Our French neighbours are often so close to getting it right but then
fail at the final hurdle, dousing a perfectly good song with some awkward grammar or finishing off a sharp outfit with some ill-advised logos
or a pair of white chinos.
However, when they do get something right they do so in
spectacular style and possibly their best idea for some time, beating even
duck paté and teaching Zinedine Zidane how to perform a Glasgow kiss, was to
put a live music venue on the first floor of their beloved Eiffel Tower.
As the first in a series of three gigs organised around Europe by
Coca-Cola to showcase emerging talent alongside established artists in
spectacular venues, a certain Siouxie Sioux (minus the Banshees) was
persuaded to don her catsuit, belt out some classy new material and
generally enjoy a view of Paris that must have been even more spectacular
from on-stage than it was to us proletarians in the audience.
The
support bands were chosen on merit by Siouxie. Headland, a five piece band from London who are
very much riding the pseudo dance/indie wave of frenetic beats and angsty
vocals, were the chief support act and they had enough spark to light up
several hundred of the tacky mini Eiffel Tower models being hocked to the
tourists queuing outside. Their combination of a mustachioed, be-suited
front man and pretty keyboard player was pleasing to the eye and ear but
it's a shame that not many people took the trouble to turn up earlier as
Headland, judging from their classy recital and recent press interest, could well be rivalling the Klaxons and Shitdisco next year for the
indie disco kids crown.
And so, after Headland had packed their kit away and a black-clad
team had installed enough instrumentation to make the north side of the
tower groan louder than a Frenchman losing at boule and spilling his port,
it was time. First her black-clad band came on and then, with a tension-building pause, Miss Sioux entered stage right.
Quite how she got her seamstress to sew her into her silver catsuit, a garment that
sat between glam rock-style grandiose and something you might expect to be
wearing if you were an extra in Flash Gordon, was anyone's guess. She actually looked in impressively good nick for
her age and there was not a bulge out of place or a love handle to be seen.
The set was almost entirely, and somewhat selfishly, made up of new
material from this year's MantaRay solo album (her first) that mostly
bordered on a sort of soft rock Marilyn Manson or a dodgy Depeche
Mode remix. That's not to say either ends of the musical spectrum are
bad, it's just not what you'd expect from the dark, brooding personality
promoted by the artist for the past three decades.
But everyone has to move
forward and, if this is Siouxie Sioux's new solo direction, then it
could win her a lot more fans than the previous dark gothic punk numbers
she's associated with. Into A Swan is one such example of a new track that
typifies her performance; it thuds along with bursts of scuzzy electronica
and grinding guitar punctuated by her trademark powerful vocal style but
with the added visual treat of a few high kicks.
Her mastery of the French
language was also impressive but not so helpful when she introduced each
song in the lingo. My greatest achievement in France that day was to
correctly order a beer in French rather than tell the barmaid I wanted four
of something in German.
So this was one thing the French almost got right again; the venue was
superb, the views astonishing, the bands all impressive. But, if we're honest, Siouxie's bacofoil outfit belonged around
the Christmas turkey on the top shelf of a pre-heated fan oven, rather than
on the slender thighs of a 50-year-old rock legend on a chilly Parisian
evening.