Gobshite's Miscellany

PODCAST: Paul Du Noyer on the lost art of the album sleeve

2011-12-03T18:52:00.001Z

AWARD winning Merseyside author Paul Du Noyer recently gave a talk titled 'Art on its Sleeve: Why Music is Good but Cardboard is Beautiful' at the V&A museum in London about the history and development of sleeve art on records.
As I couldn't be there, I asked him to recap the main points over coffee and muffins in FACT in Liverpool.
It wasn't the best environment to record a podcast, so listen out for the sound of heavy rock instrumental on the PA, a volatile coffee machine and a man offering us sweets from a vast silver bowl.

Some of examples of the covers Paul discussed today.

DuNoyer Podcast Layout 1

New designs for a student magazine

2011-12-03T00:46:00.000Z

I'm mucking about with simple designs for a new magazine my students are going to edit at university.
So, I'm sticking up some designs to get some feedback and critique. Tell me what you think.
There is a problem with a missing font on the headers (top left/ top right) but other than that, I'm keeping it simple for new and inexperienced designers.

Immediate DPS 2

The End: A classic fanzine reborn

2011-12-01T08:47:00.001Z

I posted an interview with Peter Hooton on the classic Liverpool fanzine over on my other blog. Have a read of it here. Thanks to him for his time.

Proof that newspapers should never pose a question if the answer may be inconvenient

2011-11-30T22:21:00.001Z

Mail splash this morning:

Mail online poll this morning (later spiked)

Thanks to @phantajisto for finding and posting the online poll on Twitter.

Daily Mail links women's movement to autism and then prints pictures of glamour model to show hard far it has to travel

2011-11-22T21:55:00.004Z

The Daily Mail finally lapped itself in the crazy race today.

No 1: It linked growing autism rates to the rise in prominence for women in the work place and successful parents.

No 2: It then went on only four pars in to describe the belief that it was down to MMR, a story it had been the lead cheerleader for, for many years as a 'rather bizarre hypothesis'.
No 3: It, however, added the coupe de grace, which shows just how far the women's movement really has to go to achieve its goals, by publishing pictures of glamour model Imogen Thomas (famed for sleeping with a footballer) posing in duct tape to protest at a 'gag on her telling her story. It was irony, but only on a base level that a moron may consider advanced.
As I said, it lapped itself in the crazy race, but only as Jonathan Swift furiously spun in his grave at St Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin.

A billion people are starving while the western media eats itself

2011-11-19T02:04:00.005Z

The restaurant critics of the Independent and the Daily Telegraph are spied on by a Michelin star chef while eating at his restaurant. He tweets about it. The critics react to it. One writes a comment piece in reply.

Meanwhile, nearly a billion people are starving.

We are, as the great man said, a virus with shoes

Rugby pundits maul football's yes men

2011-11-16T22:30:00.005Z

BBC Radio 5Live tonight the massive gap in quality between football's former pro yes men and their rugby union counterparts.

While Steve Claridge, Perry Groves, Pat Nevin, Mark Lawrenson et al have landed cushy media gigs specialising in saying not much more than the bleedin' obvious, the ever combative former England prop, Brian Moore (left) flew the flag for no-nonsense-say-it-as-it-is-and-damn-the-consequences punditry.

He's an intelligent man who in commentary can disappear up his own ass with self importance, but when it comes to calling it as it is and perhaps alienating sacred cows or former colleagues, he's fearless.

Tonight was magnificent. He laid the failings of England at the world cup bare: 'They were truculent from the start and they had no friends,' 'Martin Johnson was never comfortable dealing with the media, but he's the England manager, that's his job,' 'Martin Johnson wasn't tactically experienced enough or qualified for being head coach.'

The best moment came when it was noted that Nick Mallett, the outgoing Italy coach had decided to turn down England to go back to South Africa to spend time with his family. Moore added: "And in parenthesis: I wouldn't deal with that shower."

Apart from anything else, when was the last time you heard Steve Claridge or Jason Roberts use the word parenthesis?

Unlike the picture illustrating this post, Moore's never toothless in his punditry and remains a cut above.

Woody Allen and the canon of Irish literature

2011-11-15T11:29:00.007Z

Woody Allen's brilliant mickey take of the Irish Literary world of Joyce and Yeats from the story 'The Irish Genius' from Without Feathers or Complete Prose.

There's a hooky version here. But please, do yourself a favour, go out an buy them

And an oblique reference to Séan Ó'Faoláin?

A brilliant summary of the press in the Irish presidential election

2011-11-11T09:52:00.003Z

From the might Fergal Crehan. As you can see @Fergal on Twitter

Update on the pointlessness of most internet debate

2011-11-11T00:09:00.007Z

One of the greatest political philosophers of our times writes about the crisis in the EU Zone, and every eejit with an opinion feels like they are qualified to have their say.

The lesson about internet commenting could not be more stark.

A couple of issues arise again:

Communicative rationality: or, if you know Sweet FA, should you be allowed to interact?

Discourse ethics: or, if you know Sweet FA, should you be allowed to interact?

You know what, I think we all need to STFU.

*elementary post modernist klaxon*

The pointlessness of most political debate on internet forums

2011-11-10T00:10:00.003Z

I started to reply to a thread on Scottish nationalism on the Word Magazine blog tonight, I reacted to several posts by one contributor.

I spent 20 minutes writing the reply and then, having brushed my teeth, realised it's utterly pointless. I deleted it, because the idea of any kind of deep political discussion, much less change, happening thanks to discussions on the blog of a music magazine is either: a) misguided, b) ridiculously utopian, or, c) evidence of the rampant egotism of all of us in this age of free information exchange.

The fact I am posting the deleted entry here is testament to both this age of ego and the power of my own. I hope no-one reads this. Apart from the last couple of lines.

It's disingenuous to suggest that a coalition of political identities emerge solely as a matter of political expediency and a need to appeal to a support base. Rather they come can also from deep seated associations born of cultural and emotive identification.
The lefty-ish tinge to some Scots nationalism is not modern but tied to the cultural implications of separatist movements that emerge in the post-Enlightenment period. This leftist separatism is now 200-odd years old.
DCU's John Doyle wrote a great chapter for a book in 2008 which outlined the cultural and political reasons behind Irish nationalist and republican support for the Palestinian cause and reflects the degrees of support for it among all the nationalist parties in Ireland. They do so through certain cultural and emotional attachments to dispossessed nations and people.
It is, within the parameters of modern history, to see nationalism place itself naturally within leftism. Whether they tag on Cuba or other causes to legitimate them, in some way. Sub-altern nationalisms can become fascistic, but invariably start at a position of being culturally dominated.
My point is that, yes, there are a range of right-on left wing causes which naturally coalesce and which form a canon of current political catechism, but they emerge organically and not simply from self-interested politicians.
The left wing cause of identifying with those in... Oh Jesus... I'm never getting these 20 minutes back again, am I? Joe Strummer died at 50, I'm 12 years away from that. Time to stop wasting time in forums.

Evgeny Morozov nails the laughable public internet intellectuals

2011-10-31T11:40:00.002Z

Evgeny Morozov nails the cult of the Internet Intellectuals in this review of Jeff Jarvis' new book for the New Republic.

The failure of Internet intellectuals actually to grapple with the [intervening] centuries of momentous technological, social, and cultural development is glaring. For all their grandiosity about technology as the key to all of life’s riddles, they cannot see further than their iPads. And even their iPad is of interest to them only as a “platform”—another buzzword of the incurious—and not as an artifact that is assembled in dubious conditions somewhere in East Asian workshops so as to produce cultic devotion in its more fortunate owners. This lack of elementary intellectual curiosity is the defining feature of the Internet intellectual.
History , after all, is about details, but no Internet intellectual wants to be accused of thinking small. And so they think big—sloppily, ignorantly, pretentiously, and without the slightest appreciation of the difference between critical thought and market propaganda.

Monk and Coltrane and the Beat Poet generation

2011-10-30T22:05:00.006Z

PART Two of the GM podcast sees Tom Rafferty of the Primevals and the Beat Poets wax highly lyrically on the genius of John and Alice Coltrane, Thelonius Monk and what attracts him to the more difficult end of the jazz canon.

EDIT: (To download, click 'share' and then 'link to mp3' download then from DivShare.com)

Songs:

John Coltrane - 'Giants Steps' from Giant Steps

The Beat Poets - 'Exterminator'

Brilliant Corners - 'Blue Monk'

The intro and outro music for the podcast is Lloyd Cole's 'Backwoods (reprise)' available here on download at Amazon. But, fill your boots and shop at Lloyd's online shop, it's full of top quality lovelies from across the decades. You'll find Backwoods on the album etc.

The great American storyteller: James Lee Burke on the misuse of power and the dishonour of Bush

2011-10-30T01:44:00.004+01:00

Oh that all of our writers would have this depth of humanity and intellect. He should be our moral barometer.

Podcast: Primevals & Beat Poets guitarist Tom Rafferty on Hendrix, Otis Redding and The Saints

2011-10-24T21:09:00.010+01:00

PRIMEVALS and Beat Poets guitarist Tom Rafferty has long played and championed music that comes from anywhere but the mainstream.

Pebbles and Nuggets 60s Californian garage punk was one of the starting points for the Primevals, (a long time prior to their mid-90s re-issue inspired renaissance), while all forms of bebop, big band and classic jazz have inspired the man throughout his musical career. Alice Coltrane sits beside Dick Dale in hugely catholic range of influences.

In this, Part 1 of a two-part podcast, Tom talks about his formative musical influences and learning to play along to Hendrix, Otis Redding and Aussie punks The Saints in his bedroom in Mount Florida in Glasgow.

EDIT: (To download, click 'share' and then 'link to mp3' download then from DivShare.com)

Tracks:

Jimi Hendrix Experience - 'Killing Floor', from Live at Monterey

Otis Redding - 'Respect', from Live in Europe. EDIT: Note that this is the Live in Europe version. Although played, in parts, quite quickly, Tom, quite rightly pointed out, it is considerably slower than the Monterey version - which I don't have!

The Saints - 'I'm Stranded', from All Times Through Paradise (4 CD box set for £8.99 on download!)

Bonus Track:

Alex Chilton & His Beat Poets - 'Respect', from Live on Glasgow Green

Edit: The intro and outro music for the podcast is Lloyd Cole's 'Backwoods (reprise)' available here on download at Amazon. But, fill your boots and shop at Lloyd's online shop, it's full of top quality lovelies from across the decades. You'll find Backwoods on the album etc.

2011-09-27T15:00:00.003+01:00

Running, the FPR, enjoying the Catholic persecution complex and great songs to jog to

2011-09-20T10:32:00.006+01:00

In training for the Liverpool Half Marathon, I had First Proper Run (FPR) last night.

People who have run, given up, drifted away and started up etc will recognise the FPR.

The FPR is the one that heralds a campaign and it has to be accompanied by a range of acoutréments. Mine was no different.

Like all modern eejits with too much time on their hands and a range of pointless technology at their disposal, I had everything racked up to the max: heart rate monitor measuring fat man strain and GPS monitoring speed, elevation climbed and every footfall and deviation.

And then I exploded out for a 32 minute 5K - take that Mo Farah. (Mo is more than twice as fast).

I suppose in past times I'd have been disheartened with it having run so much quicker in the past, and I would invariably not have run again. But this is the FPR.

Not this time. I remember reading about how Greg Lemond would lean into the pain and hurt when going into the red on his bike. I'm looking at doing the same but at a much, much humbler a level of achievement.

This time I'm going to enjoy the pain as I build up and get faster and ignore the guilt associated with not doing enough training in the past - there's nothing I can do about that, now. I call it enjoying the Catholic persecution complex.

Anyway, these posts will be about running and music and raising money for MS charities. You need good music if you are to survive the FPR and the week of 'getting back into it.'

First up, an oldie. Incredibly The Stunning's Brewing Up a Storm is 20 years old. Which means I am 20 years older. But as Hugh Dennis used to say on the Mary Whitehouse Experience: "It's got a good beat."

The Onion visits the locations of The Wire

2011-07-12T10:30:00.001+01:00

Shack: Britain's greatest ever unheralded band

2011-07-06T01:16:00.004+01:00

I have tried to change CDs in the car in recent months, but can't. And as a result I now realise Shack are the greatest band. Ever. That's it.

So there.

And this is their best song. This will, however, wind up the purists, who will prattle on about 'Waterpistol' and 'Here's Tom' etc. To them, I'm sorry. (I'm not.)

Ultimately, me and purists know that Mick and John are the greatest unheralded songwriters Britain has ever produced.

And HMS Fable is boss because it is one of the few records I bought from more than 10 years ago that I still play the arse out of.

I think it is perfect. Literally perfect.

2011-03-16T12:37:00.001Z

The Wire in utero

2011-03-09T11:47:00.001Z

The Wire - Bible

Bob Geldof's tribute to Gary Moore

2011-02-13T00:17:00.003Z

Gary Moore was one of a triumvirate of great Irish bluesmen, including Van Morrison and Rory Gallagher. Alas, after his recent death, we are left with only the first now. Here is in his pomp playing with BB King and listen to the touching and intelligent tribute from Bob Geldof on BBC Radio 5Live's breakfast show last Monday.

Raymond Chandler on Radio 4

2011-02-03T00:48:00.004Z

A new series of, and on, Chandler is airing this week on Radio 4.
Read more about it here at the Radio 4 website.
But more importantly, please listen to Ian Fleming speaking to a clearly refreshed Chandler for the BBC on the above link. It is apparently the only recorded example of Chandler speaking about his work. The old boys do blow smoke up one another's fundaments, but that ain't no thing, just getting them together is good enough for me.
I love Chandler's writing and the fact that it transfers so beautifully to radio, surely, in no small part down to the compelling nature of Marlowe's character.
(BTW: Picture courtesy of the Daily Telegraph)

The threat to Britain's libraries and public service

2011-02-02T00:47:00.002Z

There is essentially a deep ideological battle about Britain's public services and its funding of key cultural and educational institutions.

The Tories want to hack them away from the state and make them profitable or place them in the voluntary sector. To complete this they are disingenuously using the idea of community or society, which we all believe are attractive and important forces for social cohesion, and to cloak the overall vision of monetising them, to use that horrible internet word.

The Tories love the idea of the third sector (see the satire on 'The Fourth Sector' in The Thick of It) as it reduces the cost to the public purse.

For example, the Tories want to shut libraries and schools and other public services and push the dogma of volunteerism - if you love it so much do it yourself. Why? It cuts capital and labour costs.

What replaces it? Well, there is a vast industry involved in bidding for grants, largely governed and administrated by powerful and well connected private sector companies - but still currently in partnership with the public sector.

Take away the public sector and you have a wonderfully fluid and profitable sector of public life run by private sector companies.

What results in education, the health service or education? Well organised special interest groups, usually private companies, delivering services where they are profitable.

Look at employment services - Reed et al. Clinton-style reform of the public services rendered in public private enterprise form, but delivered for profit with the reform of welfare and its savings at its core.

That's a specific example to the labour sector, but it is one that will be rolled out across all of Britain's public sector.

The sad thing is that many senior Tories have convinced themselves into buying into the idea of the Big Society as a post New Labour sincere embracing of reform of public services as an empowering force. In actual fact, it's just a delusional post modern New Labour-style Orwellian linguistic exercise that assuages themselves of the guilt of actually being Thatcherite.

Or, if you are more cynical, they are just pissing on your head and telling you it is raining.

Leave it to Fr Ted:

Father Ted: What was it he used to say about the needy? He had a term for them...
Father Dougal McGuire: A shower of bastards.

The Seven Ages of Man/Woman in Popular Music: Part 3 The Lover

2011-01-25T00:21:00.001Z

And so, after childhood, Shakespeare's melancholic Jacques turns his attention to adulthood and the long slow slide to death and that moment in which Beckett's Pozzo says, 'the light gleams an instant, then it's night once more.'
The third age of man and wochap sees us as the heartbroken lover,

And then the lover,
Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad
Made to his mistress' eyebrow.

What are the great songs of the love lorn? For me there is no contest, the Mighty Smokey with help from his Miracles.

Reactions from The Word massive here

Seven Ages of Man in Pop: Part 2 Teenage Years

2011-01-25T00:03:00.002Z

SO, in a bid to win the 'Statin' the bleedin' obvious, innit?' award for this millennium, I'm going to stick my neck out (and steal the work of countless esteemed writers and thinkers) and say that popular music's history is inextricably tied-up with the emergence of teenagers as an economic group in society.
Even 60 years or so after this emerged, pure pop is still primarily obsessed with the first flushes of love, moving towards adulthood and getting yer end away for the first time.
Now, there are many thousands of artists who have written about being a teenager - Teenager in Love, Teenage Kicks, Teenage Riot and the really quite creepy Sweet Little Sixteen, we could go on ad nauseum.
The 'Orrible Who not only made a career out of writing about teenagers, but Townshend could be considered as someone who has helped form our entire concept of being a teenager in post war Britain given his centrality to the Mod and rock movements.
But, if one song captures the first flush of teenage sexuality and the awkwardness of that age, then the mighty Fountains of Wayne nail it with this wonderful song.

Responses from The Word magazine massive here.

