It kind-of sort-of was here in London. Still freezing, but the city looked amazing in the sun, me walking across London Bridge and up to St Pauls.

Do I sound like Tommy Steele yet?

But, you know, maybe there’s something even more spirit-raising about the first day of summer in someone else’s city.

All of which flannel is to introduce yet another sunny French pop group with acoustic guitars and the spirit of Amelie.

Ok, so this is La Fiancee. And so is this – the first a sunny stroll round the suburbs, the second a live version of a Brigitte Bardot song.

I don’t know much about them. Try googling them. Info is scant.

But this sort of thing is going on all the time in France, as the brilliant blog www.fillessourires.com knows and shows.

The thing is… you might think French pop music isn’t as clever or angry or original or edgy or rock as, I dunno, the lumpen indie you may favour personally.

But it is much much nicer, isn’t it?

I met her once, when I was a child, and her WWII heyday seemed impossibly distant but was, in fact, just 30 years past – about the same time that now stands between us and, say, Adam Ant. To those of us of a certain age, these sort of comparisons seem scary.

But I’ve never really heard Vera Lynn’s music, apart from ‘We’ll Meet Again’.

Of course, it’s music from another time and we can’t really hope to understand what it really meant to the people who loved it first time round.

And yet… Listen to this song:”When I grow too old to dream, your love will live in my heart.” I’m not convinced that Vera Lynn doesn’t achieve everything in these three minutes that our old pal Morrissey has spent 25 years trying to do. (Apart from alienating a loyal fan-base by playing regular two-minute concerts etc etc.)

The sense of hope mixed with impending doom and long-term, inevitable poignancy is, well, heartbreaking, no?

The song – lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein – was written in 1934, so it’s not, at least in its original intention, about the War and the potential death or long-term departure of one’s lover. It’s probably the whole context of the Vera Lynn version that really makes the song.

I can certainly hear a Morrissey cover of this; or hear this version being used as the scratchy as-if-on-the-radio play-in for one of his piano ballads (an aspect of his solo productions that I have never seen discussed anywhere.)

Have I strayed too far from my brief here? I don’t think so. I mean: listen to it.

Most exciting was the news from the Philippines that Manila’s No 1 indiepop club, The Strict Rules of Polite Society, were theming their Christmas club night on December 22 around Kaleida and Pastel Collision. I know! I wish we had recorded more than 21 songs now. Still, it looks as if everyone had a good time, judging from the pictures on the FB page <a (which has 871 members). I have swapped a couple of emails with Geraldine who is one of the people behind the club, too. She and her pals seem on a mission to spread the indiepop word in their part of the world and take it from being a cult into being a musical mainstream thing (though some folk prefer to keep it secret – familiar scenes).

Course it is exciting that there are pockets of enthusiasm for our otherwise long-forgotten pop. They have asked me to go and DJ too and I have already checked the fare. Maybe I will emigrate.

More Googling reveals that Los Angeles’ Hungry Beat night, a night of classic English pop, 60s grooves and northern soul has fitted in our own Here Comes The Summer somewhere between The Smiths, St Etienne, Otis Redding and Brigitte Bardot.

And – surely – Los Angeles’ coolest web radio station, Dublab, is also no stranger to the Collision. On the link provided, DJ Marion kicks off her show with a PC song and talks about how she’s wanted to get hold of it for ages.

So maybe it was all worth it after all!

Anyway, it’s 13 years since I made a record and obviously that’s 1) too long but 2) a good thing, as if I had been making records continuously for all that period I would surely have run out of ideas by now like everyone else does and would be clinging to the past rather than, you know, contemplating a triumphant return.

At some point.

Anyway, the song on the ad is a great piece of naive 60s girl pop written by Tony Hatch and sung by his 15-year-old sister Ninette and you can hear it in full right here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tdJVj2x9wNk

As ever it leads me to thinking on exactly what percentage of new bands are still basically wanting to be either the Beatles or the Stones or the Velvet Underground (about 97 per cent, possibly) and why no-one digs a bit deeper and, erm, pays homage to these other quite-naive sexy Sixties vibes (see also previous posts re Francoise Hardy/Brigitte Bardot etc).

Maybe someone should, eh? (Alright, apart from St Etienne who I like but who never quite nailed it. Discuss.)

I guess this kind of thing is really inspired by that kind of Adam Faith/Bobby Vee pop of the late 50s/early 60s – sweet-sounding and smooth and safe and not likely to scare your mum and dad.

