State Magazine Issue 4

JU LY 2008

€ 5.50

/ £4.10

music is my radar:

State.ie

I RELAN D’S N EW MUSIC PA PAYLOAD

robert downey jr

International Bright Young

ting tings

Reliving The Rare Oul’ Times

damien dempsey saul williams The Rise & Rise of Niggy Tardust

Alanis Morissette Féile Revisited Fred Coldplay Viva The Revolution

Till Death Do Us Part Rachel Unthank & The Winterset Martina Topley Bird Baby Dee & Dan Deacon

circuit breakers:

Day Of Darkness Festival incoming:

M83 Ladytron New Orleans Heathers and the best reviews in

albums, books, games & dvds 1

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issue 04 might well contain...

Regulars

Irregulars

58 20

iggy & the stooges With their redemption roadshow about to touch-down in Ireland, Iggy Pop and Ron Asheton tell Paul Byrne how betrayal, drugs and chaos turned into respect, reconciliation and hanging with Madonna.

damien dempsey Bringing it all back home for Damien Dempsey’s capital idea.

incoming

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M83 and Ladytron talk new records, while we celebrate the old ones of Orange Juice; Our Foreign Correspondent reports on an emotional New Orleans Jazz Festival; farewell Humphrey Lyttelton; welcome to The Night Marchers; Heathers, Annie & Detboi make their mark.

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Stemming the retro tide with the help of Danger Mouse.

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18 36 28 39

40

Happiness is a warm mouse.

holidays by mistake input

66 71

anger management It’s not you it’s them: road rage, State style.

the trip to tipp Boozed up teenagers going buck mad for an entire weekend? The greatest live performances you’ll ever see? Paying a pound for a porcelain piss-pot? Féile holds a special place in the hearts and memories of a whole generation of Irish music lovers.

Kenya: big game and headless chickens.

Your complete guide to what’s out there. Albums: Coldplay look to the future while Radiohead reflect.

Plus the lowdown on new releases by Jape, Bon Iver, The Fratellis and Paul Weller. DVD: Teenage pregnancy, time-travelling detectives and the true story of a French magazine editor with ‘locked-in syndrome’. TV: summer hatin’. Books: Patrick McGrath’s stunning new novel. Games: can Haze rewrite the rulebook for shooters?

saul williams The extraordinary rapper and poet talks race, division and the ‘n’ word with Niall Byrne.

Day Of Darkness – the Irish metal scene’s big day out.

blog standard

fred From the Cork underground to the brink of mainstream success in three not-so-easy steps.

Robert Downey Jr on the Stones, Hendrix, Sesame Street... and Delia Smith.

circuit breakers

the tings tings Could this year’s chart sensation just turn out to be the real deal?

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music is my radar

martina topley bird

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martha wainwright Sister is doing it for herself.

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joe chester, mark geary & liam finn Dublin, London, New York – the song remains the same.

baby dee & dan deacon

96

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Ahead of the Future Days festival, we hear about Baby Dee’s grandmother singing ‘Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition’ and Deacon literally getting down with the people.

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rachel unthank & the winterset Queens of the folk stage.

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alanis morissette Emotionally raw and sonically very different, the new voice of Alanis.

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Editors: John Walshe, Phil Udell (editorial@state.ie) Art Director: Simon Roche

Editors’ letter

Publisher: Roger Woolman Web Editor/Staff Writer: Niall Byrne (niall@state.ie) Advertising Manager: Susan Maher (susan@state.ie) Operations Manager: Arlene O’Meara Marketing/Distribution Manager: Alan O’Dwyer Contributors: Dan Hegarty, Tanya Sweeney, John Joe Worrall, Maia Dunphy, Saoirse Patterson, Dave Donnelly, Jennifer Gannon, Martin Elneff, Ciara O’Brien, Shane Galvin, Martin McIver, David O Mahony, Durell Connor, Ciarán Ryan, Tony Jessen, Jenna Wolf, David McLaughlin, Jeff Weiss, Pete Ruotolo, Kara Manning, Sinead Gleeson, Johnnie Craig, Bobby Ahern, Cian Traynor, Louise Healy, Leslie King, Paul Byrne, Joe Crosby, Chris Russell, Phil Bergan, Tia Clarke, Sean Feeny, Elaine O’Neil, Shane Culloty, Jonathon Rothwell, Angharad Williams, Pamela Halton, Paula Shields Photographers: Richard Gilligan, Lili Forberg, Marcelo Biglia, Scott ‘n’ Goulden, Zoran Orlic, Liam Sweeney, Loreana Rush, Feargal Ward, Martin Philbey State is published monthly by State Magazine Ltd, 4th Floor, Equity House, 16-17 Upper Ormond Quay, Dublin 7.

Tel: (01) 888 0660 Email: info@state.ie Website: www.state.ie Distributed in Ireland by EM News Distribution, Clonshaugh, Dublin 5, and RMG Chart Entertainment Ltd, 2 Carriglea, Naas Road, Dublin 12, and in Northern Ireland, by EM News Distribution (NI) Ltd. ISSN 2009-0897.

All materials © State Magazine 2008. All rights reserved.

Reproduction of any part of the magazine without the written permission of the publishers is strictly prohibited. Although State Magazine has endeavoured to ensure that all information is correct, prices and details may be subject to change. The opinions expressed are those of the individual contributors and do not necessarily reflect the views of State Magazine Ltd.

contributor vs

Joe Crosby LA’s Joe Crosby specialises in music, pop culture, politics, travel and their confluence. A drunken accident left him with nine fingers, his middle name starts with Z, and he doesn’t care if you read this. Honestly.

Rock, paper or scissors?

Paper

contributor

Maia Dunphy Maia Dunphy’s CV may as well read ‘will drop pants for food’.

She has spent a year in Borneo working in an orangutan sanctuary. She currently resides and works in the attic of Ballydung Manor where Podge & Rodge occasionally pass her up leftovers.

Rock, paper or scissors?

Rock

The question of who survives in the world of music and who doesn’t is often a vexed one – and by survival, we don’t mean keeping a record deal: we mean literally staying alive. The ones you might least expect to go young often do, some you can see coming and others just defy logic. Iggy Pop has put his body through more abuse than most, both physical and chemical, but somehow has survived to tell the tale. In this month’s cover story, he and The Stooges’ Ron Asheton recount their fascinating story to Paul Byrne, a story of a friendship that fell apart and was rebuilt, a career that has teetered on the brink of collapse on many an occasion and their redemption – both personal and professional. Oh, and getting whipped by a Nazi onstage before being dumped in the street by the audience. Nice.

Elsewhere you’ll find the usual mix of the well-known and the acts that we feel should be making your acquaintance. Tanya Sweeney meets Damien Dempsey ahead of the release of his new album to find out why he has delved into the Dublin ballads of his youth for inspiration; Alanis Morisette and Martha Wainwright discuss the very different relationships that informed their latest records; and The Tings Tings prove that there is much more to them than tabloid headlines and conquering the pop charts.

