Recently in "smudie"

Last night I attended the launch party for Girouette, the eagerly-anticipated first album from General Bye Bye that was released this week on Greed Recordings.

The album was recorded before I started working with the band so doesn't feature any of my work. However, at yesterday's gig they did perform two new tracks for which I've written the lyrics, including Emmylou, which lead singer Philippe introduced as being "a story about a guinea pig I met in Texas, that Stuart Mudie turned into a song".

In fact, my lyrics were about a hamster, not a guinea pig, but it's still a great tune.

• Emmylou

• Honeycomb

Although songs like Cactus, Ashtray and Crayon are probably most representative of how I write, I do venture outside my rock and folk ghetto from time to time as well.

Lately I've been in the studio with a pair of electro producers from Versailles called Juan Carlos, working on a track that begins "Like a piece of chocolate, I'm slowly melting beneath your touch, babe"; I've launched a collaboration with a very funky young singer called Marlene Rodrigues; and I've written a song called Kiss By Kiss for Ashton Kennedy.

Sometimes it's good to broaden your horizons.

• Kiss By Kiss
  

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 expressly 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 among the 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.

• Splitting The Atom

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