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Saying that it's always the same old story is quite common in English, and these are two ways I've come across of expressing it. From Google N-gram, neither seems very common-- le même son de cloche peaked in the 1940s and has been on the decline ever since (never promising) while la même ritournelle was never even as popular as that.

Are these very old-fashioned expressions, or still quite commonly used? Is there a more common way of expressing it nowadays?

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Both sound a little old-fashioned. In casual speech, you're much more likely to hear “C'est toujours la même histoire”. Notice that you've got to drop the old as there's no way to put it in there.

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  • +1 pour la même histoire. Il m'arrive cependant d'utiliser aussi la même rengaine qui, à mon sens, sous-entend le coté "old".
    – MC68020
    Aug 13, 2018 at 20:39
  • @Sinusoïde: Bonne remarque. C'est probablement un peu moins courant, mais ça s'entend parfois.
    – Stéphane Gimenez
    Aug 13, 2018 at 20:47
  • "no way to put it in there" -- I never thought about that, but can you not put an adjective between même and the noun? I suppose it's true I've never seen that formulation.
    – temporary_user_name
    Aug 13, 2018 at 22:58

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