As ever, though, we look to delve a little deeper and this issue we are proud to offer you a selection of new talent from both home and abroad. Fred have been threatening to do great things for a while and now, with the accomplished Go God Go album, they look set to break out of Cork’s underground. Joe Chester and Mark Geary have taken very different routes to get to a similar point: we bring them together with New Zealander Liam Finn to hear their experiences. Rachel Unthank too has come to wider attention from the oft-ignored world of folk music, but is unwilling to let it turn her head. Saul Williams, meanwhile, just lets rip.

With the festival season fast approaching, we look forward to the Future Days event with two of its most interesting participants, Baby Dee and Dan Deacon, while we also recall the heady days of Féile in the company of some of the musicians and writers who were there, a time when the concept of an Irish rock festival was a world away from the slickly organised shows of today.

As if that isn’t enough, scattered amongst the pages you’ll also find another set of musical tips from our writers around the world, the live highlights of the coming month, the definitive review of the new Coldplay album, plus all that’s new and exciting in the world of culture and entertainment. That’s your lot ‘til the next one, hitting the stands nationwide on July 3. ~ John Walshe and Phil Udell State Editors

Result: Joe Wins

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3

Incoming

Ease Yourself In

they might be giants:

The Night Marchers From the still warm embers of recent and dearly departed party punks Rocket From The Crypt rises John ‘Speedo’ Reis’ latest musical venture, The Night Marchers. After 15 years of service, the spirit of rock ’n’ roll visited the talismanic frontman with a proposition. “Rock’n’roll spoke to me and said ‘Speedo, you head north young lad. Take your guitar and Vox AC30,’” he says, tongue lodged firmly in cheek. “The true flashlight is your guitar,

Speedo. Take my lead, re-amplify me and be a conduit for my liberation.”

Calling upon battle-hardened soldiers from his musical past – including Gar Wood on guitar, Jason Kourkounis (both ex-of Hot Snakes) on drums and Tommy Kitsos on bass - Speedo formed The Night Marchers and set about his call of rock ’n’ roll duty. With songs in gestation for several years finally finding a home in the band’s debut dispatch, See You In Magic,

50 words on…

the charismatic singer is uncompromising in his vision for the plan of attack.

“The Night Marchers is about nothing less than absolute world domination,” he says. “We are dedicated to complete annihilation and decapitation by way of electric guitar.” Mind your heads, now.

Listen: See You In Magic on Vagrant / Swami Records.

Click: www.myspace.com/thenightmarchers

come in your time’s up: snow or never

Glastonbury Not wishing to sound like a bore, but you really can’t understand Glastonbury until you’ve experienced it.

The obsession with the line-up has perhaps been its undoing as much as a run of abysmal weather, but the daddy of all festivals really does set the benchmark for every other attempt.

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The last time The Avalanches played live in Ireland as a band, they were on the crest of a wave. With a debut album garnering plaudits all over the place, their live show was a riot of DJ beats, live instruments and anarchic chaos.

Trouble is, that was 2001 and ever since things have been mighty quiet on The Avalanches’ front. In January last year, the band stated that they were looking at a choice of 40 tracks. “It’s so fuckin’ party you will die,” they went on to claim, “much more hip-hop than you might expect, and while there is still no accurate estimated time of arrival, we’re sure you’re gonna love it when it arrives ... and one day when you least expect it, you’ll wake up and the sample fairy will have left it under your pillow.” We’ve been waiting for seven years now but still no fairy.

tnm by ben goetting

The Avalanches

Incoming

In A Dublin Minute!

A couple of months ago, Mark Austin was the singer in yet another Dublin band attempting to make their mark. He, Shane Kinsella and Tom Cosgrave (collectively known as The Minutes) had entered some band competition or other but weren’t holding out much hope. The thing is, they won it and suddenly found themselves signed to Universal Records’ No Carbon digital imprint.

“It’s a bit mental alright,” Mark laughs, “but it was what we needed. It’s much better than doing it yourself. There’s a machine behind this which is not behind any other band, even the big indie ones.

To have someone tell you the plan and not have to worry about it is great.”

Until they entered the Vodafone Bright New Sounds competition, the band were working on their own release. “Our plan was to release an EP, right up to the night of the competition,” Mark explains.

“We had studio time booked. We had no idea if we were going to win so we had to have our own plans in place. Everything was on a knife edge: it would have been tempting fate to have changed anything.”

Were they always sure about

entering?

“We were very, very wary about it,” he admits. “Band competitions have a reek of desperation about them and I say that even though we entered into one. As they go, they’re weird machines. We’d never entered one before because the prize is usually a few days in some shit studio but this was too good to ignore. Why not have a single released by a major record label?”

Why not indeed, but now that single ‘Harmonic’ has appeared, what happens next?

“They’ve optioned us to go further, so we’ll see,” he notes. “Regardless of who

it’s with, we’d like to do another record.

It’s given us a taste of how to do things properly, so you’d like to keep it that way.

I think we’re a good enough band to do well with a big record company behind us. We have that commercial edge to us and could sell records without having to totally cheapen ourselves and make crap pop records.”

The Minutes are looking to play anywhere that will have them this summer – see www.myspace.com/ theminutesdublin for how to get them to appear at your house, party or local social gathering.

the departed:

hl by bbc

Humphrey Lyttelton Few 86-year-old men can expect to receive tributes from members of both The Goodies and Radiohead on their passing, yet Humphrey Lyttelton’s demise drew comments from across the spectrum. Teaching himself the trumpet at the age of 15, he went on to become a renowned exponent of the British jazz revival in the late 1940s, essentially paving the way for the advent of rock ‘n’ roll.

In 1972, Lyttleton became the host of a new BBC Radio 4 panel game ‘I’m Sorry I’m Haven’t A Clue’, a role which he would continue to undertake until he died. Music never left him either and in 2001, he and his band collaborated with Radiohead on their Amnesiac album.

“We were all sorry to hear of Humphrey Lyttelton’s death,” wrote Jonny Greenwood. “He was an inspiring person to record with, and without his direction, we’d never have recorded/ released ‘Life In A Glasshouse’. So go and find ‘Bad Penny Blues’, and celebrate his life with some hot jazz.”

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Incoming they might be giants:

Detboi

His debut Irish gig was just last month, but Dublin dance sensation Detboi is already well established in the UK and Europe as one of the main players on the bass scene.

Not to be confused with the MTV-lite bassline sound, UK bass grew from the cross-pollination of London garage with Baltimore in the US and Brazil’s baile funk. Since last year, it’s been slowly replacing electro-house as clubland’s freshest soundtrack.

Before he became Detboi, Des McGouran was one half of Xerox Soundsystem/Blisscotheque, and a regular on the local DJ circuit. His glitchy, speed garage and rave-influenced edits and remixes exploded onto the blogosphere early last year and spread like wildfire. Indeed, he credits his success as “a product of blog power”.

