Caravan Palace at Rockhal

Nearly twenty years ago, a few Parisians took the swing and gypsy jazz of the 1930s and set it to electronic beats. The sound soon had a name, electro swing, and Caravan Palace gave it one of its biggest songs, the platinum-selling “Lone Digger”.

Caravan Palace play the Rockhal Club on Friday 6 November. Doors at 20:00.

The Paris band have been splicing 1930s swing to electronic production for twenty years, long enough that the idea stopped being a gimmick and became a genre other people work in. This tour puts eight of them on stage, with two singer-dancers added to the usual line-up, and is built as a full spectacle.

Standing, in the Club. Kneecap are in the Main Hall the same night, so the square outside will be fuller than a normal Friday and the trains back will be busier.

Who are Caravan Palace?

Caravan Palace are a Paris band who took the swing and gypsy jazz of the 1930s and set it to modern electronic beats. Built around Arnaud Vial and Charles Delaporte, who write and produce the music, with singer Zoé Colotis out front, they toured France for a year before their festival debut at the Django Reinhardt Jazz Festival in 2007. Their first album followed in 2008, and the sound soon had a name: electro swing.

Arnaud Vial summed up the idea for NPR: “We come back with this old stuff, with modern electronic beats.” Their influences run from Django Reinhardt and Lionel Hampton to Daft Punk, and their single “Lone Digger” has gone platinum in the United States.

Their records

• Caravan Palace (2008): reached number 11 in France and sold more than 150,000 copies worldwide.
• Panic (2012): the album with “Rock It for Me”.
• <|°_°|> (2015): a title drawn as a little robot face in keyboard symbols, and the home of “Lone Digger”.
• Chronologic (2019): with “Miracle” and “Plume”.
• Gangbusters Melody Club (2024): their fifth album. Charles Delaporte told Pollstar the title is “funny and vintage, which sums us up”.

Songs to know before the night: “Jolie Coquine”, “Suzy”, “Rock It for Me”, “Lone Digger”, “Miracle” and “MAD”.

Milestones

• Their debut album stayed in the French album chart for 68 weeks in a row.
• In 2015 they played on the BBC’s Later… with Jools Holland.
• They have played Coachella, Glastonbury, Paléo and Rock en Seine, and their videos count more than two billion views on YouTube.

The autumn 2026 show

This tour brings a show inspired by the American revues of the 1920s. The line-up grows to eight, with two singer-dancers joining the band, and the stage mixes brass, jazz guitar, analogue synthesisers and choreography. The set covers two decades of hits, with new material too.