Friday's French music break - Étienne Daho, "En surface"

Friday's French music break this week is from a singer who first broke on to the music scene back in 1981.

It's "En surface", the most recent single from Étienne Daho and taken from his 2013 album "Les Chansons de l'innocence retrouvée"

Étienne Daho (screenshot from official video of "En surface".

As you can tell, Daho has been around a while and has built up a firm and loyal fan base and has become (in the words of the promotional blurb) "one of the most influential personalities to have emerged on the French scene in the last 30 years"

Part of the problem (for those not quite so enamoured of his music) is that Daho seems to have been "singing"  (inverted commas entirely intentional as he has a "voice" that surely only the French could "love") variations of the same song since the 1980s.

And in fact, he appears to be well and truly stuck in that era, offering up little that is sparklingly different, not to mention tuneful and instead relying on a tried and tested recipe of electro-pop "synth-driven and rock-surf influenced" (his English language Wikipedia entry, so you know it must be right). music which has, admittedly, served him well over the decades.

Very well in fact with every album turning gold or platinum and a slew of successful singles.

Granted "the familiarity factor" could probably be said to be true for many artists who've proven their longevity, but in the process, Daho just sounds too moody and bored when he sings. Don't you think?

"En surface" is one of those songs that you hear and wish would be over quickly because the melody and the "low whispery voice" have a combined soporific effect (for some) which will simply send you off to the Land of Nod.

All right. That's not exactly fair - just an opinion.

There are plenty around who have enjoyed, and continue to do so, Daho's music. And the album from which this track was taken, received some pretty good reviews when it was released.

Writing in Le Journal du dimanche, critic Éric Mandel described "Les Chansons de l'innocence retrouvée" as an "ambitious and elegant album" and one that was "sumptuous with songs that stood out for their emotional power."

Oh well.

And then there are the diehard fans, some of whose comments on the "En surface" video on YouTube are equally gushing

"Magnifique chanson , magnifique clip, magnifique chanteur, magnifique voix !" for example. Really, you shouldn't need to run that throught Google translate.

Or

"Une très belle chanson."

And

"Ma chanson préférée de l'album.....octobre est encore loin  pour revivre la magie de ses concerts."

Ah October...and the "Diskönoir" tour which will, over the next few months, see Daho take the show on the road around France (with three dates at Olympia in Paris) Belgium and Luxembourg, plus a date in London on October 23.

Ready? Judge for yourselves.

Actually it's not so bad after a dozen or so hearings....

Carving up the camembert - redrawing the French map

After much reported and totally uncharacteristic to-ing and fro-ing, the French president, François Hollande, finally made up his mind and released earlier this week his "vision" of a how new administratively slim-lined France could look.

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Hollande wants to reduce the number of regions from the current 22 to just 14, in an effort to "reduce regional bureaucracies and cut back on spending".

It's a move which, if approved by parliament, the government reckons could save around  €25 billiion annually.

And, at a time when France is looking to cut back on public spending, that can't be a bad thing.

No sooner had the plan been announced, than Hollande's supposed latest sidekick (although you have to wonder who is actually in charge), the prime minister, Manuel Valls, promptly popped up on TV (yet again) to explain the mechanics of passing the proposals through parliament and how, if they were approved, the process of transition would take place.

Most telling perhaps was his admission right from the start, that there could well be some room for manœuvre, implying perhaps that the 14 regions currently outlined might not be the final figure and conceding that the debate had just begun and it would be complicated.

"There will be debates in the Senate first and then in the National Assembly and there may be changes," he told Jean-Jacques Bourdin on BFM TV.

The key is to reduce the number of regions to make them stronger and more competitive. There needs to be change and it has to be done."



Ah, does it sound as though Hollande and Valls are already preparing themselves for a famous French fudge even before the debate has started.

The whole idea, of course, is not a new one. Over the decades, successive governments have toyed with the idea of redrawing the regional map of France.

And ever since Hollande came to power, rumours that he envisaged some sort of "carving up of the camembert" have been...well, if not rampant in terms of news coverage at least bubbling gently under the surface.

Some of the apparent choices seem bewildering - even to those who know about these sorts of things.

That ruddy great Poitou-Charentes, Centre and Limousin proposal for example. Or the fact that the département of Loire-Atlantique  and its capital Nantes and the current region of Pays de la Loire will not find itself in Bretagne where it probably belongs at least historically.

But perhaps everyone should breathe a huge sigh of relief that the much touted merging of Aquitaine and Limousin  (right up until the day before the announcement, as the map below from the Journal du dimanche shows) looks as though it won't happen.

What the JDD predicted François Hollande had in mind (screenshot JDD)

Cécile Duflot has a 1999 Renault Twingo - so what! The "moralisation" of French politics

It's all the rage at the moment

Or perhaps that should be everyone in political circles is raging about it - which isn't necessarily the same thing.