He has since DJ’ed all over the UK and Europe and counts some of British dance’s top dogs among his fans: Herve, Annie Mac and Sinden are among those who have championed his releases and he’s regularly heard on BBC Radio One and XFM. His finest hour to date has been contributing three productions to the Machines Don’t Care album – a unique collaboration between bass’ heavy hitters which drops on July 7.

Also pencilled in for next month is the release of the rowdy, sirenpeppered ‘Come Rest Up’ on Skint records.

Listen: ‘Hold Up’ (Do You Know Who I Am?, On the Brink) Click: www.myspace.com/detboisplace

100 albums to avoid before you die

50 words on…

No. 4 Tori Amos: Boys For Pele (atlantic/wea)

Given that her entire catalogue of recorded material ought to come with a health notice, choosing just one album to avoid from the discography of American singer/songwriter Tori Amos is an unenviable task. However, the strictures of this column stipulate that only one title can be hauled into the stocks for special castigation and it gives us only a little pleasure to point an accusatory finger towards Boys For Pele, one of the most deliriously indulgent recordings of the 1990s.

Although peppered with gnomic utterances and alienating musical asides, nothing in Amos’s early two

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albums could have prepared the listener for the howling pretentiousness of Pele.... With a cover image that gave full expression to her ‘woman scorned’ routine, it was abundantly clear that men – her favourite target - were once more in her crosshairs.

Indeed, the men in Tori’s recent history were to be fed to Pele, a Hawaiian volcano goddess. The arcane references didn’t stop there though: the 14 full-length tracks allegedly represent the number of body parts of the Egyptian god Osiris that his wife, the goddess Isis, had to find to make him whole again. It’s that sort of record.

With a heroic disregard for anything that might be labelled a tune, Pele is an aural miasma of rudderless ivory-tinkling and arcane prattling. In fact, it’s much like her other albums.

Don’t download: ‘Blood Roses’ If you hate this, don’t listen to: Fiona Apple, Aimee Mann, Alanis Morissette

Street Performance World Championships Despite celebrating just its third anniversary, the AIB Street Performance World Championships has become an established summer event, with more than 120 free shows over one weekend in Dublin’s Merrion Square. Australia’s Space Cowboy will defend his title against the likes of our own Tumble Circus and more. See www.spwc.ie.

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Incoming from our foreign correspondent: Ryan Duncan in

New Orleans Hot 8. One look at the Tuba player and your eyes are already partying.

For New Orleanians, the last weekend of April and the first weekend of May are always reserved. Unlike most music festivals in the United States, the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival is a local party, but like Mardi Gras, the rest of the world is invited along for the ride.

‘Jazz Fest’ is a misnomer since just about every type of music except jazz is heavily featured. Rock ‘n’ roll, blues, soul, funk, gospel, country, folk, reggae, zydeco are included, but traditional jazz is sometimes hard to find.

However, since the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, jazz has been making a comeback in New Orleans.

The Preservation Hall Jazz Band has returned strongly from the hurricane and has become something of a symbol for the city’s revival. Preservation Hall’s performance at Jazz Fest is always a must see, as their sets are fuelled with energy and emotion left over from the despair of the hurricane. Like most local groups and musicians who perform at Jazz Fest, sadness and despair is interweaved with hope for the city’s future.

One of the most moving and joyous experiences in New Orleans is getting to see the Hot 8 Brass Band play. Hot 8 put on a unique show because they mix these

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experiences to an even higher level. Since their founding more than a decade ago, Hot 8 have had four members die tragic deaths at a young age. In January 2007, drummer Dinerral Shavers was brutally murdered while trying to break up a fight outside his house. Performances can typically bring smiles and tears simultaneously.

While the local performances supply much of Jazz Fest’s unique flavour, it’s the world famous artists who supply the icing on the cake. This “icing” was what I

50 words on…

The Sound Index Recently launched by the BBC, the purpose of the chart is to serve as an accurate, real-time barometer of bands’ and tracks’ popularity. It crawls sites like Youtube, Myspace, Last.FM, iTunes etc to find out what music people are writing about. With singles charts becoming redundant, this may take-over. www.bbc.co.uk/soundindex/

was out hunting for when I was tramping through the mud and sticky heat. After spending the morning and early afternoon checking out local acts, I trekked across the Fairgrounds to see The Roots and Steel Pulse.

The Roots supplied a funky set, mixing early hits with some brand new material, while Steel Pulse ended Saturday evening on a high note, playing their happy, upbeat roots reggae. The Jamaican vets kept thousands hopping around like seasoned Rastas.

After the Fest officially closed for the night at seven, it was time to make a big decision. Parliament-Funkadelic or MIA? I opted for the former, since Clinton is a hero of mine, and was treated to three hours of classic P-Funk freak out jams. I know MIA put on an intense show, but it’s hard to turn down a legend.

This dilemma highlights the carnival that is the two weeks of New Orleans Jazz Fest: legends jamming with soon-to-be legends on a nightly basis, the concert experience of a lifetime at every bar and club in the city for two weeks straight. All of this underscores the joy and hope of New Orleans: just being here is a reason to celebrate life and its music.

Incoming my roots are showing: johnnie craig

Orange Juice

Enjoy JAGERMEISTER Sensibly Visit

camera press ireland

When I first heard them, something stirred within me. It was a typically dire Scottish summer’s evening in 1981, and I was sitting alone in my dad’s car, as many of us did during the golden age of CB radio. Sadly, my schoolmates, Pioneer and Velocity Girl, weren’t available to chat on channel 14, so I switched to Radio Clyde for musical solace. In such moments, lives are changed.

The first song I heard was ‘Poor Old Soul (Part One)’ by Orange Juice: two minutes of rollicking, funky guitar pop that the DJ announced proudly to be Glaswegian in origin. I just had to own it. However, in a seaside town with only The Woolworth’s That Time Forgot for vinyl indulgence, getting my mitts on it had to wait a few years.

Orange Juice were four young lads with raccoon hats, checked shirts and hearts full of soul. They were led by Edwyn Collins, the Scottish Cole Porter, a man whose iconic hairstyles and witty, ironic, self-deprecating lyrics about doomed romances would inspire devotion amongst an army of young men - preceding the “Morrissey effect” by some three years.

Orange Juice’s four, utterly treasurable, Postcard singles, ‘Falling And Laughing’, ‘Blue Boy’, ‘Simply Thrilled Honey’ and ‘Poor Old Soul’, sounded like nothing else around: scratchy punk with soulful vocals and disco basslines: they were all in the garage but looking at the stars. Orange Juice signed to Polydor and in February 1982 released You Can’t Hide Your Love Forever, quite the most beautifully ramshackle, lovingly assembled collection of genius pop songs ever released as a debut album, anywhere in the world. Well, in this writer’s humble opinion, anyway. The problem was, the world wasn’t really listening.

