11 April 1997
Whenever Irish social media talks about the Irish language, which is taught as a compulsory subject in Irish schools, you invariably get a reply guy who claims they finished school with a poor level of Irish but a “strong” level of French, German, Spanish or whatever. I happen to be a fluent French speaker, having lived and worked in Paris for most of a decade, after first studying French to diploma level, on top of honours school-level French and another year at undergraduate level. I can therefore say with some certainty that if our reply guy were dropped into a provincial French town armed only with his Leaving Cert level of French, he’d last about five minutes before resorting to hand gestures, weeping, and loud, slow English. What’s more, when I was leaving my job in Ireland to move to France, my Irish workmates signed a card and tried a few words en français, with dire results; the most common message I got was “Encore une fois!” from the title of this ’90s hit. The Irish educational system, eh?
As it happens, the three DJ-producers and one singer that comprise Sash! here are all German. Our functionally-francophone Irish reply guy is no doubt shouting at his screen right now that the title means “one more time” and the spoken word intro says “Ladies and gentlemen, the disc jockey Sash! is back”. I’m not sure why they’ve chosen French as their lingua franca. Daft Punk have only just released their debut album at this point in 1997 and, apart from a few tracks on the following year’s Moon Safari by Air, the French touch electronica mostly used lyrics in English anyway. Maybe team Sash! just thought French had a bit more sang froid or je ne sais quoi, as Irish school-leavers would say.
What’s of more interest to me is whether ‘Encore Une Fois’ has any appeal when you just listen to it like any other record, without the rush of disco adrenaline, dancefloor euphoria, or other things in your bloodstream. And I must say, to me it hasn’t. At halfway it does what we now know as the standard EDM build and drop, but otherwise it’s squelchy house beats, icy staccato synths, those few words in French, and not much distinctiveness. In hindsight, Sash! and their annoying exclamation mark were the advance guard not of the French touch but of the German techno-rave DJs like Scooter. This is the first of their seven Irish top twenty singles over three years, so unfortunately it’s a case of ‘encore plusieurs fois’, which I know I don’t need to translate for you.
