Photo by Matt Rowland. Llanfairfechan Community Hall - 18/06/2024
Topette!! 2025 Tour - Tickets on sale now! - links here: https://www.topette.co.uk/gigs.html
Unique Anglo-French five-piece Topette!! will be out and about across Europe in 2025, with tour dates, festivals, workshops and more. All this year's dates and ticket links are now up on our Gigs page. Please book early to help the band, the venues and the organisers in keeping their shows on the road!
ANNOUNCEMENT
Since we first started in 2014 our brilliant, funny, multi-talented percussionist Tania Buisse has been the heartbeat of Topette!!
So it's with great sadness that we have to announce Tania's decision to leave the band. Tania runs her own lovely restaurant, La Pierre Vive, in Chalon-sur-Saône, and in recent years it has become harder and harder for her to find cover, when she needs to go away on tour or head for a festival. So she has made the very tough decision, after eleven happy years, to call it a day with Topette!!
She will be sorely missed by all the rest of Team Topette!! However, there will still be a few chances to catch the full original five-piece Topette!! with Tania. She will be with us for our upcoming tour, in May / June and for all the remaining festival dates in 2025...
So, don't delay, and book your tickets for one (or more!) of Tania's last gigs with Topette!!
https://www.topette.co.uk/gigs.html
Live Album Out Now! In early 2024 Topette!! celebrated 10 years together, with the release of their fourth album, ON - Live at The Jam Jar.
A brilliantly recorded document of a warm June night in Bristol, UK. The album is brimming with the joyous atmosphere of a roomful of happy dancers and listeners, and a band at the top of their game, all having the best time.
With their UK base in Bristol, and their French home in Burgundy, it’s a rare treat when Topette!! get together to play. This live album features a couple of great guest players from France, Romain Chéré and Antoine Turpault, who join the band for the last few tunes, adding to the party vibe, and creating a huge sound.
The new album ON - Live at The Jam Jar is available now, from The Shopette!!
topette.bandcamp.com/album/on-live-at-the-jam-jar
"You’d never find The Jam Jar if you weren’t looking for it. Tucked away between
and behind things, it’s the sort of place that makes Bristol special. It’s eclectic and
filled with joy. The Jam Jar is one of those wonderful venues where magic happens.
On June 26th, 2023 Anglo-French folk collective, Topette!!, slipped between
musical styles and created their own very special brand of magic, in a room
festooned with lights and overflowing with smiles and dancing feet.
With tracks from across all three of their critically acclaimed studio albums,
Topette!! staged the very best pro-European party imaginable.
ON - Live at The Jam Jar captures a truly unique band, melding styles and traditions
with a delightful sense of risk and vibrancy. There’s no fuss, no messing about, this is
just the best kind of folk music - loud and lively, joyful and uplifting, collaborative and
instinctive. This live album celebrates their ten years together in the most fitting way."
By Gavin McNamara
A brilliantly recorded document of a warm June night in Bristol, UK. The album is brimming with the joyous atmosphere of a roomful of happy dancers and listeners, and a band at the top of their game, all having the best time.
With their UK base in Bristol, and their French home in Burgundy, it’s a rare treat when Topette!! get together to play. This live album features a couple of great guest players from France, Romain Chéré and Antoine Turpault, who join the band for the last few tunes, adding to the party vibe, and creating a huge sound.
The new album ON - Live at The Jam Jar is available now, from The Shopette!!
topette.bandcamp.com/album/on-live-at-the-jam-jar
"You’d never find The Jam Jar if you weren’t looking for it. Tucked away between
and behind things, it’s the sort of place that makes Bristol special. It’s eclectic and
filled with joy. The Jam Jar is one of those wonderful venues where magic happens.
On June 26th, 2023 Anglo-French folk collective, Topette!!, slipped between
musical styles and created their own very special brand of magic, in a room
festooned with lights and overflowing with smiles and dancing feet.
With tracks from across all three of their critically acclaimed studio albums,
Topette!! staged the very best pro-European party imaginable.