OJ may have had a modicum of chart success in 1983 with the seminal ‘Rip It Up’, but nowadays Edwyn Collins is only widely known for his 1995 solo smash, ‘A Girl Like You’. It’s a huge pity. In 2005, Domino released The Glasgow School, a beautifully-packaged compilation of every brilliant thing Orange Juice ever did for the Postcard label; it’s a timely reminder to all about why me, The Wedding Present, Franz Ferdinand, Belle And Sebastian and even His Purpleness, Prince, are eternally grateful for those wet, lovelorn, early ‘80s Scottish summers.

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Incoming they might be giants:

Annie

It is four years since we first heard Norwegian Anne Lilia Berge Strand’s sublime electro-pop album Anniemal but in July, Annie will follow it up with Don’t Stop. With her regular producers Timo and Richard X on-board, as well as Xenomania and Datarock, State is hoping it garners her the attention she deserves and maybe a hit single or two. It may well happen, as guests are rumoured to include Alex Kapranos and

50 words on…

Girls Aloud. Previous collaborators have included Röyksopp and the late DJ Erot, so she’s no stranger to big names.

Annie is also a superb DJ, as her 2005 contribution to the DJ Kicks series showcased, so State recommends you hit that up in the meantime for your dose of killer pop.

Listen: ‘I Know UR Girlfriend Hates Me’ Click: www.myspace.com/anniemusic

insane in the membrane: great hip-hop lyrics of our age

No. 4: MF Doom “Spit so many verses sometimes my jaw twitches/ One thing this party could use is more.... ahem.. booze / put yourself in your own shoes.”

‘Great Day’ as Madvillain

Dave Browne As frontman with Picture House, Dave Browne was part of the old school of Irish rock. Yet his debut solo album, Windows To The Soul, places Browne himself at the vanguard by releasing the first album available as a credit card-sized memory stick. Could this be a brave new dawn?

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“Please / Ain’t nobody fucking after her / I’m out of here as soon as I fix the flux capacitor.”

- ‘A Dead Mouse’ as Viktor Vaughn.

“Got more soul than a sock with a hole.”

‘Rhinestone Cowboy’ as Madvillain “Gettin’ paid like a biker with the best crank / Spray it like a high rank sniper in the West Bank.”

- ‘Antimatter’ as King Geedorah

Incoming average white band: not awful, just ordinary

The Libertines

The Guardian’s Ben Myers recently called their debut Up The Bracket, “the most influential and important British album since its release, maybe of the decade, even. It’s not the best, but in terms of cultural impact, it has yet to be surpassed.” The word ‘influential’ here does not translate on any level to ‘seminal’, ‘great’ or even ‘good’.

We have the UK press to thank for creating legend out of at best, a grade C band. You could argue that The Libertines were responsible for Razorlight and, those other followers of the definite article: The Fratellis, The Kooks, The Paddingtons, The View, The Courteeners and a milliard of unknowns clogging up music venues the length and breadth of the UK, peddling their crass and uninspired songs to the public, egged on by NME and its ilk. That charge is enough to close this case shut and throw away the key.

Even more infuriating, once the band split, the general public had to deal with Dirty Pretty Things’ brand of awful, retrogressive indie while watching Doherty act like a prat, take crack and heroin, somehow start the ramshackle outfit Babyshambles and still manage to stay afloat to be considered ‘Hero of the Year’ by NME readers in February this year.

That dubious accolade is fuelled by voyeuristic coverage of Pete Doherty’s tragic downward spiral, charted by unyielding tabloid stories, as Doherty melts himself into physical and mental oblivion. A sporadically decent urban poet he may have been, but Arcadia won’t save him now.

Much was made of the interdependence between Doherty and Carl Barat, assisted by their cultivated photoshoots, straw hats and an underlying homoerotic relationship. All this peripheral brouhaha belies the music itself, which was at times thrilling (‘Don’t Look Back Into The Sun’, ‘Time for Heroes’, ‘Can’t Stand Me Now’) but largely pedestrian.

The press release for last year’s Time for Heroes – The Best Of claims to collate “the tracks that defined a generation” but don’t be taken in by the PR babble. A two-album career which spluttered and descended into farce somehow became a schema for the aforementioned bands to follow since. The Libertines were influential and illustrious for all the wrong reasons. Aspiring musicians, set your sights higher than average please.

DAMIEN DEMPSEY THE ROCKY ROAD

A COLLECTION OF ELEVEN TRADITIONAL AND CONTEMPORARY IRISH FOLK SONGS Includes collaborations with John Sheahan and Barney McKenna of the Dubliners along with Sharon Shannon

AVAILABLE ON CD & DOWNLOAD: JUNE 6TH 2008 “He sees the beauty that is Ireland and that is Ireland’s past and that can be Ireland’s future.

He’s similar to me as a songwriter - it’s angry, it’s humorous. It’s great music. It’s great lyrics.”

Shane McGowan “Damien uses his own language - he’s not looking to Hollywood for his vernacular... When Damien reaches where he is going to reach everyone will say ‘we always knew he’d make it - we’ve always loved him from the very start’.”

Christy Moore “Damien Dempsey blows me out when he opens his mouth. It’s like the end of the world.”

Bono “I don’t think there’s ever been anyone like him. I think he represents the sort of voice in Ireland that is not allowed to be heard.” Sinéad

O’Connor www.damiendempsey.com

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Incoming cian traynor

I Wish I Was On That M83

Nostalgia often means remembering the past as being better than it really was, but M83’s sentimental yearning for a former time has produced something greater than the dated synth-pop that inspired it. Taking his cue from Donnie Darko, Anthony Gonzalez has skilfully crafted Saturdays=Youth as an album that reimagines his own adolescence through an idealised ‘80s aesthetic.

Although the Frenchman was born in 1980, his belated appreciation for the decade’s coming-of-age teen movies and “cheesy” chart music had a crucial impact.

“When you’re 13 or 14, it’s the best time to experiment with things like music, movies, friends, drugs and sex,” he laughs.

“It’s an open window to the real world.

You can do whatever you want when you’re a teenager: you feel invincible. So discovering one of the most important eras for pop culture at that point definitely made for the best time of my life.”

It’s difficult to revisit any period in music without making it seem like frivolous pastiche but with the help of two producers with very different styles, Gonzalez felt that he could reinvigorate the ‘80s sound by making it palatable to today’s tastes.

“I think it’s useless to make a tribute if

12

you’re not bringing something original on top of it,” he explains. “I wanted to add my own touch but because of all the clichés surrounding ‘80s music, I had to be careful.

So I chose to work with Ken Thomas (Cocteau Twins) because he has so much experience with ‘80s production, whereas Ewan Pearson (Ladytron) offered a more modern approach.”

However, the resulting ethereal

ambience and glossy textures wouldn’t be such departures from the stretching atmospherics of M83’s previous albums were they not buoyed by surprisingly wellcrafted pop songs.