The Seven Ages of Man/Woman in Popular Music: Part 1 Childhood

2011-01-18T00:14:00.002Z

Harry Chapin's Cat's in the Cradle came up on the randomiser today and it struck me as one of the greatest songs about growing up. By some circuitous route it got me thinking about Shakespeare's Seven Ages of Man speech from As You Like It.
So what are the best songs about the seven ages of man or woman?
Today is childhood.
I'm kicking off with the aforementioned Mr Chapin's beautiful paean to childhood/ adolescence and fatherhood.

The New Economy of Comedy - Liverpool Confidential

2011-01-08T21:38:00.002Z

A piece about Arena comedy and how the whole industry is experiencing its greatest ever boom in Britain's worst recession for 20 years.

In Praise of Children's TV: Terry Deary's Horrible Histories

2010-12-13T23:58:00.004Z

AS evidenced by my trip out to see the mighty Big Howard and Little Howard show on Saturday afternoon, my life is less hardcore political stand-up these days and more children's telly.

Now, unluckily for Miss H, being comfortable 21st Century 'pretendy' lefties, me and Mrs H have decided that there'll be no Disney Channel in the house, so Children's BBC is our mainstay.

Luckily the BBC is producing a handful of the best programmes airing anywhere on the planet, and the two funniest.

The first is the aforementioned BH&LH and the other is Horrible Histories, adapted from the best selling books by Terry Deary - more than 200 and counting. His latest WII novel Put Out The Light, signed by the author for Miss H on Saturday at an in store, is being devoured. It's a multi POV book which looks at the blitzes of the second war and how they affected both British and German Cities.

However, I think Deary will be known most for Horrible Histories because it's funny, witty, clever, intelligent and iconoclastic in its approach to explaining history to the pre-teen market.

Sure, it's light on context, but it makes up for its lack of methodological rigour in its post modern plundering of pop culture to explain the Romans, the Greek empires and British history of all eras. I have a friend who teaches Egyptology at the University of Liverpool who uses a sketch in an introductory lecture to first years.

The actors help too: Mathew Baynton, known for his work as Deano in BBC's Gavin & Stacey, Sarah Hadland (from BBC's Miranda), Martha Douglas Howe and the annoyingly talented Ben Willbond are among the pick of a cast which really gathers together a who's who of modern British comedy's top acting talent.

By far the funniest actor on display in the funniest ongoing sketch is The Mighty Boosh's Simon Farnaby as Death in the section called Stupid Deaths, where, er, stupid historic deaths are brought to life.

The sketches are brilliant but for my money it is the songs that win out every time. From heavy metal Vikings to High School Musical Spartans, its' clever appropriation of modern pop idioms to explain broad historical themes and periods - it is both laugh out loud funny and bears frequent watching, as our house can testify.

My favourites, however, are the Westlife style parody of the four King George's of England and the tipper toppermost is Baynton as Charles II of England as an Eminem-style, self styled rapping King of Bling.

Little Howard And The Magic Pencil Of Life And Death

2010-12-12T00:59:00.000Z

Venue: Lenny’s Bar & Grill, Liverpool

It’s been a rite of passage of mine to bring young Miss H to her first comedy gig, I got to do that today thanks to Little Howard And The Magic Pencil Of Life And Death and the wonderful Tongue in Cheek Comedy organisation in Liverpool.

Part cartoon, part scatological children’s book and part stand-up, Little Howard And The Magic Pencil Of Life And Death is a brilliant vision of comedy at its truest.

Ostensibly children’s show, but with much double entendre-ing for the adults, it is an inventive riot of ideas.

(Big) Howard Read, stand-up and illustrator, took his animated six-year-old alter ego, Little Howard, on a journey to avoid the dark menacing force of Cartoon Death, (actually called Rodney and really Read in a Grim Reaper suit), as the latter seeks to steal back the magic pencil of life and death which allows you to invent and obliterate cartoon characters.

Little Howard and the various other characters come to life on the video screen thanks to Read’s masterful illustration and the wonders of an Apple Mac and a projector.

It’s an anarchic, witty brilliant show with 10 times the number of ideas than the average comedy show - especially in an era dominated by the cheap alpha male macho posturing of TV panel shows.

The first half was ostensibly a warmer for the post interval Magical Pencil of Death segment, which was, in itself, an extended CBBC show on stage.

But, in the first half, the illustration games, audience interaction, which saw children from the audience get up and ‘play’ with Little Howard, was just as enjoyable and, again, more inventive than any show I have seen for a long time.

In the second half Big and Little Howard defeat Rodney (Cartoon Death) but only after Little Howard uses the magic pencil to turn himself into a ‘real’ 3D boy who hovers round the room thanks to the 3D glasses distributed by Read, sorry, Rodney.

You’d be hard pressed to find any theatre experience more riotous, more funny or more life affirming than this as you hear children laughing like drains in a comedy club at three in the afternoon.

At the end of the day, the show’s success is all down to Read himself. He’s a masterful and likeable stand-up in his own right, and leaving aside his illustrations and the brilliant technology that brings the Little Howard world to life in the live environment, his ability to work an audience of any age is extraordinary.

As someone who sees a lot of comedy, I can honestly say that I haven’t laughed as much in years and, more crucially, neither had either my wife or daughter and it was the latter who was most important in our shared rite of passage.

Magazine design: Less of a process and more a combination of trial and error and serendipity

2010-11-25T01:06:00.000Z

THIS wonderful video of the coming together of a magazine article package goes to show that when designing, it's less about a regimented process of following templates or processes, but more to do with trial, error and simple inspiration.

And, that process is hugely enjoyable.

The mighty, mighty James Lee Burke

2010-11-25T00:33:00.000Z

I have written about American novelist James Lee Burke a few times here and have rather been on another binge of the great man's work in recent weeks.
Having just listened to the fabulous audio book version of his 2008 Dave Robicheaux novel Swan Peak, expertly narrated by Will Patton, I have been excitedly hoovering up reviews and interviews the great man has been doing to promote his newest Robicheaux tome The Glass Rainbow (Chapter one extract here).
I, like all James Lee fans, will always love (and be piqued to the point of frenzy) by any first chapter of a Robicheaux book which sees the hero of the novel's notorious malcontent buddy Clete Purcel entering the narrative with the words: "Am I interrupting anything?"
All hell's going to break loose when Dave's former partner from the New Orleans Police Department, one half of the Bobbsy Twins and long term trouble magnet, turns up saying that.
Here is James Lee speaking to BBC Radio 2's Simon Mayo, a long term fan, about The Glass Rainbow.

Seu Jorge: the greatest encore I ever saw

2010-09-25T00:38:00.002+01:00

LOTS is spoken about the best gig and the best solo and whatever, nothing much is ever talked about the best encore you ever saw at a gig.

YET'S TWIST AGAIN... Super Furry Animals

I've seen my fair share of no shows, perfunctory 'Hey let's play the new single again' and 'Here's our favourite cover', but nothing touches two I saw in Liverpool's best music venues.
The second best was the Super Furry Animals (right) coming back on to the stage at the Royal Court, dressed as Yetis and playing a white noise guitar version of That Man Don't Give a Fuck which was introduced with a 10 minute techno mix with a sample of Bill Hicks intoning 'All Governments are murderers and liars'. (Great alternative review here at Time magazine.)
However, the best was Brazilian legend Seu Jorge (Last FM link) at the Liverpool Philharmonic a few years ago.After doing a mesmerising two hour mega show full of solo acoustic hits and full band material, he took the band on a tour of the stalls and upstairs to the balcony of the great old hall one and all beating out a samba rhythm. I was 'that' close to the man, I touched his dreds, blud.
All gigs should close with a parade - or may be that's the Northern Ireland in me coming out.
Here's some more youtube footage of a magnificent evening I enjoyed with our much missed mate Dave McManaman RIP - if you stare closely you'll see me and Macca dancing up on the balcony.

Spotify Playlist for the North West Massive Mingle (which I missed)

2010-09-24T22:57:00.006+01:00

I have put together this playlist for the meeting of the North West branch of The Word magazine bloggers. It's a shame I had to miss it due to work commitments, they are among the best nights of the year.
So this playlist features a lot of French hip-hop I eulogised here, one song from Washingtonian Ankh Amen Ra, the brilliant Rachid Taha makes an appearance and there are some songs I have loved for many years by Irish singer songwriters Nick Kelly, Damien Dempsey, Paul Brady and Christy Moore.
In the cruelly overlooked/ nearly were section, there are two songs by Beulah, one each from Liverpool indiers Smaller, Replacments front man Paul Westerberg and San Francisco indiers American Music Club. Belfast guitar soundscape kids And So I Watch You from Afar get stuck in while Texan country legend Guy Clark performs a song which has haunted me for years.
Spotify users click on the link below, everyone else, the full playlist is below the fold.
Massive North West Mingle

PLAYLIST
Richmond Fontaine – Postcard From California
Suprême NTM – Authentik
Beulah – A Good Man Is Easy to Kill
Nick Kelly – The Loneliest Ghost In Pere Lachaise
Disiz La Peste – C'Est Ca La France
Paul Brady – The Lakes Of Pontchartrain
Sous La Surface – C'est Du Hip-Hop
Richmond Fontaine – Postcard Written With A Broken Hand
Paul Westerberg – Black Eyed Susan
Ankh Amen Ra – Darfur
Prodige Namor – Mission - Feat. Rockin'squat
Smaller – In My Livable Hole
American Music Club – I've Been A Mess
And So I Watch You from Afar – A Little Bit Of Solidarity Goes A Long Way
Abd Al Malik – Soldat De Plomb
Le Rat Luciano – Sacré- A Cappella
Damien Dempsey – Kilburn Stroll
Richmond Fontaine – Postcard Postmarked Phoenix, Az
Richmond Fontaine – Post To Wire
Beulah – Your Mother Loves You Son
Rachid Taha – Voilà Voilà
Frank Sabotka – "We used to make shit in this country."
Christy Moore – Does This Train Stop On Merseyside?
Guy Clark – Desperadoes Waiting For A Train
La Rumeur – L'ombre Sur La Mesure

Sweet Seoul Music: #2

2010-09-20T00:34:00.000+01:00

Dave Candler has posted his second Korean Homesick Blues podcast. I've not listened yet, but I recognise a name or two that I like and know that Dave knows the score, so go 'ead and listen, la.

Two interviews with Lloyd Cole: Part 2

2010-09-19T00:38:00.009+01:00

You talkin' to me? Well, I'm the only one here. Who (edit) do you think you're talkin' to?

THIS is my interview with Lloyd Cole during my time as the music corresponent of the Liverpool Daily Post, actually, I think it was still the plain old Daily Post. I had offered to caddie for Lloyd around West Lancs Golf Club where my brother was a member at the time and Crosby, the town mentioned in the piece, is where I live and Lloyd's oul fella was brought up.

IT'S A reflective Lloyd Cole who talks to the Daily Post. Maybe it's the bad flu he suffered with while moving house back home in Massachusetts before he flew into Britain. Maybe the fact he's had to leave his beloved golf clubs at home for this two-week tour of Britain grates too.
(He's had to reluctantly decline an offer from the Daily Post to play West Lancashire golf club in Blundellsands due to the aftereffects of the illness. His Crosby-raised father, a former pupil of Merchant Taylors' school in the town, regularly played the famous links course in his formative years on the way to becoming a club professional.)
Either way, it isn't the same cocksure, archly ironic hipster who fronted Scots pop outfit The Commotions to no little chart success in the 1980s and then embarked on an acclaimed solo career more than a decade ago.

No, rather the married father-of-two celebrates his 43rd birthday at Birkenhead's Pacific Arts Centre tomorrow night with a quieter and more relaxed acoustic show. It will re-examine some of his best known songs from the Commotions years, take in a few choice cover versions while showcasing his most recent solo work.
Derbyshire-born Cole has returned with a reflective album to match his mood: Music in a Foreign Language - his third in four years following The Negatives (2000) and Etc released 18 months ago.
And, for those overwrought college graduates among you wanting to rekindle university years and hoping for slavish recreations of Commotions-era Cole, there comes a warning: this album and live show aren't nostalgia fests.
Music in a Foreign Language is a departure for Cole.
The clever word play, great songs and fine singing which typified Commotions tracks like 'Perfect Skin' and 'Lost Weekend', are still present, it's just that the music now is, well, a bit more bleak, world weary and grown up - a lot like the man himself.
Distanced from the big successes and major labelbacking,Cole has produced an album that is often stark and much more minimalistic than any previous offerings. These are songs about failure in love and life, set to haunting acoustic and piano arrangements, minor key examinations in the nature of life, almost cinematic in their sweep.
But Cole is quick to dismiss fears of amid -life crisis collection.
He says: "I was just interested in making a record that I wanted to make.
`"I just wasn't interested in being ironic anymore, I wasn't interested in just writing a clever song, I suppose I was just more interested in confronting demons.
"I was thinking a lot about the idea of leaving a legacy and the ideaof just because you write something and make an album that it will live on after you.
"And I don't know that it will, or that many of us will be rembered. Maybe Elvis Costello will still be remembered in 50 years. But you know play your CDs in 20 years time and they probably won't work. So the whole thing is transient."
Before anyone can level the accusation of a mid-life crisis, as Cole himself pointed out at his last Merseyside show at the Liverpool University in 2002, he started writing about mid-life crisis when he was 26-years-of-age with the Commotions' 'Hey Rusty'.
And while Cole has slavishly avoided the nostalgia circuit and big reunion shows, the good news for those of us who do want to see the Commotions again is the band will reform for a special two-night stand later this year.
He will front the original line-up when the band reissues its first album Rattlesnakes to celebrate the 20th anniversary of its original release in 1984. They will play Barrowlands in Glasgow in October followed swiftly by one show at London's Hammersmith Odeon.
But Cole is quick to point out its not a big cash -in on the back of the nostalgic reissue.
He says: "It's being done for the right reasons and it's the right time. Everyone wanted to do it just for fun.
"We are still friends and are only playing the two shows so far, unless someone comes in with offers."
Until then, tomorrow's show at the PacificArts Centre and Music in a Foreign Language should more than fill the gap between now and October.

Two interviews with Lloyd Cole: Part 1

2010-09-19T00:26:00.008+01:00

Lloyd appears sceptical at the choice of Leon Osman on Everton's right
Picture: Boston Globe

I did two interviews with Lloyd Cole while working for the Liverpool Echo and Liverpool Daily Post.
In hindsight, they aren't very good, Lloyd's answers were great, they're just not terribly well written. They are what they are. I'm not looking writing plaudits, 'Good job too,' says y'all.
Here's the first:

FROM his Stuttgart hotel room, one of the coolest songwriters of the last 30 years is talking about his admiration for Gerry Marsden.
Lordy, Lloyd Cole , the king of intelligent 1980s pop praising the bard of Mersey River crossings?
"I have more respect for Gerry and the Pacemakers, still playing the oldies rather than writing mediocre new songs, " he says earnestly.
Some might think that the erstwhile Commotions front man, known for his candour and wit, has gone soft prior to his first Liverpool show in donkeys' years.
But no, the Derbyshire-born, 'naturalised' Scot now living in Massachusetts still airs his opinions very freely, taking in everything from The Waterboys to The Clash, and US indie band The Strokes.
For many, Cole, now 42, signifies an all-too-brief moment in the 1980s when pop music was smart, when Manchester's The Smiths, Australia's The Go-Betweens and Glasgow's Aztec Camera along with Cole And The Commotions looked set to dominate the charts.

The Commotions' three mid-1980s albums, Rattlesnakes, Easy Pieces and Mainstream spawned a handful of catchy singles like Perfect Skin and Lost Weekend that marked them down as one of the best of the crop of very good 'uns.
But then Britain embraced dance music and moronic pop and Cole shuffled off, never to enjoy the same profile again.
Refreshingly, and unlike some of his bitter contemporaries, he doesn't regret not becoming the world's biggest rock star, nor does he want to revive the past for one more sniff of glory and filthy lucre.
Without a trace of bitterness, he says: "The Commotions were accidentally successful, just like some bands are accidentally good. But none of our records, except Rattle Snakes, came out at the right time.
"Right now I write for myself, I have got out of the habit of writing songs for albums. If I don't feel like writing, I don't.
"It's just something that I would rather leave alone.
"I don't want to do what Ray Davies is doing - writing mediocre new songs. As I said, I have more respect for Gerry And The Pacemakers still playing the oldies.
"Some of Van Morrison's work is very mediocre. It sounds like he's been given a couple of hundred thousand dollars and has had to write a record quickly in return."
After the break-up of the Commotions in 1987/88, Lloyd moved to the States, got married to wife Beth and had two sons.
Despite an eventual split from former record company, Mercury, he made half a dozen great pop records with 1990s Don't Get Weird On Me Babe, 1995s Love Story and The Negatives, from 2000, being my tips for those interested in catching up.
Now, he's back with a solo acoustic tour that sees him travelling suitcase and guitar in hand, every stop neatly planned.
Cole says: "It's been fun, I started doing this show as a stop gap between The Negatives shows and making another record. I didn't have any income and I had to work, but it's been fun and turned out much better than I thought."
The acoustic date at the University's Stanley Theatre a week on Tuesday is a mouth-watering prospect for Merseyside fans who can expect some greatest hits, neglected masterpieces and a handful of great covers, but Lloyd makes no excuses for it not being a cheesy nostalgia-fest.
He says: "It's been a long time since I have been in Liverpool, maybe since 1993, but I remember the shows always being fun.
"I have great memories of when the Commotions were still together and the Bunnymen took us around the town and finding out we couldn't drink as much as them.
"But, if people are turning up expecting Rattlesnakes, it's going to be a painful evening for them."
Lloyd is eager to emphasise he is still writing, with an album being worked on and hopefully on sale next year.
And an excellent self-designed website (www. lloydcole.com) keeps him in touch with legions of faithful fans and also allows him to sell his records.
On top of this, a recently released four CD box set, Collected Recordings 1996-2001, showcases some of his best ever songs and the solo jaunts could garner him the critical acclaim he deserves.
But the $6m question is: Will Gerry turn up and return the compliment?