ON - Live at The Jam Jar captures a truly unique band, melding styles and traditions
with a delightful sense of risk and vibrancy. There’s no fuss, no messing about, this is
just the best kind of folk music - loud and lively, joyful and uplifting, collaborative and
instinctive. This live album celebrates their ten years together in the most fitting way."
By Gavin McNamara
"Topette!! occupy a unique position in the current folk and traditional music landscape. A collaboration between five highly-regarded individuals from two countries, they’re the kind of perfect idea that, if they didn’t already exist, someone would have to invent. Yet Topette!! are no mere ‘project’ band. They’re a fully-formed and functioning group of the kind that rarely comes around nowadays. Topette!! are a true collective - bonded as much by the joy found in each other’s company as in their shared musical vision.
Julien Cartonnet is a powerhouse on both bagpipes and banjo. Fiddler James Delarre’s innate melodic and harmonic sensibilities make him the perfect match for accordion virtuoso Andy Cutting. Tania Buisse’s propulsive bodhrán playing and Barn Stradling’s singularly distinctive bass grooves complete a sound that is irresistible to ears and feet alike.
‘Bourdon’, is a French word that literally means ‘bumblebee’ - but also the drone of a bagpipe. Recorded in just four days by producer Joe Garcia, Topette’s third album shows a marked progression from their previous releases whilst retaining the immediacy that made those albums so appealing. If anything, the group’s long, enforced hiatus (their last pre-pandemic, pre-Brexit gig was in December 2019) has reinforced their sense of unity and reinvigorated their ensemble playing. The all-instrumental album features an eclectic selection, with tunes by band members sequenced alongside compositions by legendary French musicians Frédéric Paris and Bernard Blanc, and American ‘outsider folk’ hero Michael Hurley. The inclusion of both a Cotswold Morris tune and a traditional French folk melody celebrates the group’s roots and affirms their defining ‘spirit of European friendship and co-operation’.
By turns energising, lyrical and hypnotic, Bourdon is a joyous antidote to dispiriting lockdowns and dreary parochialism. Music that sounds as good from an armchair as it does in the middle of a packed festival dance tent."
By Steve Hunt
"The Topette!! sound enters your skull and penetrates, burrowing deep and never loosening its grip that proves irresistible to both feet and brain."
David Kidman, Folk Radio - www.folkradio.co.uk/2022/04/topette-bourdon/
Available now at the Shopette!!
https://topette.bandcamp.com/album/bourdon
Julien Cartonnet is a powerhouse on both bagpipes and banjo. Fiddler James Delarre’s innate melodic and harmonic sensibilities make him the perfect match for accordion virtuoso Andy Cutting. Tania Buisse’s propulsive bodhrán playing and Barn Stradling’s singularly distinctive bass grooves complete a sound that is irresistible to ears and feet alike.
‘Bourdon’, is a French word that literally means ‘bumblebee’ - but also the drone of a bagpipe. Recorded in just four days by producer Joe Garcia, Topette’s third album shows a marked progression from their previous releases whilst retaining the immediacy that made those albums so appealing. If anything, the group’s long, enforced hiatus (their last pre-pandemic, pre-Brexit gig was in December 2019) has reinforced their sense of unity and reinvigorated their ensemble playing. The all-instrumental album features an eclectic selection, with tunes by band members sequenced alongside compositions by legendary French musicians Frédéric Paris and Bernard Blanc, and American ‘outsider folk’ hero Michael Hurley. The inclusion of both a Cotswold Morris tune and a traditional French folk melody celebrates the group’s roots and affirms their defining ‘spirit of European friendship and co-operation’.
By turns energising, lyrical and hypnotic, Bourdon is a joyous antidote to dispiriting lockdowns and dreary parochialism. Music that sounds as good from an armchair as it does in the middle of a packed festival dance tent."
By Steve Hunt
"The Topette!! sound enters your skull and penetrates, burrowing deep and never loosening its grip that proves irresistible to both feet and brain."