“I don’t consider this album as a betrayal of what’s come before,” says Gonzalez. “I’m just trying to experiment to keep myself from getting bored. Writing pop songs is something new to me…a challenge I set myself. I don’t know if there’s a recipe to it but it’s fucking hard! I guess it’s like trying to do comedies when you’re a movie director: it’s easier to make people cry than to make them laugh. It’s also difficult to try something different and then wait for the critics to digest it.

It’s stressful.”

Gonzalez needn’t worry.

Saturdays=Youth is a dense and unapologetically stylised amalgam of influences that resists any clear categorisation. As a cascade of distorted memories and rose-tinted reflections, it creates a world to get lost in – one bound to resonate with anyone who remembers that time fondly. But even for those who might grimace at such retrospection, Saturdays=Youth smoothes the rough edges of our collective memories, adding significance to an era that is often easily dismissed.

50 words on…

Album Art Extended Ever wondered what lies beyond your favourite album art sleeve? The community at B3TA have allowed their imaginations to run wild with this challenge. Who knew the designer for The Beatles Red Album 1962-1966 compilation cropped out the hamster they had just dropped from a great height? Photoshop gold. http://b3ta.com/challenge/album_art/

Incoming they might be giants:

Heathers

alex sinclair

For most 18-year-olds, this month will bring the usual round of exam stress and worries about what the future might hold. For Dublin twin sisters Louise and Ellie who make up Heathers, however, their immediate prospects are a little more definite: release their debut album Here, Not There and head out on a 30-date US tour in support of Ghost Mice. If that sounds remarkable, consider that this comes a mere year

after their first gig and up until recently, they had to sneak into their own gigs. Here, Not There may wear its influences on its sleeve (someone’s been listening to a lot of Tegan & Sara) but it is stacked full of a ramshackle charm and marks the beginning of a potentially remarkable story.

Listen: ‘Honey Please?!’ (Here, Not There, Hide Away Records) Click: www.myspace.com/heatherswhatsyourdamage

08 26 - 29 June 20 // te// itute stitu ilmInInst e IrIrisishhFFilm Thhe ///T Bas see/ Filmba andd lin, ,IrIrelelan ublin se, ,DDub ouse The LightthHou

13

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14

I

feeding my Music Monster The new Sony Ericsson W380i Walkman® phone is made for music.

With Walkman® controls on the outside it’s easy to stay on top of your tunes and keep your inner Music Monster happy.

15

Incoming

For most bands, the live stage is their natural habitat, where they learn their craft. Not so Ladytron, the Liverpool based electronica pioneers.

“We never really started out as a touring band,” says Reuben Wu. “When we started, we had a lot of playback and backing tapes. A lot of the synthesizers we had on stage weren’t even plugged in.

It looked good but we weren’t having that much fun. It got to the point where the demand grew for us to go out and play live, especially in America. As we kept on playing these shows, everything became more live and the sound that we were creating on stage became quite different to what we were doing on record.”

That they began to develop of love of playing gigs was handy, as the tour in support of last album Witching Hour ended up lasting two years. “The tradition of electronic music is that everything is sequenced. You might have a laptop on stage, everyone is looking quite studious.

We only choose to use synthesizers because they have a really cool sound but we try to have a lot of energy on stage, we need to have fun. Touring is the main thing that we do now: the albums are a blueprint for the live show.”

One of their recent experiences was supporting Nine Inch Nails, not an obvious combination. “Trent Reznor asked us personally to go on tour with them. We did have worries about that audience not really accepting us because we’d heard stories about Peaches getting bottled off stage at a Marilyn Manson show,” he admits, “but right from the first

16

gig, the audiences were into it. Nine Inch Nails have never been full-on metal: we probably were influenced by the same bands. There was a definite overlap.”

Having finally finished their tour, Ladytron took one day off before heading to Paris to record their new record Velocifero. “This was the first time when we were the architects of the whole album,” he explains. “We emailed MP3s backwards and forwards to Alessandro Cortini in LA, the same with a band in Colombia who are friends of ours. It was a really cool thing to do, a new way of working I suppose.”

Ladytron have also built a reputation as remixers. Does that have an effect on

their own music?

“Maybe,” he concedes. “Everything that you create musically has to be influenced by whatever’s around you. The DJ and remixing things are something that we’ve always been doing since the start and they do provide you with an outsider’s perspective on other people’s music. There’s less responsibility: you can experiment a bit more.”

It’s taken them seven years to get there, but Reuben feels that Ladytron are now the band they always threatened to become. “With Witching Hour, we made our milestone record, our coming of age.

This album is taking what we’ve achieved and using it to do something else.”

they might be giants:

Ruairi Robinson Good things can happen to good people. Even 30-year-old Dublin nerds. From his early promising work as a graduate from NCAD with the short animated film, The House on Dame Street, to his Oscar nomination for Best Short Animated Film at the 74th Oscars for 50 Percent Grey, Ruairi Robinson’s work hasn’t gone unnoticed. He hit the big time earlier this year when it was announced that he was to direct the live-action version of classic manga, Akira. The movie will be released in two parts, with the first instalment coming in 2009 rumoured to star Leonardo di Caprio and Joseph GordonLevitt (Tommy from 3rd Rock from the Sun).

lt by staphane gallois

Growing Up In Public

Incoming dan hegarty

show time

State Of Grace

jb by niels van iperen / retna

I’d like to think of myself as someone who doesn’t generally get that caught up in nostalgia, but a certain collection of 10 songs almost brought a tear to my eye recently. I’d been happily listening to albums on rotation the other day: Crystal Castles, Giveamanakick, Santogold, and Dan Le Sac Vs Scroobius Pip, before stumbling across a copy of Jeff Buckley’s Grace.

This is an album that at one point in my life I listened to so much, that I’m pretty sure I ruined a number of relationships that I was in at that time!

There’s obsessive, and then there was me and my absolute adoration of an album that truly blew me away every time I listened to it.

There are bands and albums that are closely linked with certain chapters of your life, but when you listen back to them, the only thing you really get is a sense of nostalgia. I have a long list of these, but when I listen to some of them now, I wonder what drew me to them in the first place.

At the risk of sounding like a complete asshole, there’s something spiritual about Grace: something that if you’re lucky, you might only hear in music once or twice in your life. It’s an album that was released during a strange time for music, but one that, on listening to it again, would be a blessing to any time.

When you listen to the music from

the same era, there isn’t much that has stood the test of time quite like Buckley’s Grace has. This is where debates start, but seeing as I’m the only one talking here, allow me to indulge (or perhaps selfindulge)!

There are so many songs, images and albums from the early/mid-‘90s that might pop into your head now - Nirvana’s finest hour, In Utero, Siamese Dream by Smashing Pumpkins, Definitely Maybe from Oasis, before they got really annoying, and Cypress Hill’s Black Sunday. All these years later, Grace still sounds as magical as it did in 1994 - like a guy going into studio with a bunch of songs, and coming out with something that you just can’t put into words.

