My interview with legendary ex-NME writer Nick Kent is available in full from 3:AM Magazine here.
Archive for the ‘music’ Category
18
Nov
My article on the Beatles visit to Dublin in November 1963 is in the Irish Times today, here.
14
Aug
David Byrne’s releasing his very recent collaboration with Brian Eno, the album ‘Everything that happens will happen today,’ online in the next few days (here). Until then, you can download the track ‘Strange Overtones’ from the site, free of charge. On Byrne’s subsequent US tour, he’ll be playing songs from the new record, as well as from his previous collaborations with Eno: the Talking Heads records ‘More Songs About Buildings and Food’, ‘Fear of Music’ and ‘Remain in Light’, and their classic ‘My Life in the Bush of Ghosts’.
Half Man Half Biscuit lyrics to ‘Eno Collaboration’ here.
26
Jun
Here I am at my desk in Dublin only a few hundred miles from Glastonbury. The weather outside is wet and quite cool. The forecast is for more rain, but is that some sunlight I can see on the horizon? Here’s hoping! (Although the weather here in Dublin is no guarantee of what it’s like in Glastonbury, of course). I’ve just checked Google Maps, and according to that it would take about nine hours for me to drive to Glastonbury if I left now – which I have no intention of doing! (I don’t even drive.)
Neil Young! No way! That was just Neil Young on my MP3 player there. Followed by The Strokes and Elvis Costello and the original line-up of the Attractions. This really is an all star line-up! (I have no idea who’s playing Glastonbury though… um… a mash-up between Jay-Z and Noel Gallagher?)
Where are you watching the Euro semi-final tonight? I’m torn between watching its faint flicker on a big-screen through a rainstorm while standing in a muddy field surrounded by twat-hatted revellers in Somerset (maybe it’s dry there – I haven’t checked the reports) or watching it in my house in Dublin with a nice cup of tea and easy access to numerous academic textbooks. I’ll let you know which I choose in later ‘live from Glastonbury’ posts on this site!
23
Jun
There’s an interview with David Byrne about his ‘Playing the Building’ project in New York in today’s Guardian here.
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.
26
Feb
During the performance of Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova’s song ‘Falling Slowly’ at the Oscars the other night, it was strange to see that the set design people had recreated Waltons’ music store on South Great George’s Street in Dublin (where the scene in the film ‘Once’ takes place), seemingly by nailing a bunch of Gibson Les Pauls to a wire mesh.
18
Feb
When I was a child, much of my time was spent sitting in the back of my parents’ car on a trip to visit family members, listening to compilations of classic sixties pop on the cassette deck. These compilations would always have some stone cold classics like the Byrds version of Mr Tambourine Man, but would largely consist of stuff by the likes of Billy J Kramer or Herman’s Hermits. Even then, I knew something was a little off with the latter band. Later, it was revealed to me: they were shite. Either way, these assorted singles from a bygone era coloured my knowledge of music for a long time, and perhaps inevitably my musical knowledge has since then been filtered through a 1960s lens. It’s a lens that distorts stuff and makes you see lots of cool colours, don’t you know? Whoa, man: your thoughts are kandy koloured, and, if the air was water, we’d all swim through it like fishes. You dig?
Ahem, you get the idea. Anyway, now I’m much older, but on a recent trip in the car with my dad, I was reminded of those days of yore when dodgy sixties compilations were common aural currency for any extended automobile journey. You see, he bought a compilation of Donovan’s songs, covering the period 1965 to 1969. Donovan, who would never be on my list of the most essential artists of the 1960s, nonetheless released some of the best singles of that era. He also released some of the most flaccid, jazz-tinged, wibble-inflected inconsequences which remind you that the epithet ‘swingin’ is not always the same as ‘good’. Both of these tendencies are reflected in equal measure on the CD.
But on listening to some of the stuff on the CD, I reflected that classic sixties albums could never quite reflect that decade as fully as a load of disparate singles lumped together; the seventies were the decade when the rock or pop album came to fruition; the albums still with us from the sixties were experiments which never fully dislodged the pocket-money friendly seven inch record from pop fans hearts. The singles chart occupied a unique place in soundtracking the times, one it probably never will again, what with the growing diversity of music formats and the lack of definitive indexes of sales; or just the lack of sales generally. Music has become less of a communal experience, and more an individualised one: MP3 players have largely replaced radios and record players.
A couple of great singles from sixties bands: The Lovin Spoonful, ‘Do you believe in Magic?’ (in fact, most of the singles by this band); Honeybus ‘Can’t Let Maggie Go’ (a song that was really their only significant hit).
Also, Lenny Kaye’s classic collection of sixties garage bands, Nuggets. (Although, this is probably too significant and cool – really what I have in mind is the kind of cack handed compilation put together by the likes of the K-Tel and Camden labels.)