But so many years on, we’ve all got over the idea of pop as being solely about teenagers moaning about having to tidy their bedrooms or have their hair cut… so this sounds ace and rather like summer.

My next post will be about befezzed indie mover/shaker Mike Alway going to see Brentford FC at Griffin Park in the company of Liam Gallagher and getting on famously.

And about my own ongoing search for musicians for my own French Pop Dream project.

If you care.

Instead she had a proper band, bringing just the right level of noise/dischord/oddness (maybe the word I’m trying to avoid here is ‘edge’) to her dreamy songs.

So, yeah, they had, on the one hand, feedback and dischord, on the other, a glockenspiel and Charlotte had a snare drum at her side that she bashed on occasionally and they did three beautiful soft acoustic ballads, including Dylan’s Just Like A Woman – so, in all, possibly not deviating too far from the idea that the soft/hard template for all modern rock was invented by the Velvet Underground.

But is that such a bad thing?

Here she is singing Just Like a Woman in Brooklyn earlier this year.

(Incidentally, on other youtube clips of Charlotte doing this song, messageboard professors/Bob Dylan fans declare it no good because she’s whispering. Some even say she has “destroyed” the song. Don’t get me started on this plain stupid idea of covers “destroying” songs OR the dreary, sexless, clueless, pub-rock fools who could hear Charlotte’s whispering and not think it was just a bit magic. Can Charlotte sing? Can Lou Reed sing? Pop’s not maths; it’s not about provables, fellas; it’s about what works. A 200mph guitar solo isn’t better than a one-not guitar solo! Obviously!)

Anyways.

The band looked and sounded like a band in a film: it had an air of fiction about it that a 38-year-old woman should be playing her first gigs with a band of punk-pop virtuosos playing an eclectic set of unplaceably cool songs – and filling out venues.

Of course, Charlotte Gainsbourg is a special case. And that’s partly why I liked it so much – she has bypassed the usual dreary rock rules. Her music just exists. It’s not obvious where it comes from.

She spoke (and sang) in English throughout apart from one bit right near the end where she shyly and slyly said, as an afterthought, “Any French in?” (in French, obviously) and received a massive cheer.

All of which pre-amble is to mention that I’ve been working on some new songs with a French singer for the last few months, using Francoise Hardy and Brigitte Bardot’s 60s songs as a starting point (I wouldn’t have said Charlotte Gainsbourg’s songs until I heard and loved the three acousticy ones at this show.) We’re been working up a mix of cool cover versions and original songs, mainly in English and encouraged to see bands like The Postmarks and Camera Obscura, with a similar if less directly French, vibe getting increasingly popular.

At current rate of progress we will have some proper recordings for you to hear, I dunno, sometime around the London Olympics. But we’ve got 20 songs and Elisabeth the singer has a great voice, so it’s all potentially exciting, though I daresay if you prefer the prospect of sweaty pub rock to a French girl whispering in your ear then you may want to give us a wide berth.

And if you can play the accordion or the double-bass, write to me here, as we want to make some records and we need some people to help.

In fact, I wondered if Sievey was the only man who could make my pop dreams come true.

I wouldn’t say I had plans of asking him to produce some pop with me; but I definitely had thoughts of it. I wonder why no-one did?

Because even from his spoofy Frank records, it was obvious he loved pure 60s-inspired pop and was rather brilliant at it, with an ear and sensibility not far removed from someone like Ian Broudie.

The Freshies’ records – from the pre-Frank period when Sievey was a proper have-a-go would-be pop star – are just full of layers and hooks and harmonies and good humour and yet despite Sievey’s apparent Beatles obsession, he hadn’t, to my knowledge, produced any ‘straight’ records after he donned the Frank Sidebottom head in about 1984.

Intriguingly, I learned last week, that Sievey DID produce some new songs under his own name (or possibly as the Freshies) for a radio session in 2007 but I’ve never heard them and the link is now apparently dead (I wrote to the boss of Manchester Radio Online, urging them to re-up the link. No reply. Poor.)

What’s either funny or frustrating as a Sidebottom fan is that I think a lot of people who didn’t get him thought he was a one- or two-joke comedian:

1) He’s the one with the funny big head!

2) He’s the one who does rubbish cover versions!

