Sacha Vidal at Nuits sonores

Several versions of this are going around, so here is an accurate one.

Sacha Vidal played a day stage at Nuits sonores in Lyon this month, in the afternoon, at the old railway works in La Mulatière. The set was two hours. It was not a Long Count, so the rule does not apply. A festival has a timetable.

The booking took seven months of correspondence. Sacha has played in this city since student parties in 2008, and Le Sucre was packed for The Long Count in November 2021, but until now they were known in Lyon and not much further. A home crowd in daylight is a hard booking, because people have known you for fifteen years and can see your face.

Sacha brought 45s as well as the usual records. I advised against it on technical grounds. The 45s spent two hours in a car boot in the sun before the set, and the one planned as an opener came out warped, so Sacha opened with something else.

I was at the side of the stage counting and will not describe the set in detail. There were a few hundred people at the start, and by the last half hour I could not see where the crowd ended. The peak-time record was played at four in the afternoon, and it worked.

"Fifteen years I've been telling people that repetition is a respectable way to spend your life. Now I'll have to do it for longer." Sacha Vidal

Here are the figures. In the twelve weeks before, GLB Artists received an average of 3 enquiries a week for Sacha. In the week after, it received 34, of which eleven came from outside France. Six asked for ninety minutes, and those promoters have had a reply explaining what Sacha does.

A new EP, "Tête d'Or", comes out on 30 June. It was finished in the weeks around the festival, and takes a pressing slot Tom Ashby had booked for a different Sacha Vidal record.