Michaél Ó Muircheartaigh: A tribute in text and sound

2010-09-17T00:45:00.006+01:00

IN THIS era of wall-to-wall sport coverage, where every hack commentator turns to the US or wherever for a gimmick to set them apart in a crowded market, one man (and one voice) has set himself apart - Michaél Ó Muircheartaigh.
A Kerry man who has been one of the key voices of Irish GAA sports on RTE radio since 1949, he has, mercifully, never been one to let his own opinions intrude in the key job of a radio commentator - vividly describing a match for those who can't get to see it.
While British soccer commentators are seemingly in thrall to imparting their own op-ed opinions on what is going on - step forward Alan Green, no cares what you think, you boor - Ó Muircheartaigh, 80, has established himself as a real time storyteller and, if I may be excused a cliché, a painter with words.
Some of his classic quotes are here.
His rapid fire, high octane delivery and encyclopaedic knowledge of the games perfectly captures the spirit and energy of gaelic football and hurling. His frequent interruptions in Irish into English commentary, his shout outs to ex-pat Gaels listening in across the world and brilliant turns of phrase have marked him out as being, literally, one of a kind. Listen to this clip to see what I mean if you have never heard the man before.

The key has been that he has always been himself. He's never had to assume a gimmick. The fanatical passion for the games, the poetic Kerry accent, a great way with a story and a bit of craic, have elevated his commentaries from the run of the mill to being dramatic, evocative records of a game cherished by its members and supporters.
Without getting misty eyed and sentimental about being an 'exile', the stress of being away from home has been lightened by tuning into Radió Éireann of a Sunday and hearing the man in his pomp. On Sundays over the years, I have been in cars in Europe and pubs all over the show, manfully tuning the fading radio commentaries just to hear what's going on at Croker, Clones or Pairc Ui Chaoimh.
He knows the players and the managers, the mentors and county board presidents and has a story about them all, if he needs. He knows wee, old sick women listening in the Bronx and Brisbane, working men in Kilburn, Kerry and Kildare, Congressmen in Washington, politicians in Brussels and greyhound fanatics in Dundalk - one and all have the same status for Michaél.
Much rot has been written about how the modern GAA has been a feet-on-the-ground force for normality in an Ireland developing rapidly thanks to globalisation.
Misty eyed nationalists in New York Yankees hats, Nike trainers and GAP jeans, looking around the modern Croke Park - one the biggest and most advanced sports stadia in Europe - have regaled us about how the GAA is a touchstone to how we were in a simpler, gentler age and how we have to cherish the romantic past, blind to the inevitability of progress. Well, take down the adverts for Middle Eastern airlines and multi-national soft drinks companies and maybe I'll cede that one.
But Michaél really has remained that touchstone with the better parts of our past.
The passion for what were unfashionable games for many years, the great lyricism of his delivery and ability to conjure vivid pictures of a game while recalling the glorious past have set him apart. It is telling that the two great commentators of our times were himself and Michael O'Hehir, the authentic voices of GAA broadcasting.
Perhaps the codification and rules of our games, which have made them fast paced and combative, have helped in producing legendary commentators, but Michaél has been more than merely the sum of what was put in front of him to describe.
He is a lover of people and life, of stories, storytelling and craic and vividly celebrating the enthusiasm and fervour of the men and women who are are the GAA. He's one of the few in this world who no-one has a bad word on.
To listen to him shouting a great, fast paced commentary over a big crowd, his voice competing with the spectators, words charging like a racehorse over the radio, you get a vivid, tangible sense of the drama and spectacle of a big GAA occasion. Hats, flags, scarves and headbands and Michaél Ó Muircheartaigh are GAA days for me.
The listener knows in technicolour what Armagh fans on the hill in Clones are seeing or what those in Semple Stadium, Thurles, are feeling in the final moments of a Tipperary v Cork Munster hurling final or just how amazing it is to see Henry Shefflin or DJ Carey hook a sliothar over a bar from miles out. His voice compels us to love these great, unique Irish games. Nationalism without the punch.
As you have gathered, this is not an objective piece of journalism, but nor is it hagiography, we really will never see his like again.
Michaél does his last All Ireland Final on Sunday when Down take on Cork, fittingly two of the 'aristocrats' of modern gaelic football - but t'is a pity t'wasn't the men of the Kingdom, his home county of Kerry.
Listen to this eight minute highlight of Down winning the 1994 All Ireland Football final commentary to hear just why all that was said above is beyond argument.

Slán Michaél.

Lloyd Cole Interviews: Part 2

2010-09-16T00:07:00.003+01:00

Maconie and Radcliffe react to Cole's 'You think I asked for a 12" pianist?' joke punchline

EDIT NOTE: Made a gooly on album title and name of a track played here. Lloyd's album is called Broken Record and the title track of the album is 'Like a Broken Record'. Sorry, haven't bought mine yet. You can buy yours from Lloyd's own shop here.

THIS is the second part of Lloyd's one day blitz of two BBC radio stations earlier this week.
And here is a great piece of funny, interesting radio thanks in no small part to the hosts, Mark Radcliffe and Stuart Maconie, having a genuine affinity with Lloyd and letting him talk.
There are live acoustic versions of Writers Retreat! The (see got the title and punctuation correct this time, although I still have reservations about the lack of an apostrophe), ~~'Flipside'~~ 'The Flipside' (from Broken Record) and a brilliant version of 'Perfect Skin'.

Get on board the Seoul Train: a guide to the music of an expat in Korea

2010-09-15T00:06:00.001+01:00

DAVE Candler (right), a great Merseyside/ Cheshire journalist has gone on a remarkable journey in the last 10 years. The journey has seen him swap the strip lighting of the night shifts of Liverpool ECHO and Daily Post for first, Manhattan and the New York Daily News, and then the bright lights of South Korea.
Along the way he has met Paul Simon and Lou Reed, taken people to Johnny Thunders' grave and guided a local journalist around New York during the days after September 11, 2001. And then he and his wife upped sticks and headed for Wonju in South Korea.
He's a difficult man to keep track of, jaysus, Lord alone knows where he is right now, but at least he is making podcasts of the things he holds most dear. It appears he is back in the Far East and turning an ear to some of the music of his adopted homeland.
See, at heart he is still a punk rocker and in this, the first of hopefully a series of shows, he guides us through some of the music he is listening to now. It's a selection of flinty guitar pop with the kind of lo-fi atmosphere sadly lacking on BBC's 6Music and which would fit Late Junction on BBC Radio 3 perfectly.
Better than tha, the so and so has the greatest voice for radio ever. Mr Thompson, I think you have found the new Peel, but, he'll have to work out of the Seoul bureau.

A track listing, biogs and links have been requested from Dave.
I really think this is what the internet may have been invented for.

Huzzah: Lloyd Cole on network radio

2010-09-14T00:51:00.001+01:00

Lloyd Cole was on the BBC Radio 5Live mid-morning show's music review section today and the peerless Radcliffe and Maconie on BBC Radio 2 this evening.
He was promoting his new record, Broken Record, which was financed by fans through his brilliant website. 'Writer's Retreat' is the first single from it - it's not really a single - but it's the one he has chosen to film a promo for.
For my money it is the closest album he has recorded to 1995's Love Story, my favourite of his. (See GMs passim) Crucially his voice gets better as the years go on and he gets even more wry, which is, in the parlance of modern girls the world over, 'a good thing'.
I've filleted the section from Radio 5 below, the longer Radcliffe and Maconie session will follow when I have time to edit it.

Beulah's Miles Kurosky's brilliant solo album

2010-08-19T01:31:00.000+01:00

I have eulogised about Beulah here before and it was great news recently that the band's lead singer Miles Kurosky had released a debut solo album The Desert of Shallow Effects. Here's a stunning video released on Miles' website.

Do you know a lad down the chippy who thinks he's Elvis?

2010-08-19T01:15:00.000+01:00

Again, another of my blog posts on The Word Magazine which gained some very funny replies.

Camping in beautiful Pembrokeshire last week I marvelled at the night sky of an evening.
On Thursday night I saw two shooting stars - when I mentioned this to the GLW she replied in a cod Barking accent 'But they were only satellites.' Everyone's a Billy Bragg these days.
The shooting stars weren't satellites, they were shooting stars and no camping holiday is complete without seeing one, or two in this case.
What have you heard in a song and experienced in real life?

Who would be in your Fantasy Writers team?

2010-08-19T01:00:00.000+01:00

I wrote this on The Word magazine blog - there were some interesting replies.
FOR a long time I have pondered the death of the print only publication as we are apparently amid the 'vinegar strokes' of getting writing from one roster of writers. With the impending revolution of the iPad/ slates many writers believe that it will herald the opening up the possibility of a new era of micropayment-as-you-go media which unpackages the old print bundles.
But that's not enough for me.Alas, a google reader service is not enough, I want it in a leaf through package - either physical or online.
What I mean is a product a bit like the service The Week provides now. I kind of crave for the time when I can get an aggregation of all the writers I like on a given day - weekly or monthly - whereupon I can indulge myself.
I read several newspapers daily most weeks and a few monthly magazines and have a wish list of people I would gladly pay to follow if there was, say, a nice iPad app which packaged them up in a format which I found agreeable aesthetically. I'd buy an iPad solely for that express service.
My list is:
Laura Barton
(The Word Sycophancy alert) Hepworth, Du Noyer, Fitzpatrick, Jim White
Paul Kimmage/ David Walsh (Sunday Times)
Charlie Brooker (The Guardian)
Sandy Toksvig (The Telegraph)
Mark Steel (The Independent)
Andy Gill (see above)
Caitlin Moran (The Times)
Matthew Norman (The Guardian)
Dave Simpson (see above)
Gavin Martin (The Daily Mirror)
William/ Alistair Fotheringham (cycling & rugby)
Eddie Butler (literally the king of sports writers) (The Observer)
Joe Queenan (The Guardian)
Mark Lawson (The Guardian)
Tom Humphries (Irish Times GAA writer, see Eddie Butler) (The Irish Times)
Brian Reade (The Daily Mirror)
(Irish politics writers) Eamonn Mallie, Mark Devenport, Mick Fealty, Jason Walsh, Malachi O'Doherty, Eamonn McCann, Splintered Sunrise & Anthony McIntyre.
These are the people I always read.
NB:If Drakeygirl, Backwards7, Pat Carty, Archie V, Crowther, Amitri, Law, Stimps et al (sorry if I missed someone out) wanted to put their heads above the parapet and write a column on a semi regular basis, I'd also pay for an aggregation of that.
Who would form your Fantasy Writers League?

Thanks Da for introducing me to Freddie White

2010-08-19T00:47:00.000+01:00

MY da gave me the second greatest gift of them all: the first album I ever treasured: Freddie White Live On Tour (1978).
I still play parts of it at least once a week such is my deep affection for it.
I went to the primary school that da taught in 10 miles away and every day the car was filled with great music.
Pa H was never what you could have called a trendy - illustrated by the fact that the journey to school was always Mike Murphy's breakfast show on RTE Radio 1.
But on the way home it was always his home made tapes of Beatles/ Stones/ Dubliners/ Van/ Chieftans/ Paul Brady/ The Johnsons/ Planxty/ Moving Hearts/ David McWilliams albums.
It really was a great, unspoken education into my own culture in the midst of the Troubles.
And while all those albums were fabulous, the one album that got me into music when I was about nine or ten was Freddie White's live covers album.
It was the perfect gateway drug to the history of modern music - he did songs by Hoagy Carmichael, Tom Waits, Guy Clarke, Frank Zappa, Randy Newman and Joan Armatrading.
His guitar playing was beguiling, his voice gorgeous and soulful and his version of Guy Clarke's 'Desperados Waiting for a Train' was so brilliant that it haunts me to this day - in a good way.
After 25 years, I still have the thread worn TDK C90 with it on one side with Paul Brady's Hard Station on the other. (Don't start me on what Brady's song Nothing but the Same Old Story means to me, there'll be tears before the looming bedtime. See Gobshites passim.)
Freddie never achieved big success and moved to Boston for years making money in the clubs of the eastern seaboard. He returned to Ireland a few years back.
He remains a kind of underground national treasure, but I hope some of you here get something from the clip below and if you do, raise a glass to Freddie and to my da too. I'll always treasure the music the oul fella introduced me to.

Top 5 Liverpool albums

2010-06-02T20:39:00.000+01:00

RADIO contact resumed after a tough month at work and we start off with another doozy of a subject beloved of saloon bar bores in fading tour t-shirts the world over - Top 5 albums.
And we're kicking off with one of the most contested of all - a Liverpool Top 5.
As an introduction, below is a wonderful wee slice of the late and much lamented Brian Reade Show on City Talk. I contributed to the show and guest hosted it on a couple of occasions too, but that's enough self-regarding nonsense.
Here Brian (right, looking like he's heard Gillett and Hicks have called for Liverpool to move out of Anfield and on to Stanley Park's public pitches) talks to Al O'Hare of The Trestles in his day-to-day guise of music journalist, Ian Prowse former lead singer of GM faves Pele and now the main man in Amsterdam and award winning journalist Mike Chapple about a survey conducted in 2008 to see Liverpool decide its own Top 50 greatest albums.

Political songs for after election day: Part 3

2010-05-09T23:08:00.002+01:00

A FEW gems, I think you'll agree, from 'Widnesian' and Tom who responded to Part 2 on Friday night. Please keep them rolling in.

Fire Next Time are a new one on me, but there are fewer more knowledgeable music fans than Widnesian Tony Dagnall, a Cheshire lad safely billeted in Winston Salem, North Carolina.

It's featured here before, but this is mine (and Tom's) favourite song about being Irish in Britain.

Political Songs for after election day: Part 2

2010-05-08T01:09:00.000+01:00

IF YOU have read the last post, you know the score, add your own political songs below the fold. If you haven't read the last post, what you waiting for?

Here's Part Two of my favourite political songs for after election day.

The Revolution Will Not Be Televised – Gil Scott Heron: Intellectual black consciousness, proto rap which lambasts the growing commercialisation of American life in the age of television advertising. Sadly, not on his play list in Liverpool last week, but still a very potent example of political polemic nearly 40 years since it was first written.

Shipbuilding – Elvis Costello: The bitter sweet ironic reality of politics in a song. Costello juxtaposes the prosperity that the Falklands War brought to the working class shipbuilding communities in the early 80s with the reality that these people were building ships to kill in the South Atlantic. Best version is this much shown Robert Wyatt cover from the Whistle Test.

Beds are Burning – Midnight Oil: There can’t have been many more political bands to have worked over the last 30 years and there can be very few who have had a global hit about Australian Aboriginal land rights. Lead singer Peter Garrett is now Australian Minister for Environment Protection, Heritage and the Arts.

Killing in the Name - Rage Against the Machine: A popular anarchist/ left wing band writes an anthemic protest song that accuses the military and police of being in the Ku Klux Klan. And now all we know about it is that it kept Joe McElwotsit off the Christmas Number 1. Go figure.

Vive la Quinte Brigada – Christy Moore: He wasn’t afraid to put his head above the parapet during the Troubles and say what he felt even if it was controversial, but this beautiful song is a loving tribute to the Irish Socialists who fought on the Republican side during the Spanish Civil War. It’s an education listening Christy.

If you are in the orbit of Spotify, I have started a playlist here Political Songs for Election Day

Political Songs for after election day: Part 1

2010-05-08T00:56:00.000+01:00

PETER Guy over at Liverpool's brilliant Get Into This blog asked to me to put together a Top 10 political songs for the momentous British General election day. But as anyone who has ever tried put together Top 10s, it’s virtually impossible, so here’s 10 of my favourites but please post yours below the fold.

A Change is Gonna Come – Sam Cooke: A beautiful hymn for change in Segregation era USA by a man who possessed the voice of his generation. Inspired after his arrest for trying to book into a whites only motel in Louisiana, Cooke set about his masterpiece in1963, the year of Martin Luther King’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech.

The final verse ‘There have been times that I thought I couldn't last for long/but now I think I'm able to carry on/It's been a long time coming, but I know a change is gonna come’ is one of the great refrains of the civil rights-era and the combination of Cooke’s wonderful voice and atmospheric production could make stone cry. Otis and Aretha versions are also worth a listen.

Alternative Ulster – Stiff Little Fingers: It may have been a cut price version of The Clash and lambasted by many in Northern Ireland during the Troubles, but Alternative Ulster has strangely stood the test of time.

Belting final verse too: ‘Take a look where you're livin'/ You got the Army on the street/ And the RUC dog of repression/ Is barking at your feet/ Is this the kind of place you wanna live?

Is this were you wanna be?/ Is this the only life we're gonna have?/ What we need is/ An Alternative Ulster’ Like all great political songs, it’s a call for change.