So many of the obits have mentioned the cover versions – and his live show was built round them. But listen to one of the dozens of radio shows he did and you can hear the genius: really clever, detailed stories, spoofing around with the form with a smartness so lightly (and, ok, stupidly) worn that children could enjoy them as much as cultural clever-clogs like myself.

Of course, I despise look-at-how-clever/edgy-I-am comedians and so many modern ‘funny’ ‘men’ seem simply misanthropic or wilfully aggressive. Can it be that that prize fool Frankie Boyle, who makes jokes about children with Downs syndrome and evidently thinks himself edgy, can make £20k plus a night from corporate gigs when our own Sidey dies penniless?

Depressing.

Of course, the obits have mentioned how Sievey/Sidey got Caroline Aherne started by letting her play Mrs Merton (initially, a young mother for whom Frank babysat, with indifferent results). But no-one has really highlighted the many people who came after him who seemed to be in his debt.

He worked at some point with Graham Fellows/John Shuttleworth and, though Shuttleworth is funny in his own right, it’s hard not to feel that the bones of his act are very similar to Sidebottom.

I think Sievey found that thought hard to resist too, from reports.

To me, the crazily-detailed-pop-culture-observations-squeezed-through-the-surreal-masher formula of Viv Reeves and Harry Hill (who I love too) was first done by Sievey; maybe it’s my age – maybe Sievey nicked it all from someone else. Hard to suggest that Reeves or Hill stole from or were even influenced by Sievey – I guess all you can say is that he did it first and if he’d come a bit later he might have found a more mainstream niche.

I think I’ve watched every Sidebottom clip on youtube in the last couple of weeks but I’m still looking for more.

Maybe this is the definitive one, though.

I’d like to find someone who can sing in French btw, so if you have any bright ideas, send them through.

Presumably you’ve heard Camera Obscura’s new record, called ‘The Blizzard. It’s really good! Is it the best record ever that could fit in the Venn intersection between ‘indie’ and ‘Christmas’? It’s record of the week on Mark Radcliffe’s Radio 2 show here in England. Radcliffe used to play our records and surely would do again if we could only be bothered to make some more. So.

I love Camera Obscura and if you’re on this page, I think you might love them too. I’ve only just discovered them and feel slightly ashamed of this fact as they have been going since, roughly speaking, quite a long time (12 years?).

Anyway, here are the top pop debates on the web as of December 16 2009. Which side are you on?!

1. Marc Almond v Gary Numan

A clip of a possibly worse-for-wear Almond slagging off a new Numan record on a po-faced review show sometime in the early 80s. The comments beneath are fantastic, with irate Numan fans going, ‘Aha – but where’s Marc Almond now!’ apparently oblivious to the fact that most people might ask the very same question about their own boy. People get so worked up. This takes the ‘two bald men fighting over a comb’ analogy to new levels, surely.

To my mind, Almond is a great unsung artist, the Morrissey-it’s-not-okay-for-straight-boys-to-like. If you ever have the chance to see him live, go. And if you have the chance to download his album Stardom Road (and you do, it’s on itunes, obviously), then do it right now.

I have no thoughts whatsoever on Gary Numan. Should I?

2. Daphne & Celeste v Reading Festival

Footage of hopeless Shampoo-esque US pop duo getting bottled off while doing an ill-advised ‘set’ (of two songs) at Reading in 2000. Brilliant debate in the comments section – usually home to professors, long on learning and short on time – along the lines of:

a) “D&C represented rubbish manufactured pop and they deserved everything they got! I was there and I’m really alternative and proud to have done my bit to show The Man what I thought. And it was a larf!”

v

b) “Well done! You threw a load of bottles of piss at two teenage girls. Very indie.”

Repeated for, like, 5000 comments.

My view? Well, you might think that ‘manufactured’ pop is terrible. (Though you may, conversely, approve of, say, the manufactured pop of Joe Meek or Phil Spector as it ties in with your indie notion of the mentally maverick male auteur). And anyway po-faced self-appointed guardians of the indie/alternative flame are much much much worse. (three muchs). Surely.

Yours?

3. Simon Cowell v Rage against the Machine

You know about this one, I guess. The Facebook campaign to get Rage Against the Machine to be Christmas No 1 in the UK, to stop X-Factor talent show winner Joe McElderry claiming the honour.

RATM were on my breakfast show of choice this morning (BBC Five Live) and did a load o’ swearing that resulted in them being taken off air.

Capitalism still seems to be intact. At least, it was when I passed Argos on my way back this afternoon, about an hour ago.

