I was driving today and my car started playing Chet Faker. I was asking Siri to play something but he (my Siri is male and English) was being a twat and kept telling me “I can’t do that when you’re driving”, some issue with Apple Music not letting you search while driving. Anyhow it somehow got stuck on Chet Faker which brought up a lot of memories, which is why I would never intentionally choose that album. 

That album will always be the soundtrack of Montmartre to me. I was dating this model (if you’ve been in Paris the last 5 years you’ve no doubt seen his face everywhere) he introduced me to him, but it wasn’t until I lived near Haussmann that I really ‘met’ him. My friend Colin was in town at the time. He was a sound engineer, so he knew other sound engineers, and friend’s of his were doing the sound for Chet Faker’s European tour. He had three shows in Paris for some reason and of course we were invited to all of them and to hang out with them when they weren’t playing. 

During this period I had moved from my apartment near Parc Monceau to Montmartre. This was summer 2015. I had a boyfriend at the time, that I had been seeing for a few months, but we were always fighting, and I began seeing someone else who lived like 150m away from me in Montmartre. More on him later. 

Montmartre is a special place, but for none of the reasons the tourist sites bring up. It’s true that Montmartre is like a small village. I always used to joke that the hipsters from Bastille retire to Montmartre when they turn 60 because Montmartre isn’t the youngest neighborhood. A lot of people there are old and coasted on that bohemian vibe for a little too long. 

I had stayed at a friend’s apartment at Ledru Rollin for a while, and going from the tony 8th to the 11th was a huge shift. Cheaper neighborhoods in the unfashionable double digit arrondissements tend to have different people than the posher districts. That’s not a bad thing, because I prefer how laid back everyone is, but it’s different. You’re with a totally different crowd. And Montmartre is even more bohemian than Bastille, which is now like what the Marais used to be. And actually Belleville is more like what Bastille used to be since it’s gentrification process began in ‘15. 

Montmartre is something