Recently in "smudie"

I wrote the lyrics for several tracks on the album Candy Pop Folk, including The Whisper Of The Leaves and Rules Are Made To Be Broken.

Candy Pop Folk is the most recent release from Kosinus, a successful French music library that supplies instrumental music and songs for use in advertising, documentaries, films and other media.

They may have been created for commercial purposes, but they're still nice little songs that I'm proud to have written.

• The Whisper Of The Leaves
• Rules Are Made To Be Broken

Early Saturday evening, my daughter and I were one of forty or fifty lucky people who gathered in an apartment at a secret location somewhere in Paris to watch Rivkah perform at the Oliver Peel Session #16.

She even sang the song we wrote together, Splitting The Atom - and it was the first time I'd ever heard it!

It was quite a moving experience to discover one of my songs in a live setting, as opposed to listening to an mp3, and together with the intimate atmosphere of the "concert en appartement", it all added up to make a beautiful moment for me.

Plus, my daughter told me afterwards she was very proud.

Vielen Dank Oliver, merci Rivkah.

It's snowing in Paris, and I have just learned that the Christmas song I wrote with The Hogmanay Children has been released on the compilation album Chantons Noël avec Olga Records.

Admittedly, Like Every Christmas Eve may not be the happiest Christmas ditty you've ever heard, but with its mix of Japanese karaoke-style vocals in the first verse, a drunken church organ all the way through and some harmonies at the end that the Beach Boys would have died for, it still manages to be uplifting despite the somewhat morose subject matter.

Merry Christmas, and all that.

• Like Every Christmas Eve
  

When Philippe Beer-Gabel of the band General Bye Bye asked me to start working with him a few weeks ago, he was happy to give me carte blanche to write about whatever I liked. However, he did have one specific instruction, which was to try to include a reference to an animal wherever possible. This is sort of the band's signature, it seems - a beast in every song.

Well, we've been working on a few tracks together, and so far I've managed to satisfy Philippe's request in at least one - Give It All Away - by slipping a few geese in there. I'm looking forward to hearing the sound of their beating wings in concert soon.

• Give It All Away

When I was in Brest a couple of months ago, our car stopped briefly at some traffic lights and I saw a man standing in a launderette in the part of town known as Recouvrance. He had his cheek pressed firmly against the window and his gaze was lost somewhere in the middle distance, fixed on nowhere in particular (which is where I suspect he felt his life was heading) as the washing machines spun through their endless cycle behind him.

Inspired by this curious scene, I went on to write a song called Shipwrecked, which I then gave to someone I recently began supplying with lyrics in the hope she could do something with them. I'd been listening to a lot of Dominique A at the time, and it turns out she's quite a fan too.

Needless to say, my song is not about this man, or at least not only about him. Seeing him was just the spark, and the rest came the way it always does... inexplicably.

• Shipwrecked
  

Pourpre, the side project of Thomas Charlet from eliotE & the ritournelles, has recorded a version of my song Never.

• Never
  

Manchester: "Sans puissance, le son n'est rien"

Manchester are a band who wear many of their influences on their sleeve - or, rather, in their name.

There's also very much of a Mancunian swagger in the voice of lead singer and guitarist Leslie Kervella, who I first met when she was pushing her way to the front of a VERY long queue for the toilets in the Pop In and proclaiming loudly, "Let me through, let me through - I'm pregnant!"

Now that she's given birth and found time for making music again, the first results of our labours are ready to see the light of day. Smoke Signals is about taking the not-too-subtle hint that it's time to move on, while Grip compares the act of making love to nothing less than climbing a mountain.

Rock on!

• Smoke Signals
• Grip

Have A Good Night 4, released today, is a collection of "lullabies" performed by such rising stars of the French indie scene as Mina Tindle (who will be supporting Beirut on their upcoming European tour), MiLK and Fruit Juice, and eliotE & the Ritournelles (who have teamed up with Rivkah on Wheel of Dreams, a charming little ditty for which I wrote the lyrics), together with a few international guests.

The idea for our song came from eliotE herself, who told me about a dream she often had as a child in which she could "choose" what to dream about using a kind of magic roulette wheel. When she came to me with the idea they already had a vocal melody, which she described as being "a bit like the Andrews sisters", and I tried my best to respect that as I came up with the words.

I got a sneak preview of some of the album's contents a couple of weeks ago when I attended a special kids-only concert held at a playgroup in Montmartre, Paris - hardly the most rock n' roll of venues, I admit, but my daughter and her friend loved it!

• Wheel of Dreams

Sometimes, you need to start afresh.

That's what I told OrangeColumbo, who recently suffered a hard-drive failure on his PC that meant he has lost several months worth of work, including his initial demos of some songs that we'd been working on together, and a hundreds of personal photos, and who knows what else.

I didn't really know what else to say, and I still don't - other than the fact that, since I learned the news a couple of days ago, I've been rediscovering many of the tracks we've written together over the years.

Old songs like Carousel. Great songs like Carousel.

We'll be back, my friend!

• Carousel
  

I've been making music.

Although I would never really claim to be anything other than a lyricist, I have nonetheless been amusing myself lately by setting some of my old lyrics that never found a home to a series of home-made electronic rhythms. And I've been singing them myself!

Silent Mode is the first demo resulting from these experiments to see the light of day.

I'm only doing this for fun, but if you download the track, I'd certainly be very interested in hearing what you think of it.

• Silent Mode