Sibérie M’était Contéee

Chao told his biographer Peter Culshaw that he had always regarded French music as “bullshit”; for years he refused to write or sing in the language. Somewhere around his 40th birthday, his hostility softened and the result was 2004’s Sibérie, a left-field homage at least in part inspired by the world of chanson, cabaret and musette. Never released outside France until now, Chao somehow sounds quite different singing in French. To Anglophone ears it’s difficult at times to tell whether he’s being ironic or is for real. But when it works, it’s spectacular, as on ‘Helno Est Mort’, on which he somehow mutates ‘Au Clair de la Lune’ into the syncopated jazz-blues of a New Orleans funeral band.

Yet if Chao indulging his inner Parisien feels strange, there is also much that is familiar, as he filters his take on la musique Française through the usual dreamy haze of sound effects to create an hypnotic, freewheeling collage of 23 songs that glides beguilingly in and out of focus, a dry run for the cut-and-paste laptop technique he would use on 2007’s La Radiolina. At the same time, his label is reissuing his 1997 five-star classic Clandestino, which has surprisingly been out of print for several years.