Eton Rifles – The Jam: Weller’s somewhat naïve call for class war by taking on the officer classes of the British establishment wrongly endorsed by Cameron a couple of years ago. Weller’s always been an uppity outsider: ‘All that rugby puts hairs on your chest,’ ‘What chance have you got against a tie and a crest?’ kinda lay bare his intent. His best political lyric is however on ‘Down in the Tube Station’ ‘They smelt of pubs and Wormwood Scrubs/ And too many right wing meetings’ That’s the 1970s right there and tragically parts of Essex and the North today.

It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back – Public Enemy: And album, I know, but it is a complete political history class in urban black America at the end of the 20^th Century. Focussing on drugs, violence, government neglect, segregation, black consciousness and militant Islam, it’s hard to separate any one song. Perhaps ‘Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos’ or ‘Night of the Living Baseheads’ illustrate the primal anger and power that made Chuck D the greatest songwriter of his generation. And always remember: freedom is a road seldom followed by the multitude.

Waiting for the Great Leap Forward – Billy Bragg: It was a toss-up between Housemartins-era Paul Heaton and the big nosed bard of Barking, for who wrote the best lefty lyrics in the 80s. But, Bill it had to be, especially given he’s still harassing the BNP whenever he can.

A lyric that is brilliant from start to finish, but the opening verse has a beauty we don’t often ascribe to Billy: ‘It may have been Camelot for Jack and Jacqueline/ But on the Che Guevara highway filling up with gasoline/ Fidel Castro's brother spies a rich lady who's crying/ Over luxury's disappointment/ So he walks over and he's trying/ To sympathise with her but he thinks that he should warn her/ That the third world is just around the corner’.

Best thing is, he’s still rocking this and updating it at every available opportunity. Check out this performance on Craig Ferguson’s Stateside Talk Show.

Sefton Central - not so much a sh*t sandwich as a 'merde baguette'

2010-05-05T00:41:00.004+01:00

THIS billboard defacement is as far as we got to some cut and thrust of political debate in the new Sefton Central constituency, a parliamentary area which hugs the Mersey shore from the prosperous towns of Crosby and Formby and stretching five or six miles inland towards Maghull.

Each of these stolidly middle class enclaves still quaintly cling to their former village status but are essentially commuter towns home to the many public servants, professional white collar workers and the prosperously self employed who have prospered in the New Labour era.

The mortgage boom has seen these towns grow and the middle class demographic has deepened in recent years with average house prices in Crosby and Maghull stretching from the £170k mark through to £220k.
Formby comes in at around £270k - but that is skewed by the millionaires' row of Freshfield which is home to Steven Gerrard, some other footballers past and present and snooker legend John Parrott.
House prices have more than doubled in the last 10 years as they have become desirable communities for those public servants to raise their children.

It is not hard to see why they are desirable places to live. Strong, cheap public transport links to Liverpool (no more than 30 minutes away) make them commuter-friendly and each is home to a large number of reputable schools and each still has fairly strong church communities - Crosby, especially, is an historically strongly Catholic town with some excellent state faith schools.
But, despite Tory promises to axe many public sector jobs to cut the deficit and Labour's pledges to boost the economy without touching the public sector, this constituency has seen virtually no electoral campaigning by any of the three main parties - at least down our way, anyway.

Perhaps, due to boundary changes, that may be down to the perception that it's a shoo in for the Tory candidate Debi Jones, a former BBC local radio and shopping channel personality who has been a councillor for Crosby's Manor Ward for four years.

The constituency was until 1997 solidly Tory - Thatcherite Sir Malcolm Thornton ruled the roost from 1983 to 1997. It's true that Baroness Shirley Williams held it briefly for the SDP after a by-election in 1981 but she briefly replaced Tory grandee Graham Page who had held it from 1953.

A spanner was thrown in the Tory years by boundary changes in 1997 which saw the solidly Labour wards of the Waterloo area, essentially part of Crosby, taken out of Joe Benton's Bootle constituency and rightly thrown into Crosby.

Britain's one time most expensive MP, Claire Curtis-~~Barking~~ Thomas, one of the much vaunted Blair babes was parachuted in from Crewe and took the seat at a canter. She has made little or no mark on the area in her time and succeeded only in: a) boosting the sales of lads' mags in an ill-conceived campaign to get them stocked on the top shelf and, b) garnering headlines for her vast office expenses.

But now Waterloo has ridiculously gone back in to Bootle (where a voter's influence was seen to be about 0.0003 in a recent BBC exercise) and Sefton Central was created, with Maghull coming back from the Knowsley North/ Sefton East constituency that George Howarth has held from its creation in 1997.
So, getting back to the defaced billboard, what debate has there been in Sefton Central? That's an easy question to answer: none whatsoever.

In the four weeks of the campaign I have met only one candidate - the safe encumbent of Coventry North East - defence secretary Bob Ainsworth (above) who was out on the stomp for Labour's Bill Esterson.
Esterson is another parachuted-in Labour candidate, coming this time from Medway where he was a councillor for 15 years.
My sole experience of him has been some badly designed leaflets through the door which prove only that someone he knows can't take photographs or use Photoshop's magic lassoo tool - but more of rubbish election leaflets this week.

The Lib-Dems have Richard Clein, a member of Liverpool's Clein LD dynasty, a former BBC journalist who now works for leading global PR firm Bell Pottinger. He again hasn't been near the stoop of GM Towers and has also only posted poor newsletters through the letter box. I have written previously about how one leaflet looked like a An Phoblacht off-cut from the 80s.

In fairness, I haven't contacted him until today when he dilligently replied to a tweet, but a man of his talents, family experience and undoubted personality should have been out on the stomp much longer, if indeed the Lib Dems thought they really could take the seat. I think the Shinners could show them a thing or two about campaigning when it comes to the kinds of apparently lost causes even ~~my ma's favourite saint of lost causes,~~ St ~~Luke~~ Jude might blanch at.

So it all comes down to the bookies' favourite La Jones, the Tory candidate. Selected in 2005 to run this year, she presumably jumped to the front of the queue thanks to her media background and ability to switch on Christmas lights - despite the fact that there were a number of longer serving councillors who could have done the job too.

We have had a couple leaflets from the Tories, but Dave Cameron has written more often than those closest to home and Debi's entire pitch seems to be that 'she is just like us', but again more on crummy election literature tomorrow.

On the issues, such as they are locally and nationally, there have been no hustings and no public debates on what Crosby is going to get after the election of whatever government. The Tories, in particular have resorted to reprinting scare stories from the right skewed press (see below) in a bid to scare us to vote for them - now that's mature.

Thanks to slashing of editorial staff by Trinity Mirror, which controls the local newspaper market, media coverage isn't what it might have been in previous years.

It's not as if this corner of middle England isn't going to suffer from any cuts to the economy and particularly the public sector economy. Dave Cameron has already targeted the North West, North East and Northern Ireland as areas of public sector reliance to be addressed. Extrapolating wildly from my anecdotal experience, that's going to affect the many teachers, school administrators, doctors, nurses, coppers and local government media types I know from my extended social circle.

Labour and the Lib Dems have spent most of their time telling us that we should vote for them because the other can't win it, again without telling getting into the issues that matter in the constituency. Presumably because GM Towers is in a safe Tory ward, we are not deemed to be worth a visit in these cash strapped and volunteer light times.
However, most importantly, like the rest of North Merseyside we will be electing yet more back bench fodder.Just as Liverpool Walton, Bootle, Knowsley North/ Sefton East etc have got in recent years, we are not going to get an MP who will make a blind bit of difference to the national debate - unless of course it's on the key issue of getting the prisoners' favourite, Nuts magazine, banished to the top shelf.

Debi Jones is not going to get a high ranking Tory portfolio as she has neither the ambition nor Tory central office links - she is a strictly a very provincial answer to an anti-Labour question.

Richard Clein has the ambition and personality to make a career out of it - in the manner of Southport's John Pugh - but he's still a Lib Dem and Esterson will be back in Medway before you can say Billy Childish.

So, for voters, it all amounts on a local level to a simplistic and democratically self defeating exercise of a) getting rid of the hated Brown, b) hating the vacuity of Cameron's empty flim flam or c) daring to believe that the untested Clegg could usher in an era of mature three party politics and the most recent opinion polls tend to mitigate against the latter option, now.

The conclusion, therefore, is that in this era of re-branding and electoral marketing the choice in Sefton Central is not so much a shit sandwich but more of a 'merde baguette' - same old same old, just a different title. Bon appetit, mes copins!

Liverpool Comedy Festival Preview - Part 1

2010-04-30T23:58:00.004+01:00

THE opening two nights of Liverpool’s 2010 Comedy Festival have one of the finest arrays of comics the city must have ever hosted with big names scattered across the arena, theatres and clubs.

On Thursday, John Bishop (above) kicks the big gigs off with a 5,000 seat sell-out ECHO Arena show which just illustrates how a year is a very long time in comedy.

In an interview with Catherine Jones in today's ECHO he explains how he has gone from selling out the 250 seater Unity Theatre last year to selling out the Arena this time around.

At the same time Chris Cairns and Keith Carter debut their specially written one off one hour shows at the Slaughterhouse. Cairns is doing ‘The A-Z of B Movies’ (interview here, Tuesday) about a life watching rank bad films while Carter is bringing his scallydelic musician alter ego Nige back for a musical evening of songs from the stoner King of Park Road’s new album ‘Dark Side of the Meff’. (Interview here Wednesday)

Daniel Kitson, held by many as the best stand-up working in Britain today brings his new one man theatre show ‘66a Church Road – A Lament Made of Memories and Kept Suitcases’ to the Everyman for a week. It’s a clever, literate story of nostalgia and life gone by told from a series of battered suitcases.

But in each of the five main weekly clubs that the city now boasts, there is an absolute welter of quality acts. At Comedy Central at Baby Blue on Thursday the brilliant Paul Sinha headlines while at Rawhide downstairs in the Royal Court, Paul Tonkinson is the headliner. They are both quality acts.

While the clubs normally have some of the best bills anywhere in the country most weeks, next Friday they have really upped their game for the festival.

Promoter Tongue in Cheek Comedy’s three clubs lead the way. At their flagship club in the Slaughterhouse, regular compere Neil Fitzmaurice (Phoenix Nights and Peep Show) welcomes charismatic Canadian Tom Stade who has gone through somewhat of a career renaissance recently.

At their second night at the Slug and Lettuce, TiC have Ste Porter compering the brilliant surrealists Mundo Jazz and Seymour Mace and having taken over Comedy Hell at Lenny’s Bar and Grill the brilliant Nick Revell and Adam Bloom pop in.

At this stage it's not clear whether Mundo is going to be doing his Liverpool inspired hit 'Scally Scally Scouse' but hopefully he will be doing the his touching cri de ceour for racial integration 'Peace Song'.

Rawhide, with more than a decade of putting on brilliant shows is, as ever, a study in comedy club booking excellence. Paul Tonkinson returns for a second night while the glamourous Jonathon Mayor joins him.

At Comedy Central, Paul Sinha stays on for another night, and is joined by Kevin Hayes and the ever brilliant and energetic Simon Bligh. All bills remain for Saturday.

In an exclusive text message he cut and pasted from the press release, Festival marketing director Iain Christie said: "The Festival comes around so quickly every year and we can't wait to get into this one, With 75 shows in 10 days you won't be able to move for funny stuff wherever you are in the city."

You’ll not get a ticket for Bish at the Arena so get out and see some high quality comedy at often bargain basement prices.

My night with Stuart Maconie

2010-04-30T01:13:00.001+01:00

A YOUNG man pitched up at Edge Hill College in Ormskirk in 1979 with the trifecta of cultural high points of the 80s, leggings, David Hasselhoff and Haircut 100 a heartbeat away but as yet unimagined.
Within seven years he was to see one of the first gigs by The Smiths and be rescued from a life teaching English and Sociology at Skelmersdale College by the NME which whisked him around the world interviewing independent music’s luminaries, including INXS.
Stuart Maconie returned tonight to Edge Hill to help celebrate the now university’s 125th anniversary for a thoroughly enjoyable lecture. It was essentially a pimped-up reading session by one of Britain’s biggest selling travel writers, but no less entertaining for it.
Interspersing a hitherto unseen talent for stand-up style raconteurship with reading extracts from his three books, ‘Cider With Roadies', ‘Pies & Prejudice’ and ‘Adventures on the High Teas,’ he affectionately recounted his life as a student and then indulged in the deep love of England which has been the focus of his literary output.
There’s no ‘Big I Am’ about Maconie, a writer and broadcaster of some considerable stature, he has a lovely problem with the definitions of his work. As he said, although ‘Cider with...’ is stacked in autobiography he had to move it back in a shop recently because he was ashamed it was shelved alphabetically beside Nelson Mandela’s.
Likewise being called a travel writer perhaps overplays him, somewhat, he says: “Bruce Parry chops bits of his own body off and is constantly drinking hallucinogenic potions and falling into comas, I go to chippies.” Nor does he write the kind of books he brilliantly typified as ‘To Azerbijan in a Cement Mixer.’
Maconie, as befitting a man whose favourite gig is still The Smiths at Edge Hill Students’ Union in 1983, is in love with the nostalgic and unthreatening minutiae of British life. He loves half day closing, regional foodstuffs and deeply held love of place and people.
His patriotism is not that of bigotry and slagging off immigrants, his Englishness is one of civic pride and love of people and place. Recounting a phone call from his mum during his first week as a freelancer after leaving the NME, when she asked what he had done, he told her he had written a piece for the Observer, “What, the Wigan Observer?” she proudly inquired.
The kind of love of ‘nostalgic’ Britain, which inspired him to help invent those still de rigeur ‘I Love the...’ talking heads TV shows, allows him to shine a light into England of recent past and say much about what he sees wrong with that of the present.
He loves Britain’s invention of the railway, old public information films, Celia Johnson and Marmite. As he told a café waitress in Burton Upon Trent ‘an uncooked spaghetti stick dipped in Marmite makes a great emergency Twiglet.’
But, he is fully aware of the fact that the Englands of the past he so loves have a different resonance in the modern world. While the first Joy Division album, he says, sounded like Manchester of 1978 - of tyres under rainy overpasses and dodgy lifts in Hulme high rises - Manchester has changed, now it’s all skinny de-caff lattes and loft apartments.
For Maconie, Englishness is Orwell and the non-jingoistic Kipling. It’s the Wigan Casino Northern Soul club and The Smiths and Echo and the Bunnymen and Radiohead, it's Nick Drake and Pink Floyd.
Most beautifully, England for Maconie, is the romantic but ultimately tragic moment of English summertime elementally captured by Edward Thomas in the poem ‘Adlestrop,’
‘And for that minute a blackbird sang
Close by, and round him, mistier,
Farther and farther, all the birds
Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.’
Thomas would die soon after in World War One.
For Maconie, these artists’ England is wistful, elegiac and ‘mustn’t grumble'. Today's Britain, he says, might benefit from a slice of the stoic, pent-up melancholia of Celia Johnson in ‘Brief Enounter'.
Even as an Irishman, Blake’s ‘Jerusalem’ soared in my heart - the Billy Bragg version, mind.

Jimmy Fennessy rocks: Great Joe Strummer street art

2010-04-29T00:49:00.003+01:00

THANKS to my mate Jimmy Fennessy for this great pic from New York City of Joe Strummer street art. He took it on the south side of Thompkins Square Park on the corner of Avenue A and 3rd Street. I wish there were more murals of this kind in Northern Ireland.

Lenny Bruce documentary in narrator #EPICFAIL

2010-04-28T00:36:00.001+01:00

WHEN you are doing a documentary about the hippest of hep cats like Lenny Bruce, I think you need a narrator to match the hard hitting script. Maybe Christopher Walken or Dr John or someone who doesn't sound like they have come off the set of BBC1's Doctors or Antiques Roadshow.
I think, with that in mind, this is, in the words of modern social networking, an #EPICFAIL.
So who else would be a bad narrator of the Lenny Bruce story? Comments below, please.

Clash Week: In Their Own Words

2010-04-24T01:24:00.001+01:00

I'LL LET this wee audio package to speak for itself. Topper, Joe, Mick and Paul as they saw it. From the great Rockers Galore CD sampler.
Right click on the DivShare logo on the listening bar and download the package to listen to again on your iPods, mp3 players or wherever.

It really did all sound the same

2010-04-22T23:34:00.001+01:00

I HAVE been listening to this album this week and was struck that a) most of the Chew Lips style new stuff sounds like late 1970s early 1980s electro bands I stupidly ignored and b) may be the rockists were right, it did all sound the same, originally.
This double bill from OMD and Our Daughter's Wedding shows extraordinarily similar thinking from each band. OMD's came first, that's all I am saying.
It's a tremendous album with some tracks I had never heard of (Telex Moskow Diskow anyone? Brilliant) and which have bridged the generation gap between Mrs GM (undisclosed) and Miss GM (9).

