My profile of Bjork in last Friday’s Belfast Telegraph here.
Archive for April, 2008
24
Apr
…is this passage by Anthony Lane in the New Yorker:
In the seventeenth chapter of “The Voyage of the Beagle,” Charles Darwin turned to the mating habits of the giant Galapagos tortoise. “When the male and female are together, the male utters a hoarse roar or bellowing, which, it is said, can be heard at the distance of more than 100 yards,” he wrote. This is also the most accurate description that we possess of the duet performed by Mick Jagger and Christina Aguilera in “Shine a Light,” Martin Scorsese’s documentary on the Rolling Stones.
Anthony Lane, review, New Yorker April 14 2008.
14
Apr
Some months ago, we started meeting occasionally and we’d fall into talking about how we write and what the process is and where we get stuck and when it’s easy. I would sit, rapt, as I felt like I was hearing the words of a master songwriter, a kind of magician who was going to reveal to me, over lunch, some of his best tricks. Here was a more contemporary Gershwin or Cole Porter who was going to tell me a little of how it was done. Listen up.
David Byrne writes about trying to learn a few songwriting tricks from Paul Simon here.
14
Apr
Last Friday night, I went to see UCD’s football team play Drogheda United in the football/rugby ground on campus. Unlike Wigan’s JJB Stadium, there are no ruts to jump over if you’re a player partial to the beautiful game. Although the game was anything but beautiful. (In the end it was 3-1 to Drogheda, the first time they’ve scored a couple in a league game this season.) It was free in to anyone with a student card, and enlivened no end by the announcer’s hut being located on a hill overlooking the pitch, in full view of the (only) stand. Whenever a goal was scored, or indeed any incident worth reporting occurred, the man in the hut would make his way down to the halfway line, taking anything between one minute and three to get there, and then obviously the same to get back. This meant that, let’s say, any goal scored while he was in between the pitch and his announcer’s hut would drag him back to the halfway line to confer with officials – during the usual timewasting substitutions near the end of the game, this was a particularly infuriating/ribtickling spectacle as he raced up and down in order to announce each team’s latest throw of the dice. Getting free in was nice, though – an unexpected perk of being a student at a university with a League side.