David Kidman, Folk Radio - www.folkradio.co.uk/2022/04/topette-bourdon/
Available now at the Shopette!!
https://topette.bandcamp.com/album/bourdon
Out Now! Ricer / La Pause - live download single,
available to download free here:
https://topette.bandcamp.com/album/ricer-la-pause-live-download-single
Ricer, by Andy Cutting has proved to be a big hit with dancers and listeners at Topette!! bals and concerts. So we've released this exuberant live version as a single, to go with the brilliant new video by Simon Houlihan. youtu.be/z5W3PkbuRZQ?si=Ko_gq_iwCaZbG6q6
available to download free here:
https://topette.bandcamp.com/album/ricer-la-pause-live-download-single
Ricer, by Andy Cutting has proved to be a big hit with dancers and listeners at Topette!! bals and concerts. So we've released this exuberant live version as a single, to go with the brilliant new video by Simon Houlihan. youtu.be/z5W3PkbuRZQ?si=Ko_gq_iwCaZbG6q6
“Rhododendron is one of those rare instrumental – and dance-oriented – albums which gives virtually equal proportions of cerebral and visceral pleasure. Seriously recommended.”
David Kidman, Folk Radio UK.
Available on CD or download now...
www.topette.bandcamp.com
Following a season of smouldering live shows across the UK and Europe in 2019, acclaimed Anglo-French acoustic dance band Topette!! were back in the studio to record an eagerly-awaited second CD Rhododendron.
Capturing the atmosphere and spirit of those live shows, this album resonates with the wild energy of packed dance-floors, firing the five players’ imaginations and galvanising their playing. Rhododendron is a bold and exciting album, infused with good-time feeling, pulsing drive and joy...
www.topette.bandcamp.com
Following a season of smouldering live shows across the UK and Europe in 2019, acclaimed Anglo-French acoustic dance band Topette!! were back in the studio to record an eagerly-awaited second CD Rhododendron.
Capturing the atmosphere and spirit of those live shows, this album resonates with the wild energy of packed dance-floors, firing the five players’ imaginations and galvanising their playing. Rhododendron is a bold and exciting album, infused with good-time feeling, pulsing drive and joy...
Also, still available at the Shopette!! www.topette.bandcamp.com
C'est le Pompon... The first full-length album from Topette!!
"A collective of uninhibited musical adventurers playing self-penned and traditional music from anywhere, with a winning mix of bonhomie and grit.
Born out of friendship, the five-piece play naturally social music – for filling dance floors, for listening, for drinking with friends – but don’t expect it to merge into the background. This is raunchy, up-all-night, joyously jugular-grabbing dance music.
Driven by the rhythmic boiler-room of Stradling’s gnarly bass, Buisse’s intuitive bodhrán playing and Cutting’s warm bottom end, the melodies burst out of the seams of this bedrock. With great big anthemic walls of sound, Cartonnet’s glowing French piping and visceral tenor banjo, Delarre’s bright, bushy-tailed fiddle lines and Cutting’s dynamic accordion style. They are, quite literally, having a bal!"
By Sarah Coxson
Topette!! are...
Andy Cutting - diatonic button accordion & melodeon
James Delarre - violin & viola
Julien Cartonnet - French bagpipes, & tenor banjo
Tania Buisse - bodhrán
Barnaby Stradling - acoustic bass guitar
Sound production and recordings by Joe Garcia
Videos by Simon Houlihan
Photography by Ben Potton, Simon Partington & Bastien Clochard
Graphics by Sanna Stradling
Please credit them, if using. Merci beaucoup!
Topette!! Tune Books, available now from the "Shopette!!"
www.topette.bandcamp.com
All of the band's compositions, compiled in this beautiful manuscript booklet.
A treat for musicians of all abilities. Tunes to learn and share.
www.topette.bandcamp.com
All of the band's compositions, compiled in this beautiful manuscript booklet.
A treat for musicians of all abilities. Tunes to learn and share.