Search what's on

Advanced

  • Moussu T e lei Jouvents + The Hut People

  • Thu Oct 16 2008
    • Recommended
  • This event has finished
  • Chilli Fried North at Darbucka, 182 St John St, London, EC1V 4JZ

  • By Bella Todd

    Posted: Mon Oct 13 2008

  • Thirties Marseille was a seething melting pot of global sounds, where the French operettas of Vincent Scotto rang out against black blues and jazz, and beatniks, musicians, artistic drunks and, like, dead exotic prostitutes danced the humid nights away to the carnival music of the West Indies and Brazil. You may not be able to lounge seedily by a port in 2008 east London, but head down to this UK album launch by a band steeped in, how you say, la musique historique de Marseille – and you will at least hear one of the most irrepressibly appealing French-speaking acts since Manu Chao. Recalling that man’s chatty, exuberant jumble sale of styles, with an added pinch of JJ Cale’s genial late-night blues, Mister T and the Youngsters (as it translates in English) are four blue-collar fortysomethings from La Ciotat, a shipbuilding town just along the coast from Marseille, who play banjo, guitar and percussion with an attitude and image that’s defiantly anti-bourgeois.

    Combining bouncing rhythms with political bite, and tough drinking songs with a rugged tenderness, Francois Ridel (aka Mister T) and co are champions of Occitanian culture (Ridel himself speaks Occitan, the ancient language, mainly of southern France, suppressed by the centralist French government) and enemies of everything you probably associate with Parisian elitism. Their mission to ‘come up with an answer to the commercial globalisation of the planet’ may be a little ambitious, but new album ‘Home Sweet Home’ (released on Manvette Records and distributed in the UK by Harmonia Mundi) should at least win them many new converts to the cause.

    Further listening: www.myspace.com/moussu
Add your comment to this listing

Have your say






Advertisement

  • Details

  • Chilli Fried North atDarbucka ,182 St John St, London, EC1V 4JZ
    , UK
    Geo: 51.524585, -0.103107
  • 020 7490 8772
  • Category: Folk, blues & world
  • Travel: Angel/Farringdon

  • Map

Date of the day

Donny

Fun, live life to the full and looking for someone to enjoy life with! Looking for someone to share similar interests in the Arts, especially...