Obviously, I think it’s a Good Thing that artists are ‘engagé’ and offer a political view and aren’t just idiots who quite like singing and want to be famous and make money and take coke and have their pictures in the paper and live in a big house.

But then… maybe we should face it: a lot of people like to listen to bland, faux-emotive airbrushed ballads about love sung by pretty young boys who’ve never been in love. They always have and they always will.

Maybe people should just get over this plain fact and stop trying to get their (mum/little sister/gay Nigel from Planning/other people to whom they’re convinced they’re intellectually superior), to listen to Angry Music.

No?

4. Bono v Morrissey

Yes, this really is a Guardian/Observer column about why the writer prefers Bono to Morrissey. How thin do you want? Obviously I side with Morrissey (as do about 95 per cent of the many people commenting). But answer me this: what if, circa 1990, Bono had retired from pop to be, I dunno, President of the World and had bequeathed old The Edge and co to be Mozzer’s backing band and co-writers. Would Morrissey’s subsequent records have been more consistently brilliant than they actually turned out to be?

Come on – this is a great debate.

No?

While you’re deciding, here is a brilliant Morrissey B-side about child abuse by religious types in Ireland. When X-Factor has its Mozzer week next year, I don’t give much for this being included.

Though I can hear it being a surprise inclusion on Subo’s follow-up album.

You?

As regular readers know, I am convinced that some of our brilliant songs (old and, yes, future) really should be covered by people who can actually play and sing and have a budget that extends beyond the pennies previously afforded us in the world of micro-indie.

Here are the candidates:

1. Susanna Hoffs. Listen to this version of Different Drum. This song – by the Monkees’ Mike Nesmith, but you knew that – is virtually bombpoof I think, but even so this is a brilliant version. It’s afrom a covers album Hoffs did with Matthew Sweet (as Sid’n'Susie) of 60s songs, all sounding sunshiney and full of harmonies and mostly really good; an album that sounds slightly like it was recorded at home for fun – but in a good way. They’ve done one of 70s songs now. So when they come up to needing an obscure-but-ace song to complete their 90s covers album… all they’ve got to do is Google and here we are. Stop Look and Listen, maybe. ‘Back’ ‘in’ ‘the’ ‘day’ the indie police would have you beaten to death with flowers for mentioning this but… SH is 50 and, let’s just say, she looks pretty good on it. Pretty, pretty good. It would be perverse not to mention this

2. Claire Denamur. French pop fox whose debut album came out this year. I hear her doing Last Minute Miracle. For so many reasons that you would need a lot more time to explain, there’s something quite pure and unselfconscious about French pop. And even a hilarious (ish) spoof of its carefree, cliche-flirting touchstones – like this one – is still a cool thing, even as it rips into that entire notion of Gallic cool. Splish-splash!

(btw thanks to Ms Aliyah Keshani for the spoofy clip. Is she north-west London’s finest so-far-unsung singer-songwriter? Listen to her new song, ‘Running Out’ at www.myspace.com/aliyahk and judge for yourselves. I MAY have written the backing vocals for this song. Another story.)

3. Mareva Galanter. Former Miss France and repopulariser of the ukelele. Seriously. Who knew this stuff was going on? A Eurodisco take on classic 60s pop. There are no English language equivalents of all this, are there? Hmmm. BTW if you do love all that Francoise Hardy, Charlotte Gainsbourg, French-girls-whispering-in-your-ear stuff (and if you don’t, what’s wrong with you?), have a look at this blog, Filles Sourires which is a massive, ongoing tribute to all that stuff. And there’s a lot of it going on. Mainly in France. Obviously.

4. Mary Wyer. Voice of the brilliant but virtually unknown 90s Australian band Even as We Speak. Still singing on youtube, from her house somewhere in the UaE (I think). Here she is doing The Outdoor Type, the brilliant (too much hyperbole here? Well play it and see if I’m wrong) song made famous by The Lemonheads. What is it about her voice?

How about that?

Yep.

Because I’m not certain that this – their version of Edison Lighthouse’s Love Grows Where My Rosemary Goes – isn’t the best, most feelgood song ever recorded, you know, certainly now that we can;t listen to the Mamas and the Papas ‘Make Your Own Kind of Music’ with such carefree lightheartedness again…

So do yourself a favour, crank up the old speakers/headphones to 11 and dance round your bedroom/living room* (depending on age and accommodation arrangements) until your feet are sore.