Play it for that motherf***ing money, boys: First thoughts on Treme

2010-04-22T11:53:00.004+01:00

TREME, the new HBO show from The Wire's creator David Simon has all the hall marks of one he intends to run and run.
Produced by Simon and Eric Overmyer it is set three months after Hurricane Katrina in the predominantly black neighbourhood of Treme which sits behind the French Quarter in New Orleans, a traditional home for the musicians and Creole community.
After the first couple of episodes those of us familiar with the greatest TV show ever will notice similar narrative and character hints being dropped slowly into a heady gumbo of a drama. Not much of major dramatic impact has happened in the first two episodes, but another large cast of characters has been introduced and plots and themes are emerging tentatively.
Signed up for at least two series by HBO, the experienced among us will know it may take all that time for everything to be tied up, by which stage series three will be taking on another set of injustices.
I'd say this series is going to deal with the institutionally racist neglect of flood victims, the deadly stasis brought on by Federal bureaucracy and the inherently corrupt political systems which allowed the huge humanitarian disaster to unfold down in N'awlins.
One thing already apparent is there's a tremendous cast working their socks off. The Corner and CSI Miami's Khandi Alexander is stressed bar owner LaDonna Batiste-Williams looking for her brother missing in the prison system, Clarke 'Lester Freamon' Peters is the Indian chief Albert Lambreaux looking to get his carnival gang back together, Wendell 'Bunk Moreland' Pierce (above) LaDonna's gifted but priapic trombonist ex-husband Antoine Batiste hustling for work while Steve Zahn plays the middle class white musician and DJ Davis McAlary in love with black music, its musicians and culture.
However, the stand-out character, and perhaps the moral barometer of the show, is English Literature professor Creighton Bernette played by John Goodman, a man leading a crusade to get the truth about Katrina known. It's not a natural disaster he says, 'but a federal fuck-up of epic proportions, decades in the making.'
The music is incredible, in what has to be one of the best opening sequences of any TV show, a panorama of the city's heritage from ragtime to revival, be bop, rock and dirty south hip hop all comes together before concluding with a full New Orleans jazz band marching the streets of Treme.
British and Irish gobshites, content yourself with this trailer and others like it on YouTube - as yet there are no dates for either a screening or DVD release in these parts.

Guns of Brixton: Paul Simonon the beating heart of The Clash

2010-04-22T01:09:00.002+01:00

GUNS OF Brixton could be the very zenith of the kind of 'wiggerism' many Clash critics point to in their criticisms of the band, and perhaps rightly so.
Bass player Paul Simonon gets a chance to live his roots reggae dreams of outlawism in a cod Jamaican accent while telling a story of police lifting a bandito in the far off flung climes of Brixton.
Well, it may be flawed, but 'Guns of Brixton' has an awe inspiring bass line, some great guitar fills from Jonesy and the vocal is spot on from Simonon.
And the composer is the heart of this debate: there really hasn't been a cooler wielder of the four string rhythm section axe in history than Simonon (right).
I reviewed him in the overblown and overhyped Albarn-helmed four piece The Good, The Bad and The Queen and even 30 years on the man was the essence of rock and roll cool.
And this song has haunting harmonies, is underrated and wsn't even spoiled by the fey shit sandwich that is the Nouvelle Vague cover.

Beware the propaganda: Rock the Casbah

2010-04-21T01:03:00.000+01:00

THIS interview with Strummage would lead you to believe he was the driving force behind 'Rock the Casbah', The Clash's most successful single, but don't be fooled - it's all about multi-talented drummer Topper Headon. (left).
1) The original interview I am using was done while Headon was still suffering from the effects of heroin dependency and he had no chance to give his side of the story. He has since got clean and the record been set straight.
2) Strummage, like the rest of The Clash entourage, love the process of myth making, especially while recording sound bites for American radio and especially when needing to promote something. Disappeared front man anyone?
3) Bar the bloody lyric and a few guitar fills, Topper had written the most successful song the bastards ever recorded.
At least the story has a happy ending - some time ago it was decided the royalties were to be split four ways and there is no rancour among the Last Gang in Town, it's still a great song.
It's still Topper's song despite what Joe says below.

The true sound of the suburbs: Lost in the Supermarket

2010-04-21T00:01:00.001+01:00

THE STORY goes that during the Rehearsals Rehearsals years of the early Clash, their first manager Bernie Rhodes urged them to write about their lives, not about America or love songs or the kind of ephemeral stuff that many pop songs were about, but to reflect the often manufactured gritty realism that punk was supposed to have heralded.
So, in the mythology created by the Last Gang in Town, Strummer, Jones and Simonon adjourned to Jones' nan's 18th floor flat in Wilmcote House high above the Westway motorway flyover in Notting Hill in West London, looked over the tiny balcony (above) and resolved to write about life as it affected them.
It took another two and half years before they found the highest point of their writing about their own lives.
To my mind, the highest point of The Clash as songwriters is 'Lost in the Supermarket' from the London Calling album, a song which almost poignantly pinpoints the alienation many of us in suburbs can feel at various points of our life.
It's easy to forget that in the 1970s the big supermarkets that have become a fabric of our lives were a relatively new concept and that life in high rises and housing estates had been heralded as a new utopian example of communal living paradise by modernist architects only in the two decades before. The terrible reality of the latter lie would only become apparent in the 1980s and 90s.
Mick Jones, Strummer too, often get stick for not being great singers, unfairly in my opinion, but I really love Jones' vocal on 'Supermarket.' It's febrile and light and worthy of the insecurity of the narrator created by Strummer in his lyric.
And one line is the best: 'I got my giant hits discotheque album/ I empty a bottle, I feel a bit free.' It says it all about getting your kicks where you can when you are feeling lost in whatever isolated reality you are living.
Over to you Mick and Joe...

Turning rebellion into money: White Man in Hammersmith Palais

2010-04-19T00:43:00.000+01:00

OF ALL the nonsense that is often thrown at The Clash, the most common criticism is that they were opportunist arrivistes always flying to Belfast for photo ops and using DM shod, biker jacketed revolutionary chic to sex up their meat-and-two veg rockism.
But that kind of cynical critique doesn't allow for the likes of myself who will be forever in their debt for opening my eyes to a legion of great music that I wouldn't ordinarily have heard of. They were a music library waiting to be explored, because unlike many, they always wore their influences on their sleeves - sometimes literally.
Guitarist Mick Jones once described their fabulously eclectic album fourth album Sandinista as 'music for people who work on oil rigs, a bit of everything,' but I have always seen The Clash as a practical equivalent of those long lists of artists you got in the credits of Def Jam rap records: after listening to The Clash, I had to search out Prince Far I or Culture or Ken Booth or Vince Taylor.
It was more than just music. Through The Clash, I went and read about movie star Montomery Clift (from The Right Profile from London Calling) and photojournalist Sean Flynn (from Combat Rock). (He worked with John Steinbeck's son).
On Thursday last, I was struggling with a mountain of work and fired on Under Heavy Manners by Prince Far I, you think I would have known about that 20 years ago living in a new town of roundabouts and little else without The Clash? Possibly, but it was thanks to interviews with them that I did.
The Clash back catalogue is like the big revolving racks of tapes that were in Craigavon library when I was an awkward, mostly friendless teenager stuck in his room. I got The Clash from those racks and those racks contained a lot of the music The Clash lionised and covered and I also listened to that.
The Clash, unlike a lot of commercially successful bands had the ability to make other worldly sounding music, stuff a band in their position would usually not make and 'White Man in Hammersmith Palais' is perhaps the best example. A reggae tinged story of being an outsider in a black venue, not the stuff of zeitgeisty, successful figureheads of British punk in 1978.
And that's the point: it is Joe Strummer's story of being an outsider during an evening of the black culture they so loved. It's about people and love and enthusiasm before turning to pointing a finger at the cynical pricks who make life bad.
It also has the best 'Oooh A hooo A oooh' harmonies ever committed to tape. That might be the best thng about it, too.
Listen to the interviews below from Joe and Mick to tell the story.
(I'll hypertext this up soon)

Clash Week: Let's take humanity back into the centre of the ring

2010-04-18T01:16:00.001+01:00

THIS WEEK I will be posting pieces inspired by interviews recorded by members of The Clash during the production of the wonderful Don Letts' documentary 'From Westway to the World'.
I've been lucky enough to get an audio CD sent out to US radio stations for promotional use after the re-release of the box set 'The Clash on Broadway' near the end of the 1990s. Much thanks has to be given to my Widnesian mate Tony Dagnall who snaffled said CD in Ed McKay's, the record and book shop he works for in Winston Salem, North Carolina.
The CD looks like it has been sold by someone attached to college radio station of Wake Forest University in Winston Salem.
At the end of the day, humanity is what The Clash, and particularly Joe Strummer, means to me.
Ed Hamell, the one man acoustic guitar wielding colossus, got it right many years ago in his Uncut magazine column when he said anyone who attacks the Clash for posturing or selling out misses the essential humanity at the heart of the majority of their greatest songs.
Joe's spiel here says it all for me, I'll be posting my thoughts and some more interviews for the next seven days.

Libertines and the rule of diminishing music industry returns

2010-04-01T00:44:00.000+01:00

PETER Guy hit the nail firmly on the head with this sensationally well written demolition of The Libertines in the wake of news that they are to reform for a festival this summer for a monster fee not unadjacent to 1.5m of your British pounds.
Not bad for two nights work which will work out at about 120 minutes in total stage time. I can't imagine they will overburden themselves with intensive rehearsal to get ultra tight - it was never a concern in the first place.
Central to Pete's thesis is that the cult of The Libertines/ Pete Doherty was based on a slavering music press sycophancy which needed to rapidly create new heroes but which ultimately opened the door for eight years of terrible guitar bands which have failed to light up anything, let alone what passes for charts now.
The continual glut of uninspiring indie guitar bands which still routinely appear to steal time which we, as eternally interested but perennially underwhelmed consumers, will never get back, come directly from the time in which The Libertines emerged.
It was a period of plunging music sales and dwindling music paper circulations in which A&R men and music journalists fantastically sought to battle these twin perils by trying to recreate the last, in every sense of the word, glory time for each industry - Britpop.
So the A&R men headed down Camden way or Old Street or got themselves off to the gritty North in search of some slim hipped rapscallions, but not before gathering up the vintage Epiphone guitars, picked a football team for each band (if they didn't have one), got the Fred Perry polo shirt/ tight jeans/ vintage parka look bang on, signed up the likeliest crews and sent the boys (always boys) out to misbehave just like Noel and Liam had done.
The boated music PR industry, seeing the devastation among the major and big indie labels and the potential losses from their dwindling coffers, got to work polishing a bewildering series of turds.
At the same time, music journalists (myself included) forced to file columns on a daily or weekly basis on the thinnest of new gruel were, at best, forced to acquiesce and cover that which we knew as cack, or, at worst, actually blindly became trumpet majors for a period of utter dross in a bid to cut a diminishing niche in this new media ecosphere of plenty.
It was the hoariest of music industry clusterfucks - no-one wanted to put their heads above the parapets and say that which was going to bring down the bright red beach ball of fun which we all needed to keep floating.
But, it was a singularly depressing time where anyone with any recent historical frame of reference could see all the old joins being imperfectly glued back together by desperate people.
Mod/ Britpop stylings, cool punk/ post punk producers (Andy Gill/ Mick Jones), Union Jacks and Victoriana were utilised to give a communion wafer thin concoction some sense of timelessness and history in the hope that it would not disappear with the same rapidity of the average communion wafer.
The new fads of the internet were also utilised to give this old stew some new seasoning: bands did 'guerilla' gigs arranged on the internet and other acts were signed due to live shows streamed on the emerging phenomenon of mySpace. 'OOOH, look.' we cried, 'Sandy Thom and the Arctic Monkeys were signed due to the new self empowering and utterly democratic spaces of social media.What a story to kick their careers off with.' Mind, we didn't call it social media until much later.
The Libertines held impromptu gigs in whatever needle strewn, shite and blood stained hovel they were inhabiting and there was always a phalanx of journalists and hand held camera 'documentarians' to capture the bohemia for NME TV or BBC3 or whatever. With more channels and new demographics emerging there was always a home for this stuff.
In Liverpool, the Deltasonic label made an absolute virtue out of a post modern retread necessity by simply taking youngsters and telling them what they would sound and look like. The Coral were an identikit scally stoner act, The Zutons a rockier version, The Little Flames a bit the same with a good looking girl singer and The Dead 60s were a former hard core four piece turned into a reggae tinged Clash-a-like who were ultimately upstaged by one single wonder Southerners Hard-Fi.
It really was depressing to see most of them lauded and more pertinently, to be involved, partially, in the lauding.
I remember one gang of big indie label chancers called The Others who were sold to me by a PR as a potential big thing. The were the apotheosis of this generation's mediocrity: an identikit shower of cack put together like a self-assembly IKEA band - a good looking young fella who resembled Lee Mavers and three session musicians - one of whom looked like a fat member of The Cure. They were dreadful and even for the weekly £60 from the Daily Post, I wouldn't polish the aforementioned doggie waste product.
The saddest thing is that, Arctic Monkeys aside, it's still going on. The Courteeners are at best derivative but more realistically plain bad. Scouting for Girls, Kaiser Chiefs, The Music et al continue to get a few moments in the spotlight thanks to a supposed primacy of indie guitar bands in both Britain and its music press.
The reformation of the Libertines in July or August will hide, momentarily, one simple fact: we need no more British indie guitar bands because that seam has been mined to extinction and we need no more of them.
If we had stopped and looked in 2002-2005 that would have been wholly apparent and we would have saved ourselves a pile of time in the process.

The Wire and modern journalism

2010-03-31T01:05:00.000+01:00

I wrote this piece for Jason Walsh's brilliant magazine Forth.ie. It is an update on one started here some months ago on The Wire and what it says about modern newspapers and journalism.
I will update it again very soon as I am hoping to publish a piece in an academic journal about the subject.

It's not rubbish - it's just you don't like it

2010-03-31T00:46:00.000+01:00

I posted this on The Word Magazine blog enraged at people (as we used to say in local newspapers) 'slamming' The Clash's 'London Calling' and Captain Beefheart's Trout Mask Replica'. I love the first and don't care for the latter but respect most equally for their enduring appeal to people.
I now think that most attacks on popular canonical works in most art forms are almost pointless. Re-appraisals, particularly by those who don't like them, tend to be sarcastic, catty and nit picking where simply the words: 'I don't like it,' would suffice.
I stand by the core of this post: just because you don't like it doesn't make it shit.

'Amid the welter of re-appraisals of classic albums as 'not very good' or 'total abortions' that have become de riguer around these parts in recent days, I was reminded by something the oul fella said to me nearly 25 years ago.
As he was praising Ralph McTell to hilt in a bid to get me to expand my horizons from whatever narrow passing indie trend I was into at time, he was met with a volley of abuse about the Tickle on the Tum hitmaker.
His reply was perfect: "Just because you don't like it doesn't mean it's rubbish." And, much though I hated to agree with him then as now, he was right.
On any scale of success, either sales or critical/ fan approval, 'London Calling' and 'Trout Mask Replica' among others, are great albums. They live beyond their times because they have an enduring appeal which allows them to transcend the contemporary.
Just because you don't care for them doesn't make them bad.
And anyway, the reappraisal of the 'canon' in any art form almost inevitably leads to diametrically opposed verdicts than those originally given. And, it's almost always pointless posturing.'

What have you heard/ read/ seen this month?

2010-03-31T00:36:00.002+01:00

AGAIN, stolen shamelessly from The Word magazine's Blogger Takeover strand, I'm asking fellow gobshites to tell me what they have read/ seen/ heard this month. Here are mine for March 2010.

Books

City of Lies by Alafair Burke – while it has a couple of nicely drawn characters, a nicely convoluted plot which makes you think almost to the end, Burke’s New York-set police whodunit doesn’t sit in the top league of modern crime thrillers. The absurdly strong and wilful detective Ellie Hatcher has the potential to be a great character and the backdrop of Manhattan and NYC is lovingly painted, but it lacks a the stylistic oomph of New York crime scribe Lawrence Block (skip annoying intro to site) and the moral overtones of either Burke’s father – the great James Lee or the holy trinity of modern East Coast American Noir: Lehane, Pelecanos and Price (see tags on the left).

It’s one for those of us who can happily fly through Jonathan Kellerman or Robert Crais.

Mediated Politics edited by W. Lance Bennett & Robert M. Entman

This book is 10 years old this year and still is as relevant to the modern communications student/ researcher. Amid all the middle class fortune telling of those predicting the future with absolute confidence on the welter of blogs established by self appointed experts, this is a valuable reminder that we have as yet to do extensive research into the power of the blogosphere beyond a couple of books and peer reviewed journal articles.

We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People by Dan Gillmor

Six years old and a similar story to Entman and Bennett’s collection – a book which charts the first wave of impact on corporate or big media by the internet and blogs and which shows we have yet to write the key text on the second wave. Perhaps only Charlie Beckett’s work is leading the way, in Britain at least.

Films

Precious little at the cinema but a splurge on Amazon for stuff that I wanted to see again.

First up was Matteo Garrone’s wonderful Gomorrah (2008) which shows the brutal and all pervasive depths to which the mafia permeate life in Southern Italy. From nonsensical drug turf wars which needlessly cost lives, to the all too often seen ‘innocent boy to drug mule’ motif (known to lovers of The Wire) to the white collar political criminals in the pay of the mob, it is the best film on mafia ever made. Award winning writer Roberto Saviano, on whose book the film is based, is now in hiding and his exposure of the true nature of Italian society should be potentially explosive. It also has a breathtaking opening sequence which sets the scene for the rest of the movie. To call it the best film since City of God, does neither film any justice. Gomorrah is really compelling. The final lines of this Amazon review should tell you all you need to know about why this is a vital piece of film making and journalism.

