JACQUES CHIRAC will be dismayed to learn that it is not just in international business that English is the accepted common language. The French president and a coterie of his ministers stormed out of a meeting of EU leaders in Brussels last week when the head of a business lobby group began to deliver a presentation in English, writes Jim Carroll
As far as Chirac was concerned, Ernest-Antoine Seillière should have talked away in his native French. It would be left to the translators in booths around the hall to translate into English Seillière's thoughts on the need for EU countries to reject economic nationalism into English.
But Seillière spoke in English because, he said, it is "the accepted business language of Europe today". Chirac and his homies left the room in a huff and cooled their heels in the corridor until the next speaker came to the podium.
Of course, English is also the accepted lingua franca when it comes to writing rock and pop lyrics - and that applies right throughout Europe. You can hear this every time a CD or MP3 by some gang of European young guns comes your way. The package may have been sent from Cologne or Brussels, but the language is most certainly English.
You could also hear it very loudly at Eurosonic, the festival where the cream of the continent's rising alternative acts come together in the Dutch town of Groningen each year for a few nights of music and merriment. There may have been a melting pot of lingos to be heard on the streets and there may have been a Danish or Dutch band on stage, but there was only one language coming from the amplifiers.
It's unlikely that Chirac will spend too much time mulling over possible protectionist policies to overcome this linguistic imbalance. After all, despite the quota system which French radio pioneered, even Chirac knows this is a battle that cannot be won. Pop music has always had an industry-wide Anglo-American bias and not even the French president throwing a wobbler is going to change that.
The rule of thumb would appear to be that if you want to get your records released and music heard beyond your native land, you have to sing in English. If you counted the number of non-English international hits over the last few years on the fingers of your hands, you'd probably have quite a few digits left over. It's a choice that bands have to make at their very first rehearsal.
What's interesting, though, is just how acceptable this has now become. None of the other European journalists I spoke to at Eurosonic could really see anything amiss with the likes of Spanish band The Sunday Drivers (who naturally spoke to the crowd in Castilian between songs) or excellent German act Robocop Kraus not writing or singing in their native tongues.
It is now something to be commented on and noticed only when it is the other way around. "It would be considered world music if it wasn't in English," was one sniffy put-down about the situation.
Leaving aside the red herring about the dearth of Irish rock and pop acts singing in Irish (after all, Irish is the official language here in theory rather than in practice), such acceptance of a monolingual norm on planet pop does seem to be a mite strange.
Of course, there are many rock, indie and pop acts who happily go about their business singing in French, German, Dutch, Danish, Norwegian and Italian. They play shows, release records and make enough euros from tickets and CDs to enable them to do it all over again.
Few, however, reach a position where a commercial crossover is possible beyond their home turf. If an act's records are to reach a bigger audience, it's in the lap of the professionals and the vast bulk of radio-programmers don't really want to hear anything that jars with daytime radio's current diet.
That's bad news if you're singing in Spanish or Greek, no matter what you're singing. And it's something that even Monsieur Chirac can't change.
jimcarroll@irish-times.ie
