Topette!! are back, with a new album, a UK tour and festival dates in 2022!
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.
Available now at the Shopette!! (our Bandcamp)
https://topette.bandcamp.com/album/bourdon
UK Tour - June 2022
9th - Bristol -SouthBank
10th - Gower Folk Festival
12th - Stroud - Lansdown Hall
13th - Birmingham - Centrala Space
14th - N Wales - Llanfairfechan Community Hall
15th - Lancaster - Gregson Centre
16th - Sheffield - Crookes Club
17th - Norwich - Canary Club
18th - Margate Folk All-Dayer
19th - London - Clapham Library
Check out the video for Oblique Jig / Miss Heidi Hendy... Filmed by Simon Houlihan at Sidmouth Folk Festival, 2019. youtu.be/QJddK-684RI
“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 dancefloors, 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, the vibe is ‘Party!’: 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!
Topette!! are...
Andy Cutting - diatonic button accordion & melodeon
James Delarre - violin & viola
Julien Cartonnet - French bagpipes, & banjo
Tania Buisse - bodhrán )
Barnaby Stradling - acoustic bass guitar
Sound production and recordings by Joe Garcia
Videos by Simon Houlihan
Photography by Simon Partington
Graphics by Sanna Stradling
Please credit them, if using. Merci beaucoup!
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 dancefloors, 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, the vibe is ‘Party!’: 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!
Topette!! are...
Andy Cutting - diatonic button accordion & melodeon
James Delarre - violin & viola
Julien Cartonnet - French bagpipes, & banjo
Tania Buisse - bodhrán )
Barnaby Stradling - acoustic bass guitar
Sound production and recordings by Joe Garcia
Videos by Simon Houlihan
Photography by Simon Partington
Graphics by Sanna Stradling
Please credit them, if using. Merci beaucoup!
Top quality T-shirts available now, as well as bargain-bundles, from the "Shopette!!"
www.topette.bandcamp.com
www.topette.bandcamp.com