L'histoire de Raymond et Cécile

Still no new music for you right now as The Streetlamp team has its collective mind on weightier matters. However, we couldn't give you absolutely nothing so we've decided to combine all the strands of our Francophilia - les chansons, les film, les femmes, la politique, and bring you a short introduction to Juliette Gréco.


Juliette Gréco was born in Montpellier to a Corsican father and a mother who became active in the Résistance. Gréco also became involved in the Résistance, and was caught but not deported because of her young age.
After the war, Gréco spent the post liberation years frequenting the Saint Germain cafes, and became a figure associated with the political and philosophical Bohemian culture of La Rive Gauche. Philosophers, poets, authors and musicians filled the night clubs and brasseries that lined the boulevard Saint-Germain, and the area became the centre of the existentialism movement associated with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. As a regular figure at the many music and poetry venues, Greco was given songs to sing written by Sartre himself, and also became acquainted with Miles Davis and Jean Cocteau, even being given a role in Cocteau’s film Orphée in 1949.

Gréco can also be seen in Bonjour Tristesse, a 1958 film directed and produced by Otto Preminger and based on the novel of the same title by Françoise Sagan. The title is derived from a poem by Paul Éluard, "À peine défigurée" amd it means, of course, "Hello Sadness".

Here is  Gréco with the French language version of the song:



An MP3 of this can be freely downloaded 'here'.


Now here's Sur Les Quais Du Vieux Paris:


An MP3 of this can be freely downloaded 'here'.


Finally, here's Sous le ciel de Paris, the melody of which should be familiar to everybody.



An MP3 of this can be freely downloaded 'here'.


Hope you enjoyed those.If you're interested in French chansons then have a look at these 100 free downloads 'here'.

À bientôt

Griff
xx Click here

Life in the Faslane

Glasgow poet Eamonn Coyle speaks on truth and nuclear weapons in Scotland.

British nuclear weapons spending explained by a panda

We're embedding a video (below), which we hope you'll like. It combines our love of pandas and our dislike of nuclear weapons. What we like most about it is the way that panda makes bear's confident, "common-sense" assertions sound like the ridiculous illogical nonsense that they so obviously are when you stop to think about it.

Well done, panda! If only humans were so wise.

The Chance for Peace

As you must have noticed, if you've been following the Streetlamp from the beginning, we've not been bringing you quite the same indiepop outout recently as he have in the past. The main reason for this is that we've been rather diverted on the political front. Scotland, at the time of writing, stands on the brink of a momentous, game-changing decision, which will have repercussions far beyond these shores.

One of the repercussions of Scotish independence is that, if the people of Scotland vote Yes, we will effectively be able to force the UK state into unilateral nuclear disarmamnet. This is quite an attractive outcome for some of us!

Inspired by this opportunity, our own resident film-maker, Ray, has made the following video, which has been given official endorsement from the Scrap Trident campaign. The video in question uses excerpts from the Chance for Peace speech, an address given by U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower on April 16, 1953. Eisenhower is, of course, the man who famously warned the world of the growing power of the Military–industrial complex and uttered the immortal lines:

"I think that people want peace so much that, one of these days, government had better get out of their way and let them have it."

We here at the Stretlamp think that, for the people of Scotland, that day is coming soon. Here's Ray's video on the subject:



For more information on the subject, please visit Scrap Trident.

The music used in the video is the 2nd movement, Largo, from Dvorak's "New World" Symphony reorded in 1963 by the Philharmonia Orchestra, conducted by Otto Klemperer/ This can be downloaded for free 'here'.

The Streetlamp Team