Next up the two part French crime double Mesrine which I saw at FACT in Liverpool. Directed by Jean-Francois Richet and featuring (and I use this phrase with the respect it deserves) a career defining performance from Vincent Cassel, it is the real life story of 60s/70s French gangster Jacques Mesrine. It has to be said that Cassel, a man good looking enough to test my Kelner-like 36 year unblemished record of heterosexuality, gives the performance of a lifetime. Breathtaking violence, glamour, daring escapes, heists, gambling, shagging and media manipulation - it is the perfect example of an intoxicatingly true story told well by a fine director and a leading man with huge charisma.

Tomorrow night, I’m going to go with a 1974 paranoia-fest double bill with Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation and Alan J. Pakula’s The Parallax View because I think both movies say so much more today than they even did in their own times.

Music

Man alive, I have gone mad with all manner of genres in the last few weeks of frenzied PhD catch-up writing. Amadou and Mariam for the last couple of days – anything with such a noticeable influence of the producer Manu Chao has to be a good thing.

Reggae star George Faith, particularly his work with Lee Scratch Perry, turned up during a Word magazine instigated randomiser session as did the Nigerian-born ‘calypso’ star Ambrose Campbell whose work features on the now several years old ‘London is the Place for Me’ compilation I found thanks to Du Noyer and The Word. Campbell's very interesting obit from the Guardian is available here.

On top this, while writing I have found my inner classicist and have again been top skanking to Daniel Barenboim’s conducting the Berlin Philharmonic doing Bruckner.

At times of minor crisis, I always turn to (among others) Lightning Hopkins, Trojan Rocksteady, The Pogues and The Clash and this period has been no different. Enough hypertext already, if you need to know - google people.

Let me know what you have watched/ read/ heard this month, below the fold.

Live streaming

2010-03-12T14:08:00.002Z

Flashback: Oscars coverage

2010-03-07T23:08:00.002Z

I FILED this piece for the Liverpool ECHO TV column on March 25, 2002. It was written hurriedly after having been in the esteemed Crosby pub The Edinburgh the evening before with my mate Cormac Austin who had been visiting from Belfast.

When I say hurriedly, I mean (to use film parlance) it was one take right on deadline - in the old days a copy boy would have ripped it from the typewriter and ran like stink to the compositors rubbing sweat from his visor.

No rewrites and no self-analysis and still the favourite thing I ever wrote there because the emotions will be similar to those watching tonight's schmooze fest. It shows that sometimes it's better just to write what you think and be damned.

Oscar Special (BBC News 24)
OKAY, okay, its not officially last night's telly, but the early-morning Oscar coverage from LA got the hatred meter rising through the roof.
As the nation slept and young parents like me were blearily calming down hyper-active weeuns, the biggest shower of over-paid prima-donnas were praising and analysing more prima donnas giving wee gold statues to other more highly paid prima-donnas.
So as billions of dollars were wasted on analysing the classic simplicity of Sharon Stone's dress, I was screaming at the telly: 'Of course she looks good, she gets paid $20m a movie, she's got people employed to make her look good.'
Then we were told it was a great night for the African-American actors; it was a triumph of the great American dream. Did Martin Luther King die just so we could get the chance to see Halle Berry ham it up like the hammiest pantomime dame?
'This is for all the women of colour,' she blubbed unconvincingly, while I was sat shouting 'he's behind you' and waiting for Jim Davidson to come on as Buttons and start the song.
Even Sidney Poitier came on and made the sort of fawning, luvvie-speak acceptance speech that makes you want to kick in the TV.
The roll call of puffed-up luvvies in designer dress rolled on and on and on. By this stage steam was puffing out of my ears like a big old cartoon villain.
Leave it to the Brits: At least Jim Broadbent and Julian Fellowes looked as if they saw the ludicrousness of the whole thing and just pretended to be underwhelmed for a while.
Then as the parties started after the ceremony, Rosie Millard and some mad Yank woman with a big jaw from Vogue magazine started to analyse the couture, the haircuts and the shoes. Then I blew a gasket.
I began to shout: 'There's people dying of hunger in the world. Can't you see this is wrong? That it's immoral, that it's ridiculous. Why aren't you listening to me? Are you deaf? Argggghhh?'
And then I realised that sitting shouting about world hunger to the TV in the early hours of the morning is perhaps the most ridiculous aspect of Oscar viewing.

Poster Day

2010-02-17T21:30:00.001Z

AS part of my PhD I have to complete a poster which advertises and explains my thesis.
Any excuse to mess about on Quark....
Poster Day 2

The Mosquito Press in the Information Age

2010-02-15T00:57:00.000Z

I wrote this piece of Jason Walsh's brilliant Forth magazine

PS O’HEGARTY’s 1946 essay ‘The Mosquito Press’ in the The Bell declared that an interesting book could be written about the weekly and monthly journals which he says ‘festooned the Separatist, Sinn Féin and Irish Ireland’ movements since the days of Parnell. (1)

Much the same could be said for the modern multi-media era which has seen an explosion in new journals and websites dedicated to the cause of documenting the present and negotiating the future of republicanism in the age of the internet.
From traditional newspapers like Saoirse and An Phoblacht to magazines like Fourthwrite and The Hibernian, internet journals like The Blanket and blogs like Splintered Sunrise – it has been a golden age for Republican journalism and while this vibrant and sophisticated new media ecosphere has often slipped off the radar of the mainstream media, anyone making a concerted effort to nose around the Republican Sphere will know a more complete picture of Republicanism is available from the many and varied corners of the information super highway.
It is not in the council meetings or cummann gatherings that the next generation of Republican activists is going to come, but from the blogosphere and online media.
Mick Fealty, editor of Slugger O’Toole, esteemed political commentator and ringmaster general of the Irish political blogariat says it is interesting to note that the age of the Northern Ireland peace process has run concurrently with the age of internet and social media and that the two things may be inextricably linked (2), certainly the media in all its forms became a key terrain of political interaction from well before the signing of the Good Friday agreement.
From roots in the prison journalism of Long Kesh to the Bobby Sands Discussion Group, development in groups like the Irish Republican Writers Group and Fourthwrite through to the myriad of blogs, websites and YouTube Channels, a new republicanism has flourished in the modern age and provided a challenge to the official narratives of Sinn Féin.

Republicanism & journalism
My own interest in the Republican media sphere was first piqued as I started out three years ago on a part time PhD looking at the Framing of republicans in the media in the post-GFA era. With Holy Cross, the Northern Bank Robbery and the murder of Robert McCartney all fresh in the memory, I felt republicanism was at an interesting place in its own timeline and that for the first time in its modern history, it had some modicum of control in its relationships with the media. From the vantage point of Liverpool and a career in journalism, it appeared to me that with every day Sinn Féin’s journey from political pariahs to mainstream political players (3) represented a kind of political and media miracle those of us reading Liz Curtis in the 1990s could not have foretold.
It is also interesting to note that at the height of Sinn Féin’s 32 County Political arc (before Northern Bank and McCartney) and in the midst of this explosion in writing and comment, the Belfast Media Group thought it intellectually sustainable and economically viable to launch Daily Ireland at this time. It had many critics, but it did at least aim to give a voice to the many strands of republicanism.
However, the more I read the mainstream media the less I became interested in ‘Official Provisionalism’, with its attendant New Labour style affectations. Actually, that is terribly unfair to Sinn Féin which had barely put a foot wrong and which had embraced the possibilities of the internet and social media before other political parties – An Phoblacht was the first Irish Newspaper on the net.
Rather it was the ever developing sphere of Republican dissent that fascinated me - not the hammer throwers concerned with revisiting the tired rhetoric of armed struggle and the good old days of a triumphalist reading of War News in the Phoblacht. No, it was magazines like Fourthwrite and The Blanket which most interested me, thanks to the unusually high standard of journalism, comment and production values – three things that one cannot always count on in Irish Republican journalism.
It struck me that these magazines and a number of the early republican bloggers had become a new and logical progression of the Mosquito Press, buzzing around Sinn Féin, making pests of themselves and opening up the republican sphere again. I was also most interested in why republicans, in particular, consistently return to writing and journalism as a means of manifesting their politics.
O’Hegarty notes that ‘All movements, and all sections of movements, in a democratic age, appealing to ‘the people’, have found it necessary and advantageous to have a paper of some sort to put their points to the people.’ Borrowing the phrase ‘Mosquito Press’ from John Redmond, O’Hegarty’s contention is that the large number of often small circulation magazines buzzed around together in the cause of first Irish statehood and sovereignty in the face of the Home Rule movement. It also struck me that this new mix of old style magazines and newspapers, websites and bloggers was closer to the second wave of mosquito press which grew in the 20s and 30s after the establishment of the Free State and which was dominated by the Frank Ryan edited An Phoblacht. Caoilfhionn Ni Bheachain’s excellent 2007 journal article for Eire-Ireland ‘“The Mosquito Press”: Anti Imperialist Rhetoric in Republican Journalism,1926-39’ updates O’Hegarty and evokes the period quite beautifully for an academic journal. References to Saoirse, Wolfe Tone Weekly, An Phoblacht and Republican Review have clear parallels with the growth of activist journalism in Ireland today.

Activist Journalism
Fourthwrite, 10 years old and still covering Ireland and the world from the left, remains one of the best magazines of its kind in Britain and Ireland. Its world view is crucial to its success. Editor Tommy McKearney has left links forged across the world and as a result gets regular contributions coming from Nepal and Gaza. The magazine grew out of the Irish Republican Writers’ Group and despite allegations of intimidation from Sinn Féin (4) in the early days and a shift in emphasis after founder members Tommy Gorman and Anthony McIntyre left to start The Blanket, it has continued to plough a studious and honourable furrow. Academics have given much time and tortured deliberation to formulating definitions of citizen and activist journalism, in interviews, McKearney has given me a simple one. His writing is activism – he claims to have no literary intentions – and Fourthwrite is an extension of his political engagement.
Weekly internet magazine The Blanket, which began in 2001 under the editorship of Carrie Twomey, is a veritable treasure trove for modern day researchers and will doubtlessly become a valuable resource for historians in the future. Twomey’s husband Anthony McIntyre was lead writer on the The Blanket and his often provocative style saw his work get wider attention in the Guardian and the Los Angeles Times among others. The website ran for seven years and helped alter how modern, dissenting republicanism was perceived by the outside world. It felt it was important to give a voice to anyone who wanted to write for it - a stance born out of the intimidation Twomey, McIntyre and their friend Tommy Gorman received at the hands of Sinn Féin. By the end of its life it had Irish Daily Star columnist and committed evangelical Protestant John Coulter as an honourary blanket man. It could be said that the Blanket’s template was the irreverence and intelligence of The Bell as edited by Peadar O’Donnell rather than the dogmatism of the Provisional green book.
Twomey and McIntyre shut The Blanket in 2008, but McIntyre’s website The PensiveQuill, which he updates three times a week is the best site of its kind in Ireland or Britain. He has a talent for entertaining political commentary which would put many in the mainstream media to shame while his insider knowledge of the Republican movement makes him one of the most authoritative voices in opposition to Sinn Féin. His wicked sense of humour manifested itself wonderfully during the recent Iris Robinson affair with: “As for her young beau in all of this, in tackling Iris Robinson, Kirk McCambley might not have been imaginative but he was certainly courageous.”(5)
While Republican Sinn Féin’s Saoirse continues to land on the doormat once a month and the 32’s Sovereign Nation follows suit, the days of a party paper in those formats must soon be a thing of the past. With fixed costs of printing and distribution on the rise and dwindling numbers of activists to sell copies - the distribution model for the old activist paper must be under threat. Certainly éirígí made a conscious decision not to print a newspaper to sell at branch meetings because successive Sinn Féin ard fheiseanna made it apparent that papers are no longer self-financing and actually cost the party money.
Instead éirígí have made a conscious effort to be ‘more creative’ with the means of communicating with their public. Their website is excellent and it updated regularly with news and they have got a lot of respect for their ability to react quickly to events. They have also garnered headlines and made inroads into the Irish political life thanks to publicity stunts like the rebranding Starbucks and eye catching election material like the Sex Pistols-inspired Lisbon No vote poster from 2009.
Also on the Republican left are blogs like the 26 Counties-based Cedar Lounge Revolution and Sinn Féin Keep Left who have socialist republicanism at heart rather than the other way around. They are tremendously interesting sites as they really signpost the gap between both Sinn Féin in the South and the left and the overall gap between parties on both sides of the border.
Anyone wishing to waste several days looking at the artefacts of the Irish Left should get along to its Irish Left Online Document Archive. These are interesting sites because they evidence the split personality of Republicanism as Sinn Féin in the north drifts to the centre and slowly disintegrates in the south.
The peerless Spintered Sunrise, a Belfast-based left wing Republican blogger who manages to mix examinations of both identities with an occasional foray into the world’s of glamour models and pornography. What sets Splints aside is a brilliantly entertaining writing style and an encyclopaedic knowledge of the left and Republicanism. He (she?) is up for an Orwell Award at the minute, so get along and cast your vote.
In the blogosphere the myriad forms of republican Catholicism are given room to have their say. South Armagh man Chris Gaskin’s Balrog up until quite recently did a fine job of explaining the catholic Republican identity. And if I am positing the theory that the new media ecosphere allows for all voices marginalised to be heard, then special mention needs to be made at this point of the Hibernian Magazine edited by Gerry McGeough.
While republicanism was at the heart of the magazine’s ethos, it was more concerned with recovering a right wing, Catholic Ireland which McGeough felt had been lost with Sinn Féin’s embracement of the left and the growing secularism in the 32 Counties. It is true that The Hibernian did reflect a core older, grass roots Republicanism both in rural Ireland and in the emigrant communities of the USA, especially with the tagline ‘For Faith, Family and Country’. It ran until late 2008 for more than two years on an editorial diet of faith and new world order-style conspiracy theory which often saw it derided, but it was tremendously well designed for a Republican publication and perhaps the most professional of any of the hard copy formats available recently.
What would O’Hegarty make of all this? Well he makes mention of WP Ryan, editor of Peasant and Nation between 1907-1910, and describes the editor as having ‘in him a mixtre of Theosophy, Paganism, Celtic Mythology, Socialism and Modernistic Collectivisim,’ which looking back over the last 10 years is a mix that has yet to find foothold on the internet – who’s going to be the first?
-----

1. PS O’Hegarty, ‘The Mosquito Press’, The Bell, April 1946, Vol 12, No1
2. Mick Fealty, ‘Slugger O’Toole’: The New Media as Track Two Diplomacy’, Public Diplomacy, Cultural Interventions & the Peace Process in
Northern Ireland: Track Two to Peace?
3. Graham Spencer, ‘Sinn Féin and the Media in Northern Ireland: The New Terrain of Policy Articulation’, Irish Political Studies, Volume 21, Number 3, September 2006
4. Anthony McIntyre, ‘The Irish Republican Writers Group and the battle for new ideas’, HYPERLINK “http://www.socialistdemocracy.org” http://www.socialistdemocracy.org
5. The Pensive Quill, ‘The Iris Virus’, Jan 7, 2010

My Night with Mark Kermode

2010-02-15T00:50:00.002Z

I wrote this for Jason Walsh's brilliant online magazine Forth

IN an age of thumbs up/ thumbs down two word reviews and ‘all the news in one minute’, there is greater manifest need for a critic as preternaturally gifted as BBC film reviewer Dr Mark Kermode. (pictured right)

Having cut himself a sizeable niche in the world of film reviewing through his chart topping and recently expanded BBC Radio 5 Live podcast with Simon Mayo (left), his star has been on the rise recently thanks to a growing portfolio of regular gigs on News 24 and BBC2’s The Culture Show.

Now with almost all of the BBC’s film output annexed for himself, he has just embarked upon a tour of the art house cinemas of Britain to publicise his new book of cinematic memoirs, ‘It’s Only a Movie’.

For anyone who knows Kermode’s sincere, geeky fan boy style, the book is more of the same, in fact for those who have followed his work with Mayo, many of the stories have been heard more than once before. But it really doesn’t detract from a wonderful read.

This is because almost uniquely among modern reviewers, when interviewing the stars of films he doesn’t like he doesn’t hold back from telling them so. So, as result, in the book and on stage we get the story of how Helen Mirren hand bagged him at the BAFTAs for saying ‘The Queen’ was a TV film rather than a ‘real film’ and the hilarious spectacle of Kermode being forced to chase a huffing Nick Broomfield down the road with a portable mic after the documentarian stormed out of an interview promoting ‘Kurt & Courtney’ after the good doctor had told him it was ‘a horlicks of a film’. As he pointed out at his live performance in Liverpool’s FACT centre on Thursday, the whole episode was utterly ironic given the amount of time Broomfield had spent in his own career hounding people with recording equipment.

In the live environment an hour of his choicest yarns are enlivened by the fact that he has the genuine charisma of a great performer. Although essentially a superannuated signing session in front of confirmed fans for whom he didn’t have to work too hard to get laughs, Kermode had some great gags to go with his sardonic reflections.

He began with his filmed metallic thump-laden review of ‘Transformers 2’ - the first film review which doesn’t require words and ended with a tribute to Duncan Jones’ 2009 sci-fi film ‘Moon’ played on the Stylophone.