Some people have suggested that if Jeff Buckley hadn’t died, that Grace and the rest of his music would never have reached such a wide audience. It’s impossible to disprove this, but so many people who’ve been moved by tracks like ‘Last Goodbye’ ‘Dream Brother’ and his interpretation of Leonard Cohen’s ‘Hallelujah’ were initially unaware that he was dead.

I’ve never understood this morbid fascination that some people have with deceased musicians (or anyone for that matter). This is something that has become associated with many departed names: Cobain, Lennon, Marley, Joplin and Jeff’s father Tim Buckley.

I did say earlier on that I don’t think that I’m one to become overcome by nostalgia, but on this one occasion, the sound of ‘Lilac Wine’, ‘Lover, You Should Have Come Over’ and their eight siblings have brought me back to a time when I really got passionate about music.

A lot of times you read pieces like this and think ‘oh listen to this person rambling on about some album that I’ve never heard’. All that I can say is, if you haven’t listened to Grace yet, do. It’s an album you’ll hopefully love, at the least appreciate, but you never know: it could become a cherished part of your life like it has mine.

Tune into Dan Hegarty’s Alternative To Sleep on RTE

Ricky Warwick Nationwide, June 5 - 20 Former frontman with heavy rockers The Almighty, the legendary Warwick has found a new guise as an acoustic Americana songwriter. He returns to the road with songs of passion, dirt, whiskey and tales of a misspent youth.

The Notwist and Halfset The Button Factory, Dublin, June 7; Roisin Dubh, Galway, June 8 German band The Notwist took six years to release their new album The Devil You + Me, so these live dates are much anticipated.

On support duties are Halfset, who will be showcasing material from their forthcoming album Desire Lines.

Lykke Li The Sugar Club, Dublin, June 12 Stockholm’s pop sensation flies the coup for her first show on Irish soil in the intimate, seated setting of The Sugar Club. Expect material from her rather wonderful Stateapproved debut Youth Novels.

Orquesta Buena Vista Social Club Olympia Theatre, Dublin, June 19; Savoy, Cork, June 20 Although many of the old boys of the club have passed away in recent years, the show goes on. It’s still an exhilarating lesson in Havana history and it may be your last chance to catch some of these Cuban greats.

Drumacanoo Punx Picnic The Rock, Letterkenny, Co. Donegal June 28, 29 Ireland’s biggest independent punk and underground music festival takes place at the end of the month with three live music areas and Paranoid Visions, Blood or Whiskey, Estel, Toxic Waste, Roosky, Only Fumes and Corpses and many more bands taking part. Weekend tickets are €50.

2fm (90 - 92fm), weeknights from midnight to 2am.

17

Robert Downey Jr

18

Music is my Radar The star of Iron Man on his eclectic musical upbringing, from the Rolling Stones to a “Tibetan nose flute guy”.

As told to Paul Byrne ~ Photography by Greg Williams

I grew up with the sort of parents who had music on all the time. And it wasn’t just, ‘oh, this is my favourite album, so you’re going to hear it again and again and again’. They were always searching, looking for new sounds, old sounds, weird sounds, soothing sounds. So that was a great education for me. I was able to appreciate someone like Hendrix, but you could also go off exploring Miles Davis, or some Tibetan nose flute guy, or the latest bubblegum pop star out of England.

I always had this dream in the back of my mind that I would make an album one day, and to have that happen with The Futurist was pretty damn amazing. I knew I’d get loads of stick, because I’m an actor, and the golden rule is, hey, actors can’t make albums, and rock stars can’t make movies. For the most part, that’s a good rule, but there are a few exceptions. Look at Sinatra.

I wasn’t trying to make any great musical statement with The Futurist, other than, this is who I am right now and this is where I’m at musically. I didn’t feel the need to put a reggae song on next to a big band number, and then have a calypso metal track, just to show how deep I could go.

Man…

Even with all that music swirling around the family home, some favourites come to mind. The very first album that had an effect on me was The Stones’ Let It Bleed album, which my dad gave to me when I was six. I remember just staring at this cover forever and ever. It’s actually a cake baked by Delia Smith, who’s something of an icon on this side of the water, right? Well, back then, all I could think of is, ‘what are they trying to tell me with this cover? And what the hell is going on with this music?’ Completely knocked me out…

Of course, the fact that my dad soon after gave me my first glass of wine and my first joint meant I was ready for just about anything when it came to music. My dad knew Jack Nietzsche, who was the arranger on Let It Bleed, so that album was always being put on. But so were Jefferson Airplane, Art Pepper, Charles Mingus, Janis Joplin, Artie Shaw. Of course, at the age of six, the Sesame Street songs were a big influence too.

I recorded The Futurist at a friend’s house, and it was a form of release and relief. I’m sure I was a pain in the ass to the engineers – phoning them up after midnight with this or that suggestion – but it was such a good feeling to finally make that album. I didn’t expect it to change the face of music today and, hey, it didn’t. But it’s a pretty good record. If I don’t mind saying so myself…

What am I listening to today? There is so much good music out there right now, and I feel that because there is just so much going on, people are overly-critical.

If someone like Kings Of Leon had emerged 25 years ago, they’d be given their own country. There are people putting music out there without record labels, just putting it up on the net, and you can find anything you want, any combination, and that’s pretty amazing…

Iron Man is in cinemas now

19

20

State

Damien Dempsey

One From The Heart Words By Tanya Sweeney Photography By Richard Gilligan

There is tired... and then it would appear there is Damien Dempsey tired. Fresh (or rather, not-so-fresh) from a gruelling 16-date US tour with The Swell Season, and a week-long, post-tour bender back in Dublin, Damo has logged a rather impressive 5,000 road miles within the last month and lived to tell the tale.

“After every gig, (band guitarist) John McLoughlin had to drive, and I had to navigate, so you have to keep your wits about you,” he admits.

On touring once again with old mucker Glen Hansard, he reveals: “It’s great to see him doing so well. I was around for the lean old times when we were all struggling, and now Glen is looking after his homies back here. We were doing huge theatres over there, with 2,500 people, and Glen and I would get the crowd singing ‘The Auld Triangle’ every night. I guess all the Americans are hearing what the Irish crowd are like so they know what’s expected of them. We made it around anyway, and we were plugging Obama at every gig...after all, it’s rare you get a chance to get to vote for a black man with Irish roots.

“Anyway, getting over the jetlag has taken about a week, but I’m off to Howth for me swimming as soon as I get a chance...to get me batteries recharged again for the summer.”

Sadly for Damo, there is the small issue of a swift promotional jaunt for his new album, The Rocky Road, before he can make any leisurely trips to the Dublin seafront. Easily earning his mantle as one of the hardest-working men in Irish music, Dempsey has just released this album, hot on the heels of last year’s exceedingly powerful To Hell Or Barbados. Replete with the type of much-loved ballads sung in post-pub sing-songs the length of the country – among them ‘The Twang Man’, ‘Sullivan John’ and ‘Hot Asphalt’ –The Rocky Road is possibly the clearest and most impassioned document of Damien’s childhood roots yet.

