Meet the musicians trying to revive French-language pop 

The other day, I went to see a nouveau riot-girl band called Claire Dance play in a disused factory in Bagnolet on the edge of Paris. They were great: the kind of sonic kick in the nuts I’d been waiting more than a decade for an all-female band to deliver. I half-wondered whether it was just my own imperfect command of French that left me clueless as to their message. ‘C’était tout een eenglish,’ came the response from the guitarist afterwards. How come they never considered accompanying such emotionally charged music with lyrics in their mother tongue? ‘It’s considered cringe,’ she replied. ‘We only like English music.’

That France has a complex about its language will surprise nobody. Where the frontiers of other tongues are porous, the Académie Française polices its own with all the open-mindedness of a North Korean political commissar. Gallicisation of English neologisms has been recommended policy since 1972, and effectively enshrined in law since the 1990s. There is, however, one gaping cultural anomaly in this schema, an exception that proves but increasingly undermines the rule: the strange disappearance of French from the country’s homegrown rock and pop.

Since the Toubon Law of 1994, 35 per cent of radio airplay has been reserved for French-language songs. France, moreover, is the only country which insists that its Eurovision entries be sung (at least partially) in its own tongue – when beardy hipster Sébastien Tellier dared to perform in English in 2008, the reaction was, to say the least, mixed. Yet the ‘alternative’ scene leans ever further towards English, and the reasons come down to that most idiotic rationale: ‘accessibility’.

During the Trente Glorieuses after the second world war, when a relatively monoglot but economically powerful middle-class emerged in France, the local idiom ruled the airwaves.