By far the funniest bits of the live show are his recounting of Werner Herzog being shot in LA while being interviewed on camera by Kermode, along with his recreation of mega blockbuster ‘Avatar’ with three Smurfs on a coat hanger and a big stick. Behind it all was Kermode’s disgust at the sanctimony of James Cameron’s script and the swindle that he believes 3D is.

Kermode is often at his most memorable when he is angry about the cinematic fayre he is served – in the books we get a full explanation of his now legendary 15 minute tirade against the second ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’ movie which became a You Tube hit and just what he thinks about the films of Gore Verbinsky’s ‘Pirates’ franchise as a job lot: ‘They should be buried in a very deep hole where they can never bother anyone ever again’

When he doesn’t like something he really hates it – ‘Breaking the Waves’ and ‘The Big Lebowski’ are like finger nails on a blackboard, but when he loves something then it is heaped with praise – ‘Mary Poppins’ is transcendent and proof of God’s existence and has the best 28 frames of all cinema. ‘Planet of the Apes’ is a political tract by which Kermode says he has lived his life, ‘Shawshank Redemption’ is a religious document with clear biblical parallels that, as it turns out, not even the writer knew it had.

As ever ‘The Exorcist’, the movie which changed his life (and has almost been a life’s work for him) gets wonderful treatment on stage and in the book. His first full viewing of it five years after seeing the trailer really crackles in print: “The first viewing passed in an almost orgasmic whirl of fear, and remains one of the most genuinely transcendent experiences of my life. Rarely have I been more aware of being alive and in the moment...’ Where else do you see that kind of enthusiasm in arts criticism?

In person and on radio or TV, Kermode is witty man, a passionate critic and a tremendous raconteur ready with some of those often very poor impressions for which he is rightly upbraided by Mayo on a weekly basis (his Quentin Tarantino and Woody Allen are almost indistinguishable). He gladly accepts charges of arrogance and sometimes of art house elitism, but what shines out is his commitment to promoting cinema as an art form and not simply as entertainment.

* Mark Kermode's ‘It’s Only a Movie’ is available from Random House Books

Podcast No 3: Kasabian, Lady Gaga and booting the life out of Peter Guy

2010-02-13T00:01:00.000Z

On location in Holywood, County Down
ME, student journalist Rosanna Hynes and Word Magazine writer Jamie Bowman got together on Thursday afternoon to rebut some of the vicious tirades of fellow Liverpool music journalist Peter Guy about pop.
Peter says music magazines are dull because they don't cover new female or black artists and we are square for reading them.
In fairness to Peter, he is one of the most enthusiastic music writers working anywhere and his blog, Get Into This, is a superb, vibrant and bloody well written one. And we are going to get him in a room to fight his own corner in a couple of weeks.
Still, didn't stop us figuratively kicking the life out of him. See what you think.
We take in how Lady Gaga sounds like cheesy French Euro Pop, how Kasabian have been annointed as the Nuts magazine's perfect version of laddishness and one panelist uses the words 'My dad's Dead Kennedy's records.' Brilliant.
Next week, comedy great Gary Morris of the peerless surrealists Slaughterhouse Live.

Podcast No 2: Steve Gribbin on how to do comedy incredibly well

2010-02-05T00:47:00.000Z

IN many ways the only reason I ever wanted to write comedy, or write about it, is because of Steve Gribbin.
When I first head or saw 'alternative comedy' on TV or on the radio it was people like Ben Elton or Will Durst who I was really into. They were political and funny and satiric and vitriolic and chimed with the kind of political atmosphere I lived in.
I bought Ben Elton albums from Golden Discs in Belfast and taped George Carlin and Richard Pryor records from the library in Craigavon and taped as much of Friday Night and Saturday Night Live as I could.
Soon after, during Rag Week 1991 ( I think), I bunked into a brilliant show at Queens University Students' Union in Belfast with Mark Thomas, Brenda Gilhooley and Skint Video on the bill. I was solid gone to quote Balloo the bear.

Skint Video were Steve Gribbin and Brian Mulligan and they played musical parodies and political songs and I thought they were brilliant. They were on the Mary Whitehouse Experience on Radio 1 and popped up a bit on whatever wee bits of network radio and TV we got in Northern Ireland. I taped all of it, unfortunately in a frenzy of nest building 10 years ago, before the age of MP3 conversion, most of the cassettes went into Sefton Meadows tip in Maghull.
Then about eight years ago I was the de facto comedy writer for the Liverpool ECHO and saw Steve again at the Best of Liverpool gala show which traditionally finishes the Liverpool Comedy Festival. And he blew me away again doing political comedy to an audience which would have settled for girls in pyjamas gags.
In a bid to raise the profile of the brilliant Liverpool comedy club, Rawhide, I interviewed Steve prior to one of his regular headline sets. We hit it off and have been mates since.
Despite the narrowing of the stand-up canon in the clubs where comics can get away with tawdry observationalism, Steve still batters away with his angry, musical satire - blowing the roofs off clubs all across Britain and Ireland.
We've co-written a couple of his shows since and in writing with him you get a sense of what really works in a club. In this podcast we have talked about the nature of doing comedy, Steve's influences and why Elvis Costello and Alexei Sayle are his great idols.
It's 54 minutes long - but I am not going to make it easy for you - but it's all killer no filler and a couple of times it may be libellous.
Sorry about the levels on the songs, it distorts a bit, but this is a great insight into how a top comedian goes about his business.
Please leave a comment at the end tell us what you liked and disliked.

Sometimes words are not required

2010-02-04T21:25:00.000Z

THE good doctor's review of Transformers 2 is more eloquent and articulate than any of the thousands of words written about the Michael Bay blockbuster.

REVIEW: Steve Gribbin at The Slaughterhouse

2010-01-31T01:17:00.002Z

Disclaimer: Both the comic and promoter of the gig are very good friends of mine. It doesn't cloud my judgement.

SOMETIMES when you are as dull as me, having seen hundreds of live comedy shows, rather than concentrating solely on the stage it's really more interesting to observe what a great comic on his game can do to a room of people.
Tonight Steve Gribbin (right), in just 25 minutes, ripped the roof off one of the best comedy clubs in the world - the Slaughterhouse in Liverpool - and he did so not with mainstream material but with a set chock full of satiric songs on politics and religion.
From the Westminster expenses scandal, to the Catholic Church's Sex Guide to a very blue, but top class gag about Iris Robinson, it was an incredible illustration of how, if you challenge people to think about something other than banal observational rubbish, they can and will.
And he had people stomping and shouting. He had two glammed-up Scouse birds near the stage bouncing in their seats in something akin to ecstasy, holding their mouths to stop themselves spitting vodka and coke over the stage. One oul lad near me spewed beer over his mate and the hardest knock I've ever seen at a comedy gig was crying with laughter like a wee fella and bruising mates' shoulders with punches signposting each punchline.
But the point is that no other art form, when done this well, has the same incendiary effect on a room full of people from disparate backgrounds as great stand-up comedy in a club.
There may be mass hysteria at rock gigs, or even some touring comedy in theatres, but most of those people are there for the band they all like or the comedian they have seen on TV. A comic playing a four man bill, has to have the material, experience and chops to rip the roof off a club like Gribbin did tonight. To do it doing political comedy makes it all the more memorable.
Now, Merseysiders are more tribal than many other British city/ region states, but when Gribbin played what he bills as the 'first ever authentic Scouse hip hop song' 'City of Culture' the room went understandably nuts. The reaction to a verse which uses the shortened slang cozzy (swimming costume) mozzy (mosquito), gozzy (cross eyed) and hozzie (hospital) was ridiculous.
Just looking at what great comedy does to a room of people is tremendously heartening - I just wonder why more people don't spend a tenner and do it more often. It really is the best night there is to be had anywhere in entertainment. You have booze (should you wish) in your hand and someone whose raison d'etre is to make you laugh your ass off - it's a no brainer.
And special mention has to be made for the efforts of the compere Neil Fitzmaurice and promoter Paula Harrington. A small cellar room like the Slaughterhouse with low ceilings and the stage inches from the front row is tailor made for a good night. But, club comedy only works when genuine care is taken in choosing bills and making sure it is run properly.
Fitzmaurice, a Phoenix Nights star/ writer and Peep Show cast member, who came up back in the day in the recent late 1990s heyday of Manchester comedy (Peter Key, Dave Spikey and Daniel Kitson) is a great home town compere. He's so charming and bullet proof as a compere he could have got the Davros economic summit rocking this weekend in Austria.
Harrington's bills, which see comics able to double up with another night nearby in the Slug and Lettuce pub, see big name club comics coming to Liverpool again. She must take some credit for curating a tremendous club and I mean curating in the most pretentious way imaginable.
But, ultimately, it really was all about Gribbin. It takes years of experience and a real eye for what works in a club to make political material 'kill' in the age of mainstream mediocrities like Michael McIntyre and Jimmy Carr.
Tonight, I wish a Radio 4 or Mock the Week producer had been in the audience because this is how it really should be done. It was clever, savage political comedy, true to the roots of the modern movement and which moved people to question the powers of their own urinary tracts. i.e. They nearly pissed themselves.
Knowing Steve Gribbin has not clouded my judgement - it was heartening, tremendous fun. To hear more, come back to Gobshites this Thursday to hear a two part podcast with the man himself where he talks about the art of writing comedy and listen to him play a couple of exclusive songs.

The Trestles: Exclusive Tracks Part 2

2010-01-30T00:21:00.002Z

THIS IS the second exclusive track from the forthcoming album from The Trestles, subject of our new weekly podcast on Thursday.
This track is called 'The Civilised' and don't forget to get along to the Zanzibar tonight (Saturday, January 30) for their latest gig. £3 on the door - sweet, la.

Podcast No 1 Follow-up: Exclusive Trestles tracks

2010-01-29T15:15:00.009Z

THIS is the first of a couple of exclusive tracks off The Trestles new, and as yet unfinished, album. You lucky people, as someone used to say.
They play Liverpool's Zanzibar Club in Seel Street tomorrow night (Saturday, January 30) and with tickets a paltry £3 on the door you must get down there and see a great live act. Their next Liverpool date is not until the end of February, so get along.
Get over to their myspace or Facebook groups to keep up with the tonnes of news emanating from Casa Trestles. The first track is 'A Drink of Water' the second, 'The Civilised' will available here tomorrow.

Podcast No 1: Trestles table a motion for change

2010-01-28T20:57:00.002Z

THE Al O'Hare fronted Liverpool four piece The Trestles are pretty unusual for a modern Scouse band.
Eschewing nearly three generations' commitment to the faux mystical by the permanently stoned, the Trestles are dedicated to an old fashioned rock and politics manifesto which kind of sets them apart on the local scene.
Instead of looking at a mix of Beefheart and the Beatles for their inspiration, they look to the spiritual twilight of Celtic soul-era Van Morrison and raw early period Springsteen for their key influence. A hefty dose of Oasis-style working class pride also seeps through - it's no surprise given how O'Hare delights in declaring his love for the Gallagher's peerless first record, Definitely Maybe.

The key to understanding The Trestles is their fearsome live reputation and it's clear that the work ethic of Spingsteen underpins the whole shooting match.Theirs is classic, sincere, emotional, human rock and the lack of skinny jeaned/ floppy fringed cool is somewhat refreshing in the era of identikit Scallydellic rock. The Clash (particularly Joe Strummer), Neil Young and Christy Moore all leave their mark on either O'Hare's lyrics or the overall sound of the band.

You can see them on Saturday night, January 30th, at Liverpool's wonderful Zanzibar Club on Seel Street and for £3 on the door it's an absolute steal.

They play the hipster hangout Korova in early February and as soon as their album is complete a raft of dates are promised and we'll do a review when it appears.

Scouser O'Hare (above right), a music journalist in his day job, joined forces with North Wales guitarist Tom Carroll (left) two years ago and the partnership is bearing fruit, first in the form of last year's Hard Faced Town EP and with the forthcoming 10 track long player we chat about in their interview.
The first single with the songs 'The Civilised' and 'Drink of Water' are available over on their mySpace page. I'll pop them up here tomorrow as a sneak preview of the gig.

I went along to Al's gaff, appropriately enough in the Penny Lane area of Liverpool, and we chatted for nearly two hours - 40 minutes of which have become the inaugural some might say premier GM podcast.

Al's going to join GM for a regular music podcast over coming months so let us know about what you think and we'll have a chat about it.

Shining a light on Northern Ireland: Splintered Sunrise

2010-01-21T00:34:00.000Z

SPLINTERED SUNRISE is a blogger from the North of Ireland writing some of the most perceptive articles about the Province/ Occupied Six (delete where not applicable) anywhere in the media.
He is one of the clutch of Republican and/or left wing bloggers whose work makes up a vibrant section of the new media eco-sphere in Northern Ireland and one that is frequently neglected by the mainstream news outlets for a variety of contentious and uncontroversial reasons.
It's well written, funny, perceptive, iconoclastic and irreverent and says much about the wider political climate of Northern Ireland (see BBC NI style guide at work there) that traditional journalism doesn't or can't.
It's been a tremendous help to me in my doctoral studies into dissident and/ or dissenting Republicanism and one of the few that has combined this sphere of politics with a picture of Lucy Pinder in her finery. Bonus.
Splints is entered for the Orwell Prize for political writing, please get along and see why it's one of the best blogs anywhere in the world. The 10 blog posts entered for the prize are superb pieces of writing the best of which being on Republican geography.

A Liddle of what Lebedev fancies might not go a long way

2010-01-20T00:21:00.004Z

Another piece of I have written for Jason Walsh's brilliant Forth.ie web magazine

THE news that Islamophobic, climate change-denying, radical anti-feminist and self-proclaimed sectarian columnist Rod Liddle is first choice to take the editorial reins at Britain’s Independent newspaper might at first sight be the kind of storm in the liberal intelligentsia teacup the man himself loves bashing most.
As a Sunday Times and Spectator columnist, Liddle has manufactured a successful niche as the ‘go to’ gobshite for knee-jerk right wing cack since his resignation from the editorship of BBC Radio 4’s flagship morning news programme Today in 2002.
In the intervening time he has accused radical feminism of leaving Britain with a generation of single mothers, confessed to being a fan of Rangers football club on purely sectarian grounds and decried climate change evidence on the basis that it’s snowing where he lives.
However, in the last weeks of 2009 he hit the controversialist trail with a vengeance and with the kind of brass neck which, to borrow a phrase from Hunter S Thompson, would even have seen Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck and the assorted loons at Fox News standing behind him whistling and revolving fingers around their temples in the international sign of the fruit loop.
On his Spectator blog in November he first accused Celtic fans of singing rebel songs during the minute silence for Remembrance Day inside the ground at Falkirk. The song - ill-advisedly - sung was actually about Aidan McAnespie and was being sung outside the ground by a small number of hammer throwers that follow the club (that I, incidentally, support). Ultimately, it set a record for getting things wrong in only two paragraphs.
But trump this poorly reported and ill-judged nonsense he could, first with a piece (right) which sensitively opened with: ‘Time for a quick update on what the Muslim savages are up to.’ It’s not exactly up there with the great opening pars of credible journalism but could be argued to fit with the sensitivities of those who frequent the blog of the Spectator.
However, he then out did it with a piece written from his rented rural 18th Century Wiltshire farmhouse which erroneously stated that the legacy of unfettered immigration has led to the majority of serious crime in London being perpetrated by young black men of African and/ or Caribbean origin. As one poster to the forum of The Word magazine said: ‘Say what you want about Rod Liddle, but he never makes life easy for himself.’
All three pieces illustrated the hysterical short form opinionated rubbish which is beginning to characterise the blogosphere of supposed prestigious news organisations.
The template seems to be: get a rent-a-gub and give them free rein to antagonise sections of the public and then revel in the shit storm of even more tedious rebuttals/ agreements which sink to the same low of the original post all the while garnering thousands of unique page visitors and whatever online ad revenue they may accrue . It couldn’t be further away from the high minded narratives of the democratic role of the media which has buttressed generations of journalism ideology.
But there are other reasons to oppose Liddle as editor of the Indie.
One is that, although bearing a name which evokes a cut price German grocer, Liddle has skilfully become a kind of Waitrose or Browne Thomas version of Richard Littlejohn - the Daily Mail’s Tesco own brand faux working class, anti-intellectual, right wing, elf and safety Nazi baiting, firebrand loon.
The only difference between the two is that Liddle rarely publishes apologies, Littlejohn has the grace to commit many to print.
Liddle may write for the prestigious old journalism marques of the Speccie and The Times, but his shtick is of the decidedly new school, disingenuous sub-White Van Man variety.
It’s the kind of cack which sees Jeremy Clarkson qualified to denounce literally anything that he may perceive to be liberal, lefty or intellectual. Theirs is a damaging baggage of cultural inverted snobbery writ large and prospering in a national media, which in an era of declining sales, hits the outrage button rather too easily.
So why has any of this anything to do with the Independent? Well, the Indie for many of its faults (overwhelmingly metropolitan, steadfastly high brow, often boring and humourless) is still a newspaper which tries to do the right thing journalistically. It’s stoic in its centrism and tries to give a voice to as many commentators from across the political divide as possible – it brings together columnists as diametrically opposed as the right winger Bruce Anderson, the multi-culturalist Yasmin Alhibai-Brown and the incorrigibly left wing comedian Mark Steel. A Liddle-helmed Independent would perhaps challenge that ethos and we in Britain would be worse off for it.
Why? Well, despite declining sales (less than 100k at full price, currently), the Indie is one of only three national papers without a Tory bias. We seem to have reverted to the dark days in British journalism that the academic and author Jeremy Tunstall pointed to in his wonderful book Newspaper Power in 1996. He illustrated that by the mid 1990s, despite there being only a few points between the Tories and Labour, the press was 72% Tory leaning (in terms of daily and Sunday sales).
A perpetuation of that kind of narrow political discourse is even more damaging in the current era of media feeding frenzy when the broadcast organisations slavishly comment on the agendas of the print sector.
Getting Liddle in to edit the Indie (however small the circulation) may see a further homogenisation of the political comment available in Britain. It’ll either send Indie readers scurrying to the blogosphere where their voices will become lost in a cacophony of hysterical spleen venting or, more damagingly, they’ll just do what many others have done which is to simply switch off. In the long-term, despite possible short term gains, it will further diminish the power of news organisations to set a rational agenda.
Right, I’m off to attack a Muslim terrorist humming Sean South ushering in Sharia law by writing a fact-free two par blog entry. Post your replies...