On board for the ride, quite thrillingly for the 32-year-old singer-songwriter, are Barney McKenna and John Sheahan of

The Dubliners fame, as well as sometime collaborator Sharon Shannon. Ostensibly, releasing a covers album should be a much less anxious endeavour than releasing an album of self-penned, ripe-for-interpretation songs, State ventures.

“I’m trying not to feel too worried about what people think but you always do,” he confesses. “I’m kind of afraid people will be like, ‘these songs are done amazingly by Luke Kelly and Christy Moore...what’s he re-hashing all this stuff for?’ But it’s like a dream come true to play with my heroes: when you get the chance to play with your boyhood heroes, you have to grab it with both hands and not give a shite what anyone says.

“I’ve a young audience, and if they get a quarter of the joy I got out of these songs that I did, I think it’ll make them very happy and me very happy too,” he adds. “When I do (sing-song) sessions and there are younger kids there, they don’t know what to sing. I mean, are they going to sing a Britney Spears or Westlife song? Those songs don’t stand up when you can’t sing them unaccompanied at a house party.”

It’s a long-established truth that young Damien cut his proverbial teeth at the sing-songs his parents would regularly hold at their home on Dublin’s Northside (“I’d be hiding under the table so I could stay up and listen”). Yet in his adolescence, the onslaught of a fledgling rock channel called MTV became another career catalyst.

“I remember thinking that guitars just looked cool,” he smiles. “I had a tennis racket and I’d play Christy Moore in the mirror while everyone was rocking out to AC/DC.” Even now, he admits to a grudging affection for several of MTV’s current stalwarts.

“Ah, I like some of the stuff Beyonce did, Jay-Z too,” he shrugs.

21

State

“I like The Arcade Fire too and the Kings Of Leon. Their singer is... interesting.”

While music has been doubtlessly coursing through Dempsey’s veins since the year dot, he does recall that performing as a career wasn’t necessarily part of the early version of his grand master plan.

“I was never asked (what I wanted to do), so I dunno...I just wanted to go down the field and play football,” he admits. “I wasn’t thinking that far ahead. I was once told by a teacher I’d end up sweeping the roads, and I always thought,’ what’s wrong with sweeping the roads?’ At school, I was quite a dreamer ...I’d look at the atlas all day. I think they thought I was stupid, a bit slow, until we did a quiz one day on the capitals of the world, and everyone was like,’ what the fuck?’”

As happened with many a Dublin youngster before and after him, next came the obligatory phase where he holed himself up in

22

Damien Dempsey

a fledgling garage outfit.

“Yeah, I played with two lads in a shed alright,” he laughs.

“Jimi Hendrix and Thin Lizzy, and a bit of reggae...excellent stuff.”

On the arduous, labour-intensive process of teaching himself how to play guitar, he says: “You’d be sitting with the needle on the record, picking it up, putting it back, trying to get the notes... it took hours and hours. You definitely had to put the work in. You see some kids made to play classical music, and they get to certain age, or Grade 8 or whatever, and give it up ‘cos they were whipped into it. The way I did it, I don’t think I’ll ever give it up.”

Another significant milestone followed when, as a teenager, his father Frank brought him to spit-and-sawdust bars on the Howth seafront. In a tale of true kismet, it was there that he first encountered future collaborator McKenna.

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State

Damien Dempsey

“Bono just came over and was like, ‘I love the way you’re singing... you’ve a violent way of singing’. Later, he said ‘I believe you’re playing in the Noggin Inn, so I might see you there’. I just thought ‘yeah fucking right’. But fair play to them, it was pretty great to see them in the crowd. Although, when I went up to the dressing room afterwards, my bottle of brandy was gone.”

“My father would go, ‘let this young fella sing’ and I’d be terrified,” he remembers. “There were all these men coming off the boats, so it was very vibey.”

The rest, as the old adage goes, is history, and since those fateful times, Damien’s unique brand of muscular, disarmingly honest music has won him a host of admirers. In recent times, he appears to have even amassed a few notable fans, among them Bono and Republic Of Loose. In the case of the latter, it transpires that Dempsey and ROL frontman Mick Pyro go way back.

“12 years ago, there would be no-one there watching us [when they played onstage together in Eamonn Doran’s],” he recalls. “Last month (at their residency in The Academy) they got me to do ‘Bad Time Garda’ and (Thin Lizzy’s) ‘Dancing In The Moonlight’ onstage with them. Republic Of Loose have that vibe that makes their music...just edgy. Ballsy. Brilliant.”

Meanwhile, Bono is a relatively new addition to Dempsey’s ever-growing coterie of well-known followers. The pair met while recording ‘The Ballad Of Ronnie Drew’ in January: a month later, Bono and The Edge famously turned up to see Damien play in the rather low-key surroundings of the Noggin Inn in Sallynoggin.

“It’s rough and ready, but a great venue,” observes Dempsey.

“At the Ronnie Drew thing, Bono just came over and was like, ‘I love the way you’re singing...you’ve a violent way of singing’.

Later, he said ‘I believe you’re playing in the Noggin Inn, so I might see you there’. I just thought ‘yeah fucking right’. But fair play to them, it was pretty great to see them in the crowd.

Although, when I went up to the dressing room afterwards, my bottle of brandy was gone. But still, it was a great honour to get the auld stamp of approval.”

By contrast, the media intriguingly reported a less-thanharmonious exchange between him and Amy Winehouse at the Meteor Music Awards after-show in 2007: Damien reportedly got into fisticuffs with plucky Amy by not letting her play pool at Eamonn Doran’s. Perhaps not surprisingly, it’s a rumour that Dempsey is only too happy to set the record straight on.

“Load of lies,” he scoffs. “I was on the dance-floor, saw her playing pool and that was the closest I got to her. I was thinking, ‘fair play to her’, as she was this little girl playing pool with a load of big lads. I didn’t even go near the pool table that night.

But there goes me support slot with Amy Winehouse, I suppose.”

24

Given that he’s been away touring in the US, it only seems fair to bring him up to speed on recent infamous YouTube footage of her and Pete Doherty playing with baby mice.

“Are they getting together?” he asks, amused. “They’d make a great couple...they might cancel each other out.”

With his career in full bloom, Dempsey now divides his time between Dublin and London, and predictably gravitated towards the North-West suburb of Kilburn, often described as Ireland’s ‘33rd county’.

“I was drawn there. I dunno why,” he muses. “They don’t know why the Irish went there in the first place. There’s a lot of second generation Irish there, and a lot of older ones who never came home scattered in the boozers along the High Road. I lived in Notting Hill when I got there but it went very up its own arse.

It’s grand you know, but people there are now talking about what they have and how much their mortgage cost, so it’s very superficial. Kilburn is still real, like Talbot Street. Sometimes I go to Dublin Castle (in Camden) and check out the newer bands.

There’s always a great vibe off new bands ‘cos they’ve got balls on them, a bit of attitude. They’re ragged around the edges.”