The decision by the French president, François Hollande, for politicians to come clean to the public by declaring how much they're worth.

Government ministers will set the ball rolling in a campaign which has been dubbed the "moralisation of politics".

They have until April 15 to tell us all exactly how much they're worth and whether they pay wealth tax.

And of course this being France, Hollande is also proposing to introduce a new law which would force all elected officials to disclose publicly their individual wealth and family assets, while coming down harder on those who lie or fail to tell the complete truth.

It's all something of a typical knee-jerk reaction to the tax evasion scandal surrounding former budget minister Jérôme Cahuzac.

The junior minister in charge of disabled people, Marie-Arlette Carlotti, was the first to list her assets, when she published them on her blog. Apartments, house, life insurance policies, bank accounts and vehicles - fascinating stuff.

Likewise for housing minister, Cécile Duflot, where we learn that among other things, she has a 1999 Renault Twingo!

Carlotti and Duflot have also been joined by some members of the opposition centre-right Union pour un Mouvement Populaire (Union for a popular movement, UMP) eager perhaps to show us all that...while not exactly poor, at least how "normal" (and like the rest of us) they really are.

Former prime minister François Fillon, although not wholeheartedly in favour of a need for a law, appeared on prime time television news on Monday to reveal that he wasn't rich enough to pay wealth tax.

"I own a house in the Sarthe (his former constituency) which I bought with a mortgage 20 years ago for €440,000. Today it's worth around €650,000," he told France 2's anchor David Pujadas.



There's less than €100,000 on my savings account and I have two cars, both of which are older than 10 years," he added, (conveniently) forgetting to make any mention of the shares he has in a private consultancy.

Another former minister Laurent Wauquiez also "went public", insisting that the Cahuzac affair proved there was a real need for transparency to show the French that they could trust their elected representatives.

"We're elected to defend the public interest," he said in an interview with Le Journal du dimanche.

"And we shouldn't be in politics to 'make money'."

The UMP party president, Jean-François Copé, is among those who say they won't be disclosing their wealth publicly - unless it's made law.

For him, the idea is pure "voyeurism" and "hypocrisy" as well as "an attempt by François Hollande to create a smoke screen around the fact that one of his ministers committed fraud and then lied about it."

http://www.jeanmarcmorandini.com/article-302930-jean-francois-cope-refuse-de-publier-son-patrimoine-sauf-si-la-loi-le-demande.html

Of course Copé has a point. Cahuzac's behaviour in the run-up to his admission - when he looked journalists and fellow politicians "straight in the eye" and swore that he had no secret bank accounts abroad - is evidence that if someone is going to lie in order to cover up, then creating a law will probably not stop them.

Plus there's already a wealth (ouch) of laws on the books to deal with those who are caught.

Is yet another one really necessary?

And where is the line to be drawn.

If members of government and perhaps all politicians are required to disclose their assets, then why not all elected officials and those who influence policy and public opinion at every level: union leaders, journalists, the judiciary?

Finally of course there's the implication that if you're unwilling to disclose your personal wealth, you must have something to hide, and honestly...is anybody out there really interested in the fact that Cécile Duflot drives a 1999 Renault Twingo?

Time for a spot of music maybe.

What would you like? "If I were a rich man" from "Fiddler on the roof" perhaps.

Or Abba's "Money, money, money"?

Oh all right then - both.

François Hollande, back from hols and time for work - finally

The French president François Hollande is back from his summer break all bronzed and ready to get cracking with affairs of state.

Er. Hello? Isn't there something wrong with that?

François Hollande and Valérie Trierweiler  - end of summer hols. Nice tan (screenshot Var Matin)

Unemployment, economic recession, the problems in the Eurozone, Syria - all trifling concerns of government which could be put on hold, it would appear, while Hollande, sunned himself in the south of France for three weeks.

Oops, 18 days to be precise. Mustn't exaggerate now.

Those are points driven home not only in Tuesday's edition of Libération with a headline that reads as though it's taken straight from Le Figaro "L'été très moyen de françois Hollande", but also by a piece in this week's Le Point by Hervé Gattegno.

"Where else would a 'normal' employee begin a job at the beginning of May and be automatically entitled to three weeks holiday in August," asks Gattegno in his piece entitled "Hollande was on holiday for too long."

Gattegno surely has a point.

Sure he's now calling his ministers in and having detailed head-to-heads with them about how to tackle the recession (what recession?), economic hardship at home and throughout Europe, what to do about Syria, the Roma, violence and security in France and the list goes on.

But shouldn't he have been doing exactly that - or at have least given the appearance of doing so - already?

In an interview with Le Journal de Dimanche last weekend, Jean-Luc Mélenchon characterised (or rather caricatured) Hollande's first 100 days in office as "100 days of almost nothing."

