Quelques gouttes de nous: Fip’in Fabulous

So much for my new year’s resolution for more frequent blogwriting. January went by in a blur not the least because it included an unplanned week in

England

to help my Dad, who’s not been well.

As I said in our end of year roundup, we’re pretty well integrated into French life, or at least village life in this very rural corner, but we’ve completely failed to change our music listening habits. Or at least up to now.

If you know us well you’ll know that we’ve both got quite catholic (with a small ‘c’) tastes in music; one of our first conversations when we met was about Led Zeppelin and the last well-known band we saw live was Faithless, so that gives you a bit of a clue. Increasingly, we listen to music online – Jonathan’s aptitude for technology means he can make internet music miraculously come out of the hi-fi – and we’ve been listening to last.fm since the days when they told you how many other people were listening (and it was often less than a hundred or so). When we’re not listening to Radio 4 (as a former government communicator I can’t quite kick the ‘Today’ habit) or Radio 7 (I love drama when I’m ironing) we enjoy Paatan’s musical rickshaw on the BBC Asian network and Judge Jules and Pete Tong on Radio 1. I can’t bring myself to listen to Radio 2 although I know many people of my age do; I just can’t get the JY Prog and Terry Wogan out of my head, I’m afraid. It’s a bit like not being able to eat snails because I can’t banish the image of those eyes on stalks.

Our musical shift France-wards came about through the Guardian’s “Readers Recommend” column and blog. I’ve been a fan for some time, and if you’ve ever made lists of songs with a connected theme then you’ll love it too. There used to be a great, but small, independent record shop in Guildford which played the same game – I can remember spending a very happy wet lunchtime there about fifteen years ago when the staff played whatever songs the customers suggested about rain. Forget about work with The Rain Song – what bliss! Sadly, it went the way of many independent record (and book shops) when HMV opened in the Friary Centre. So much for progress!

While my general music knowledge is reasonably broad, my brain is no good at detail so I struggle to make the connections between the theme of the week and the music I know and love. If often trawl up lots of irrelevances and miss the bloomin’ obvious amongst my favourites. I hesitate to suggest things which have already been mentioned because it just makes more work for the long-suffering editor. So although I often feel like the little girl standing on the edge of the playground watching admiringly, I love the column and with a growing band of regular contributors, RR makes every Friday a day spent people I feel I almost know and would like to know better.

RR comments are as diverse as the contributors and increasingly there’s been a feeling that something else was needed – a spin-off somewhere in cyberspace for tangential discussions about obscure lyrics, where playlists could be posted and recipes for boeuf bourgignon shared (I jest not). So, since last month, thanks to the heroic efforts of blimpy mcflah there’s the overspill blog. And it was through a comment in a thread about Deezer playlists that the Frogprincess introduced me to fip (and Deezer, come to that). Our lives will never be the same again.

Imagine a public service radio station with no adverts and very little talk that’s brave enough to follow the White Stripes with a Fauré sonata, with a repertoire encompassing Fred Astaire and Frank Zappa and everything in between. On its webpage Fip describes itself as ‘Curious and demanding’ and as if to prove the point while I’ve been writing this it’s introduced me to a French singer called Juliette singing a recent thing called “Tu ronfles” ("you snore"), Kassav (I’d guess at a North African background but with French accordion influences) as well as a Charlie Mingus piece that I’d imagine was recorded some time before I was born. I always thought that French contemporary music would be rooted as much in Africa and the middle east as in Northern Europe and fip has proved me right. There’s so much more than the bland sing-along-a-pop that you pick up when you fiddle with the radio as you get off the ferry at Calais.

Ironically, although we’re in France we can’t get fip on the radio. Evidently, since French regional public-service radio was re-organised a while ago fip ceased transmitting from Reims and we’re too far away from Paris to pick it up. But that’s no hardship thanks to their online radio player which is far more reliable than the BBC’s, even since it’s been beefed-up and re-named. Even better, fip gives a real-time playlist and archive. No wonder there’s a strong attachment to fip in Brighton!