Alexandre Bellenger - turntables. Jac Berrocal - vocal, trumpet. François Fuchs - double bass. Dan Warburton - violin. Limited LP (250 copies). 'Jac Berrocal's knowledge of obscure (and not so obscure) French chanson is nothing short of encyclopaedic, as I discovered during the time we spent together touring with Aki Onda a few years ago. My original idea for the Hot Club project (the name of the band, by the way, originates in a joke I had already recorded with Alexandre Bellenger and we'd called ourselves Hot Club de Saint Maur, after the Parisian suburb where he lives) was to take some of Jac's favourite songs and do our own, umm, versions of them in the studio, with François Fuchs (you need a good session bassist for shit like this) and Alex. Of course, the best laid plans go wrong, and our whole day in Maikôl's studio in Bagnolet was rather, shall we say, unproductive, probably because Berrocal finally woke up about six hours into the session, by which time I'd enjoyed a liquid lunch and was falling asleep. Fuchs and Bellenger were wonderful throughout, I should add. Nothing daunted, I decided to take the studio tapes and do my own kind of plastic surgery on them (my model in this regard is Sid in Toy Story 1), exploring bizarre parallels between our free improvisation and the songs we'd originally set out to cover. The result is, as is often the case with Berrocal, I'm happy to report, totally unclassifiable, but as the song goes (not one we covered, btw), je l'aime comme ça.' Dan Warburton