Gattegno says Mélenchon was, in his usual style, exaggerating but there's also the uncomfortable feeling - even among those to the Left - that there might be some substance in what he says, and a potential sign of things not to come.

The article in Libération, a paper that is not shy in its support of the Socialist party, is surely evidence in itself that some on the Left are questioning Hollande's tactics - or lack thereof.

Hollande might want to be demonstrating that he's not as omnipresent as his predecessor Nicolas Sarkozy, but isn't he taking delegation perhaps a little too far and appearing almost absent?

If he carries on at this rate his five year mandate will come to resemble those of Jacques Chirac's second term in office - a time when French politics stood still while the world moved on.

François Hollande's irreproachable government and code of conduct - good stuff, isn't it?

Does anyone remember François Hollande saying in an interview with Le Journal du Dimanche during the presidential election campaign that he would "undertake not to have anyone around him either at the Élysée or in government who had been accused and/or found guilty by a court"?

(screenshot BFMTV report)

His statement suggested he wanted a "clean" government; one beyond reproach and whose ministers would set a moral example to the rest of the country.

Hey, once the government had been named, Hollande even made them all sign a charter of ethics or code of conduct which, although it didn't explicity make reference to past "misdemeanours", stressed the importance of transparency and "good behaviour".

Among the pledges each minister made were that there would be no conflict of interests, no accepting private presents or invitations that could be called into question, the respect of collective responsibility for decisions taken by the government, to give up any other local or regional political offices they might hold.

And on the more "normal" level they were obliged to travel by train rather than 'plane whenever possible and ensure that they respected the rules of the road when driving or being driven.

Wonderful stuff, isn't it?

But back to that initial undertaking - the one to be surrounded by those with an unblemished past - legally speaking.

How's he doing?

Well for starters there's the prime minister Jean-Marc Ayrault who, back in 1997 when he was mayor of Nantes was handed down "a suspended prison sentence for favouritism in the allocation of a city hall contract".

Then there's the foreign minister Laurent Fabius who was tried but acquitted of manslaughter in 1999 in the tainted blood scandal which took place when he was prime minister in the 1980s.

Let's not forget Christine Taubira, the newly-installed justice minister who back in 2004 was found guilty by an industrial tribunal in an unfair dismissal case brought against her by a former parliamentary assistant.

And bringing us bang up to date of course is the case of Arnaud Montebourg the minister of industrial renewal who has been found guilty this week of publicly insulting the management of the ferry company SeaFrance last year.


All right, they can all be "explained"  - they have - and justification made to show that in each case the minister has been "legally rehabilitated" (what?) or the case brought against them didn't have an impact on their "personal integrity".

But - phew.

Barely two weeks into a new government.

What the heck was that campaign pledge all about?

Hot air, it would seem.

And the charter of ethics? Well let's see just how many exceptions are made to that as the days, weeks, months, years roll by.


Gouvernement Hollande : polémique autour des... par BFMTV

Carla Bruni-Sarkozy pregnancy rumours

Speculation is rife on the Net that France's first lady, Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, is pregnant.

The source of course is an irreproachable one; the French weekly celebrity gossip magazine Closer, which asserts in its latest edition that "someone very close to the couple," had provided the information.


It's a story which really doesn't matter whether it's true. The very fact that it's out there in the public domain - albeit it Twitterdom and the less serious elements of the mainstream media - means that it has somewhat taken on a life of its own.

The presidential office - the Elysée palace - has reacted of sorts when questioned by the national weekly newspaper Le Journal du Dimanche with "It's a matter which touches on the private life of the president" - another way of saying "No comment' in a country which has very strict laws which are largely accepted when it comes to public figures.

Perhaps that explains why the so-called story has not really made on the sites or pages of France's main newspapers and magazines, let alone the airwaves and screens of radio and television.

As Bruno Roger-Petit points out on the French website Le Post, there has been almost complete indifference from the mainstream media (other than the usual suspects) to the speculation so far.

Perhaps that's not so surprising as this is the third time in as many years that rumours have surfaced about an impending patter of tiny feet at the Elysée palace.

Just run a Google search and you'll be able to pull up umpteen articles maintaining Bruni-Sarkozy has at one point or another been expecting.

Be that as it may, Closer is sticking to its guns this time around.

The editor of the magazine, Laurence Pieau, confirmed the "scoop" to the national daily Le Parisien, saying that she was certain the information was more than reliable.

"We would not have divulged the news without being completely sure," she said.

"It has been corroborated by several different sources and we are convinced that Carla Bruni-Sarkozy is in the earliest weeks of her pregnancy."

The next few days and weeks will tell whether the rumour is true, but in the meantime, Closer has created a buzz, ensured its sales for the following week, and taken everyone's mind away from political affairs that might actually be of some importance over the coming year as campaigning hots up for the presidential elections in May 2012.