"Paris is maybe the town I hate the most on earth"

I've been doing some writing for the excellent site musicOMH recently, and the biggest deal so far has been an interview with Yann Tiersen, whom you probably know as the composer of Amélie. For my first interview with anyone halfway famous I thought it went rather well, and Tiersen was in fabulously contrary mode, talking about how he hates Paris, how little he identifies with the image of it presented by Amélie. I did have a stomach-churning moment when I looked down halfway through the interview to see my digital recorder hadn't been working, but happily the conversation was memorable enough that I was able to run to a café and jot down most of what he'd said.

Tiersen's Amélie music, most of which had already been recorded for his own albums, genuinely merits that overused word 'iconic', and has become shorthand for Paris and old-fashioned romance (I was watching some crappy YouTube clip of Nigel Slater yesterday - without the internet I swear I could have cured cancer by now - and they were using some of the music to evoke a sense of nostalgia for childhood. Tiersen's music has that wonderful and rare ability of being reminiscent even the first time you hear it.) His new album is rather different, though: grandeur has replaced kook. It's called Dust Lane and well worth a listen.