A Foreign Take on French Radio

So it's currently Australia day here in Paris, a good nine and a half hours behind the city of Adelaide where I'm from. Naturally I've got the hottest 100 streaming on my phone as it is a small comfort for me when I'm feeling a little homesick. Unfortunately I already know Flume has topped the list (curse you time-zones!). It's listening to some good old Australian radio, however, that got me thinking about the differences in radio stations between what I've heard here in France and back home. The most notable characteristic to the stations I've listened to here are that they play a fairly even mix of French and English songs. It's strange as you don't notice it sometimes, you'll be sitting in some department store, zoned out whilst your girlfriend chatters away to a store attendant in French, and before you know it you realise you can actually understand something. But it's not the conversation, no (I haven't been learning french that quickly), you'll find yourself tapping your foot to some golden oldy, like Wonderwall or Life on Mars. Annoyingly, however, it also applies for pop songs, so just when you think you've escaped the mind-numbing drivel they constantly play on the radio in London, it comes blaring out of some supermarket radio and ruins your day.

A plus side to the radio here is a station called Nostalgia which plays, constantly, the songs you love from the better days. It is still split between English and French songs, so sometimes you don't know what the hell they're playing and sometimes it's something like Bohemian Rhapsody. What is brilliant though, is when the car full of french people you're travelling with burst out singing some french song at the top of their lungs. I was coming back from helping shoot a short film with a bunch of great peeps when this very thing happened. Clearly Les Mots Bleus is a song of notable significance from their past and you can't help but getting swept along with their nostalgia, even when you never heard it. Overall, I think I still need to listen to a bit more radio over here to get a bit more of an idea of things. They have just about everything from hip-hop, that sounds like gibberish due to the language barrier, to folk. Honestly though, I miss the radio back home and I am still finding that I have no idea what songs have been released in the last year. Up to number 88 now, hoping to hear a bit of Amity Affliction and some more Violent Soho. Happy Australia Day!