John Lydon Culture Show Special

2010-01-10T23:33:00.001Z

FOR all Gobshites outside of the UK and the reach of the BBC iPlayer, the brilliant Culture Show Special interview with John Lydon by Andrew Graham Dixon, the latter of who has been much eulogised around this here parish.

Untitled from Gobshites Miscellany on Vimeo.

The original treatment for The Wire by David Simon

2009-12-31T00:47:00.000Z

THANKS to Sean from the Soul of Man blog (listed here) for finding this, the original treatment for The Wire submitted to HBO and written by David Simon.

It's incredible.

I'll write more about it over the next few days.

All the best and happy new year Gobshites.

The Wire - Bible height="500" width="100%" > value="http://d1.scribdassets.com/ScribdViewer.swf?document_id=24633298&access_key=key-ef2zcghgzrk8o70nofw&page=1&version=1&viewMode=list">

The (potential) death of British Comedy: Part II

2009-12-23T23:43:00.000Z

This is the second part of the series I am doing for Jason Walsh and his web magazine Forth

'That ginger chavvy gypo looks a bit rapey and his nan smells of piss'

AMID the weeping and gnashing of teeth last weekend that we (er, that’ll be ‘you’ - d) got some agents wrong in our doom laden critique of modern British comedy, what could easily be discerned from the replies received is the fact that many people agree that modern comics are slowly beginning the slide towards the narrow mainstream they once felt duty bound to avoid.

There has in the later years of this decade been a gradual reversion towards the casual sexism and racism that alternative comedy sought to banish and which were the cornerstones of the ‘old comedy’.

Now as we finish the noughties and run headlong into whatever the 2010s are going to be called we can now do gags about rape and incest and race as long as we pick the socially acceptable groups it is OK for Jimmy Carr and his mob to take the piss out of. It’s OK, because it is either a case of a) hey, it’s just a joke, dude; b) we’re only being ironic or in the worst justifications - a mixture of both.

Again, the finger has to point squarely at those headline comics making mucho hay while the TV sun shines on Mock the Week or Argumental or whatever.
Step forward Frankie Boyle and his Daily Mail baiting gag about the Queen’s pussy being haunted, step forward Russell Howard and your morally objectionable use of the word rapey and more prominently step forward Jimmy Carr and the legion of paedophilia and rape gags which you can pass off as ‘ironic’.

Where once the comedic pioneers like Lenny Bruce (right) or George Carlin genuinely said the unsayable in a bid to change the morality of their times, now we have naughty schoolboys simply saying that which shouldn’t be said in the first place.

A telling example of how far our standards have dropped is the Facebook fan page for Carr the most striking gag of which is, "You know a girl's too young for you, if you have to make a train noise to get your cock in her mouth." That appears three times on the page to the merriment of those posting there.

Another: ‘Childhood obesity sends a very mixed message to paedophiles, sure they’re easier to catch but who wants to fiddle with a fatty?’ is just wrong on any number of levels. It’s not clever and only really genuinely ironic in a debased, unattached way.

As a disillusioned comedian friend said to me on Friday, comics should do these gags only if they can actually justify them. Face up victims and justify them. They can’t and that is not me or my mate being po-faced, intellectual or clever.

And standards have dropped – that’s a judgement call and I’m making it right here.
Telling rape and paedophilia gags doesn’t offer anything to the reassessment of morality or social mores, it just narrows the intellectual gene pool of comedy and short changes a generation of punters.
If all they are being served is Frankie Boyle talking about the Queens genitals, then they have no measuring stick to gauge what is good, bad or acceptable. Worse still they’ll not see the great comedy which leaves a mark on its society.

If we do a pull back and reveal of modern comedy we see the groups that is OK to have a go at now – the new comedy clichés if you will. Rape and incest victims get them honking in the aisles as we have seen, while chavs and ginger haired people are fair game too. The Welsh have replaced us Irish as the ‘race’ group it’s OK to slag and Scousers and Geordies are never far off the comedic radar. Middle class Christians take a right shoeing but by far the funniest group on the planet to these comedians are those with disabilities, Jaysus, we can all have a right larf at Stephen Hawking and his mates in wheelchairs.

Don’t get me wrong, to quote Hunter Thompson, I think we should be beating the clergy like dogs with mange – it’s just that all of these targets are just easy.
It takes no work or skill to have a dig at these – I want these comics to have a go at radical Muslim clerics while in a mosque or beat down a Mossad operative’s heckles by saying he’s a bit puffy. If you are going to be edgy then do something that is genuinely dangerous. Test the courage of your convictions.

Before the shout goes up that what is being suggested here is some kind of middle class, left wing, New Labour, tofu munching right-on censorship – it is anything but. As Will Durst, America’s premier satirist said recently, the left has the sense of humour of an end table. Their critiques are to be avoided at all costs.

Stewart Lee has emerged as the leader of a new generation of comics opposed to the Carr/ Howard/ Boyle consensus, it’s just that the phalanx of cerebral acts aren’t particularly that funny.
While Lee is funny and clever while being guilty of the charge of sanctimony, Josie Long or Robin Ince are always clever but just not that funny. They’ll take their quirky Edinburgh style shows, so beloved of the critics, to the art centres and one night stands and all concerned will simultaneously perform an intellectual circle jerk while patting one another on the back for not being Michael McIntyre.

The tragedy is that if you go out into clubs and look at the comedians doing genuine satire and struggling to get their acts noticed amid these two camps of comedy de nos jours, there’s little likelihood of this getting any better before it gets a whole lot worse on both sides.

Joe Strummer RIP

2009-12-22T01:26:00.000Z

JOE Strummer is seven years dead today, and we are much worse for it.
No one pop star ever touched me more than Strummage and never a week goes by without listening to The Clash or his four 'solo' albums.
I wrote this interview a month prior to his death for the Liverpool ECHO.
It's a rubbish interview because I was overawed speaking to a hero, I hope I did him justice. He even phoned me a day later to make sure I had got the pictures his wife was sending for it. I was feeding our daughter Ella her brekkie when I took the call, I dropped Weetabix all over the floor.
All the best, Joe.

Liverpool ECHO, November 22, 2002
THE voice is as enthusiastic and passionate as it ever was, the beliefs as idealistic as they ever were.
Joe Strummer's back in town and he ain't changed a bit.
Leader of punk deities the Clash, musical pioneer, political idealist and doting father, Strummer remains undimmed by the slings and arrows of 25 years outrageous fortune in the music industry.
And, excited punk rock pop pickers, he's heading our way.
On the phone from his West Country home, the man born John Mellor in Turkey 50 years ago is looking forward to coming back to Liverpool, a city which took the Clash to its bosom like no other.
But more of the nostalgia later. This time he's bringing his band, the Mescaleros, back to town next Friday at Liverpool University's small but perfectly formed Stanley theatre.
This is the story so far.
Strummer and his young band have recorded a couple of critically acclaimed albums (Pop Art And The X-Ray Style from 1999 and last year's Global A Go-Go) and won rave live reviews since the great man came back from nearly a decade of self-imposed showbiz exile three years ago.
They rip through a handful of Clash classics every night and augment these punk favourites with the best tracks from the two albums, as well as throwing in the odd new song or reggae cover.
And how would you describe the new songs?
Well, deep breath now, it's an interesting mixture of pop, blues, reggae, dance dub and African jive.
It's infectious and irresistible for anyone with a passing interest in quality sounds.
This time around they are hitting the university with the intention of honing a set ready for recording a new album early in the New Year.
Cue Joe, rapping quickly and enthusiastically about the vibe in the band.
He says: "We were out in Japan and America and we were really rocking, blowing crowds away with the new songs. So I wanted to get it back out on the road again and bash the songs out and make them stronger before we get in to the studio.
"The new songs are mutating, and becoming more human because we are banging them out without fussing.
"Playing live is a part of the process; we aren't interested in making something pristine, we want to bash the songs out before we get into the studio.
"But what I have learned is that when you are on a roll like this and the vibe is right you have to keep riding it; the only time we ever managed to do it before was with (legendary Clash triple album) Sandinista."
Clang! That there, folks, is the sound of the Clash name being dropped, and it's a musical legacy you can't ignore when interviewing the great one.
Liverpool loves him and he loves us. Heck, Liverpool is practically home territory for Strummer, who made his long-awaited return to the stage at a legendary show at the now closed Cumberland Street venue the Lomax in 1999.
But for many an ex-punk about town, a Clash show at Eric's in 1978 was the high water mark for both the band and the movement.
Joe adds: "We had some great shows in Eric's where it really went off, they were brilliant nights where we really rocked the house.
"We loved Eric's and loved playing Liverpool."
In fact Eric's in 1978 can claim to be the most packed show of all time - the club only held a couple of hundred people, but up to 10,000 claim to have been present.
Despite these nostalgic waxings there was no place for the Clash on the cheap TV celebrations of the 25th anniversary of the birth of British punk.
As middle-aged men and women rehashed a quarter of a century-old anecdotes, Strummer and his band mates Mick Jones, Topper Headon and Paul Simenon kept a dignified silence.
Strummer simply says: "That's all false memory syndrome. I don't want to look back, I want to keep going forward, I still have something to say to people.
"I don't want to be seen as one of the Searchers, doing the same things over and over again.
But until then, I'll just keep going."
There is no chance of a potentially multi-million dollar reunion of the Clash, but they are still the band most revered by the current crop of garage groups.
On top this of their 1979 classic London Calling has been voted one of the top 10 singles of all time by music bible NME.
Joe says: "That's better than money or anything else in this job - that's respect, the fact that these great bands acknowledge a debt to us. That's fantastic."
So that's Joe , punk rock Godfather and a man of the people.
* Joe Strummer and the Mescaleros, Stanley Theatre, Liverpool University, Friday, November 22.

Preview of things to come... that's a preview then

2009-12-18T22:00:00.002Z

AND ANOTHER this time in the style of everyone' favourite newspaper, The Sunday World.
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Have I Got Never Mind the QICocks for You?

2009-12-18T20:16:00.001Z

HERE ARE some magazine pages online. Just hit the tile button on the bottom Scrbd toobar to view them as they were intended - as a double spread of the recent story I did for Jason Walsh at Forth magazine.

GM Britcomedy Layout 1

Have I Got Nevermind Mock the QICocks For You?: The death of British comedy

2009-12-13T01:55:00.004Z

I wrote this piece for the Irish online magazine Forth edited by JASON WALSH

A CASUAL glance at the listings pages of the posh papers tells you everything that you need to know about the current state of stand-up comedy in

Britain

With Russell Howard playing the 10,000 seater enormo arenas of major cities, Jimmy Carr on an endless profit haemorrhaging tour of the big theatres and Michael McIntyre currently colonising the top of the DVD sales chart, you could be forgiven for thinking that the Mickey Mainstreams are taking over.

But look more closely at the case of McIntyre and you will see the invidious dead hand of a two factors: the power of homogenous, constantly on repeat TV panel shows and a couple of agencies who can now make or break stars at will.

McIntyre, Howard, Carr, Frankie Boyle, Reginald D Hunter and Mark Watson are standing testament to the power of Mock the Week, QI and Never Mind the Buzzcocks to break comedians in the modern age. The problem is that the personae they adopt on these shows becomes the one that the audience wants and what is left is a terribly narrow set of comedic styles. And there’s the rub, the comedic canon gets narrowed to such an extreme that there are few genuinely challenging voices allowed entrance to this boys club.

Also if you look at the profiles of the acts currently at the top of British and Irish comedy one can see the power a couple of super agencies wield. Carr, Dara O’Briain, McIntyre, Bill Bailey, Sean Locke, Boyle, Rich Hall, Mark Watson, Phill Jupitus, Jonathon Ross and Alan Carr all come from Off the Kerb, which can often provide whole panels for the game shows. Avalon with Harry Hill, Frank Skinner and Al Murray etc are equally as powerful, particularly on ITV.

With the comedy circuit contracting in Britain due to savage licensing laws, the high cost of selling booze in expensive city centre properties and dwindling recession-hit audiences, there aren’t many opportunities to break the big time from the clubs. Acts here tailor their sets in the hope of getting noticed for TV and then the vicious circle is closed. The homogenous line of faux angry men and banal observationalists continues.

Boyle’s just such a reductive case in point. The often savage, let’s see how far we can go style which fits the short form of the panel games has become elongated for the live environment.

His shtick is unimaginably weak:

Feedline: ‘Yadda yadda (insert famous person’s name here) yadda yadda.’ (Go up a wee bit at the end)

Punchline: ‘That’s like yadda yadda fucking yadda (lewd sex act reference here) yadda.’

Two hours in Boyle’s company is a spirit sapping experience which leaves you wondering if there is anything positive to say in his world.

And while Carr and Boyle may be the apotheosis of the lewd Daily Mail baiting comedic class then McIntyre follows in a line of banal ‘You ever noticed...’ merchants who can also peddle a fine line of crap British nostalgia. You know the type ‘Space hoppers, what were they all about? Remember Spangles?’ ad nauseum.

Peter Kay, who has just sold a quizillion tickets in two minutes for a huge tour of the arenas of Britain in 2011, is the man to blame for this strand of modern British comedic mush.

While Phoenix Nights was genuinely funny in its first series, Kay couldn’t help but milk it dry with the painful Max and Paddy TV series and the more painfully dreadful X Factor skit last Christmas. He even coined it in with a tour which thumbed it nose at the audience by being called ‘Mum Wants a Bunglow Tour.’

His recent chat show appearances have shown just how threadbare his act has become, talking about Matey bubble bath on the Jonathon Ross TV show with that salt of the earth Northern irony that has become the shtick with which we should gleefully beat him with.

Another comic who worked (and financially fell out) with Kay says he witnessed a genuinely dispiriting evening watching the rotund Boltonian’s best mate (and luckiest man in comedy) Paddy McGuinness playing a big theatre in Manchester. As the braying masses roared with glee, McGuinness did observational gags about having a piss in the shower. That’s how far the whole sorry mess of alternative comedy has fallen.

And perhaps a measure of how far off the radar of modern comedy that irony has fallen is watching Al Murray doing the pub landlord arena show. Thousands turn up to see him to do an ironic take on British nationalism – gladly taking it at face value and ignoring its satiric intention.

As if any of that really matters, because beyond the TV there are millions of people who love Chubbby Brown and don't give a fig about any of this navel gazing right-on cack and just want racism and a more primitive than 'On the Buses' style take on sexual politics. It’s just that many of those with ‘alternative’ roots come close to being disciples of His Lord Chubbiness, but conveniently cover it with a version of arch irony audiences can or cannot recognise if they want.

But where are the alternative voices to this cabal? Where are the women? Jo Brand is rapidly becoming the grande dame of Brit comedy by the twin virtues of surviving long enough and being able to out lad the lads when the occasion demands. Sex poppet Lucy Porter occasionally gets a look in, but only in a very tokenistic way.

The future is bleak. Those comedians who hate this kind of mush are retreating and circling the wagons around themselves. Stewart Lee who is the figurehead of those in opposition is a gifted comedian on his night. A stylish innovator with a world view that challenges that of the Never Mind the QICocks generation, it’s just that he’s never going to go mainstream and will run ‘ar nos na gaoithe’ (like the wind) from it should he ever get close to it.

There remains no real sense of invention or a thrill at seeing something different that we all did seeing people like Jerry Sadowitz or Hicks or Dylan Moran for the first time. Oh for the clowns, Oh for the wits and Oh for something other than Michael McIntyre telling us about something that fucking happened to him that morning. Just don’t hold your breath – the BBC and the agencies have DVDs to flog and arenas to sell out.

All I'm Saying Is... Pt 2

2009-12-10T11:59:00.000Z

First up, Al O'Hare of the Trestles posts his AISI.

All I'm Saying Is...

2009-12-10T01:09:00.000Z

NEW FEATURE
Send me a jpeg of you holding a work of art that you love or that means a great deal to you and I will publish it no questions asked, no explanation required. It must be something which you believe speaks for itself without any semblance of qualification or extrapolation.
Let's build a new canon of canonical texts.
You must own it or have it, that's the only rule, it must be tangible.
Ergo, All I'm Saying Is...