On a eu peur

Well, we’re back from Brittany and feeling suitably relaxed and refreshed. It’s been great actually, just what we needed - prolonged stretches of serious inactivity, during which large amounts of bread, fish, cheese and dry Breton cider were consumed. All very pleasant.

But I haven’t been entirely idol, I’ve come across some pretty wild and wonderful music, which was a bit of a surprise as I’ve never been particularly impressed with the French music I’ve come across before. I’ve bought some CDs, made a few recordings on my new (secondhand, picked up on eBay just before we left) iRiver, and even made a few video recordings on a “borrowed” camcorder. Indeed, I’ve had a lot of fun playing at Andy Kershaw (I’m talking about making recordings “in the field”, you understand, nothing to do with restraining orders…)

Raggalendo

Last Sunday afternoon found Josie, Michael and myself at a beautiful chateau called Roche Jagu, sitting in the sunshine, drinking the obligatory cider, watching a very strange hip hop act called Raggalendo, from Goudelin in Brittany. I can’t remember a band ticking quite so many wrong boxes (quite so enthusiastically). For starters they were all-white and all-female, and as well as that they rapped in French and Breton. Top stuff! Oh, and they did their whole set in traditional Breton costume. Outstanding…

My French isn’t good enough to pick out much of what they were singing about, although Josie swears they did a song about Petit Folous which may well be true but I kinda hope it isn’t. There was certainly a huge element of fun about the gig, but they weren’t the sort of novelty act that this maybe makes them sound. To me they sounded a lot like the Beastie Boys or even Deeelite, but their Myspace sites Iggy Pop and Jimi Hendrix as well. They even managed to work in some traditional Breton dance. It was all terrific fun.

I’ve found this video on Youtube, which I’m afraid takes a while to get going (skip on to about 1:25) but is “L’Alcoolocataire” the song they jumped into the audience and finished their set with…



I made a few recordings which aren’t quite as good as I hoped; you’ll have to excuse the sound of the wind on the mic and the occasional fumblings of a cack-handed recorder… The first track is called Peur de Peur, but I’m afraid I can’t work out the title of the second one, so I’m calling it Arret.

Peur de Peur

Arret

I should probably point out that without the wise council and restraining influences of my friends I not only went off and bought the CD (a weakness I think I’ve admitted to on these pages before) but went the whole hog and bought the T-Shirt.

I’m not apologizing.