music - French Techno Pop, French Chansons and Folk Music, and some other kinds of music we know so little about that we just class them as 'music for people younger than us.'

I don't believe I've ever mentioned it before but The COG is a Francophile. This is why, last night, I found myself sitting on concrete in the sub-basement of an old Victorian industrial building - a sub basement probably formerly used to hold coal, but now a bar called 'The Basement'. We were there to see the French Chansons part of the festival. It was a small room - I counted about 60 people in it and 15 of them were sitting on the stairs. The rest of us were on two concrete tiers on two sides of the room, or on the floor.

We saw three acts, quite varied mostly pretty amateur but in a good way. The first group - Les Zuts - was just a bunch of French local guys who performed 3 SErge Gainsborough songs. Really enjoyed them. The second group - Francois and the Atlas Mountains, was a bit more professional and did a long strange song called le Peau. Which I liked. But the last act someone named Marina Celeste, formerly of Nouvelle Vague. She was a hot ticket - adorable French woman-child type. Tonight she is performing in a much larger venue - one of the top performances of the festival.

She began with a song about Une Frivol, which, she explained, is a girl who drinks too much alcohol and likes too much the men, when she has drunk too much. She followed that with a song called Orgasm Addict. Then, other songs, mostly in English for some reason. The climactic song was memorable. She shipped off her sparkly dress, revealing a tight black tank dress underneath and began to whip her hair around and dance on the stage while she sang a song called, apparently, Too Drunk to Fuck. That's pretty much all the lyrics, too. It was actually lots of fun to watch, but it made me reflect how times have changed since Serge Gainsborough and Jane Birkin's song Je t'aime... moi, non plus. was banned in England.

But, we had a good time. Even if we were 30 years older than the next oldest people there.