Once upon a time, he lived in a flat of his own in London.

Now, he stays with producer, manager and friend John Reynolds.

“That was a bit shit ‘cos I never had money to go out, so I’d be sitting in most nights listening to the neighbours fighting each other though the walls, killing each other.”

Ever the industrious sort, Damien is still working away on new material and newer creations suggest a leaning towards even more experimental territory.

“I just want to keep having the gift of singing: hopefully it will keep flowing through me,” he surmises. “I have an idea for a song with a samba or Cuban beat. I might even do a reggae album or a soul album, but definitely put an Irish groove over it.”

One his current strain of jet-lag is under wraps, perhaps he can make a pilgrimage to Jamaica, State suggests.

“I would, but they haven’t invented [sun block] factor fucking 80,” he laughs. “Oh, they have? Sure, I might so. In a couple of years, I’ll hopefully have a bit more money... then I’ll have a goo of the place.”

The Rocky Road is out on June 6. A single ‘A Rainy Night In Soho’ is out on 30 May.

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S u r v i v e The Album June 13th

LIVE: Cyprus Ave, Cork - 22 June / Tripod, Dublin - 23 June

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State

Martina Topley Bird

Great Expectations Words by Phil Udell

26

State

State has spoken to many different people in a variety of locations in our time, yet it is safe to say that we have never had a conversation with a pop star on a cross channel ferry before. On her return journey from Paris, we remark to Martina Topley Bird that she has now been releasing records for 13 years. She pauses and does the mental arithmetic.

“Yeah, since I left school. I turned 20 the year that Maxinquaye was released,” she remembers. “It was quite an introduction. They were crazy times.”

Actually, the terms ‘pop star’ and even ‘releasing records’ aren’t exactly apt when it comes to Topley Bird. Since she made her extraordinary mark alongside personal/musical partner, Tricky, on that groundbreaking debut, she went on to make three more Tricky albums and two solo records, the second of which The Blue God has just seen the light of day. Even the singer herself admits that people may think that for her, music is merely a hobby.

“People have made comments that I don’t seem to be very productive or prolific and I could be more enterprising or opportunistic, but that wouldn’t make me a happy person,” she confides. “There are always people who have an opinion on what you should do. I learnt a lot making [her first album] Quixotic about how and when to play music to people, or if to talk to them about it at all. I didn’t play this album to any of my mates or family when I was making it. You come around to the fact that what anybody else says doesn’t make any difference to what I think at the end of the day.”

Her self-confidence hasn’t always been evident, however. “In the process of making that first solo record, I wasn’t sure of myself,” she admits. “I didn’t have any relationships with people: I had to get new management, a new label. Tricky had dealt with all that stuff before: I had no experience with any of it. I didn’t really have a vision for what the album should sound like.”

If Martina wasn’t sure which direction her debut would take, there were plenty of others who were keenly awaiting its arrival.

“There was a lot of expectation of the effect it would have,” she concedes. “I don’t know where the logic came from but people thought it should have the same impact as Maxinquaye, be as much of a juxtaposition to what else was out there.”

Surely that says a lot about how people regarded her and the role she played in Tricky’s success? She falls silent for a moment.

“I weirdly do think, ‘thanks for expecting so much of me’. It’s good, in a way.”

As it was, Quixotic did not change the face of music but was a fine record that received plaudits all round, including a Mercury

Martina Topley Bird

Music Prize nomination. Did she enjoy it all?

“It felt slightly jarring,” she admits. “I was aware that it was a good thing but I’m not sure that I enjoyed it. I was used to being at home and slouching around and suddenly there were lots of people taking pictures. My label were definitely hoping for a Mercury nomination, so if they got what they wanted, they would act nice.”

For Martina, her label acting nice meant no pressure to provide a follow up. Over the following years, she would continue her trend of collaborations, including Diplo, Son Of Dave, The Gutter Twins and Gorillaz. She remembers the last project fondly.

“The live stuff was really amazing: it was quite moving watching the show. I don’t know if I’ll ever be part of something so huge again in my life. It was good to do these collaborations as it makes you still feel like you’re doing something, rather than having five years between records without doing anything. Then again, there aren’t any rules, are there?”

One of the reasons for the delay between albums was her insistence on locating one producer to oversee the whole record. Then she found him. “I wasn’t finding that person until I met Danger Mouse. We did one track as a tester in 2005 and he committed to doing the album.”

Did she have a defined vision second time around? “Not really, no,” she confesses. “I was aware that I was happy working with him and doing what I wanted to do, very early on. There wasn’t a lot of verbal planning as to what we wanted to do sonically: we just tried things and kept what we liked.”

Danger Mouse may have proved the perfect sounding board for her ambitions, but she was not alone in that conclusion: the past few months have seen a series of releases bearing his name.

Was this a concern?

“In press terms, I’m aware that I’m fitting in with a few other acts that he’s worked with. It seems to be all right, probably because it’s not just another Danger Mouse / Gnarls Barkley style album.”

She’s not wrong. The Blue God has a wonderfully classic feel to it, yet is also notably forward looking. When we mention other retro-raiding artists such as Adele and Duffy, Martina lets out an audible groan.

“I don’t quite get the point of mimicking other eras,” she opines. “I like things that allude to something, even when we’re doing artwork. There’s lots of that on the album – it alludes to Blondie, some girl band stuff. I don’t see the point of just copying what’s gone before, without doing something new with it.”

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Circuit Breakers

Words by Phil Udell

Proving Their Metal [

For two days in June, a small Laois village becomes the centre of Irish metal activity. True!

As another Irish summer kicks into gear, the festival circuit yet again He can see it having a knock-on finds itself in a state of flux. Some are gone, others have arrived, yet a relatively quiet corner of County Laois is preparing to welcome an international line up for the seventh year in a row. Some of the most influential names on the world scene are due to appear alongside a slew of domestic talent. Yet the chances are that you will have no idea that it is happening.

That’s because the Day of Darkness festival is all about heavy metal, Ireland’s unknown music scene.

“It’s always been under the radar here. There’s never been a metal media, since the metal show on 2fm folded there’s been nothing on national radio.”

Donnchadh O’Leary from the festival has joined State to examine the situation. “The only channel before the internet was UK magazines, which never really focused on Irish bands. It’s changed enormously, there are so many bands producing great demos, putting on really professional live shows, getting it right from the start. Years ago, you didn’t have that.”

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effect. “The thing that you’re seeing now is more Irish bands getting signed to foreign labels. Primordial are on Metal Blade, where the likes of Slayer started. With the big labels comes proper promo and the rest. Primordial’s schedule for the summer is amazing: they’re doing so many big festivals. They’ll be at the Norwegian version of The Electric Picnic, so they’re playing to a mainstream sort of crowd.

That’s completely unheard of over here.”

Does the domestic scene get support from the Irish audience? “A lot more than it used to but it’s still a small hardcore,” he admits. “They’re still biased towards the foreign bands. That’s strange, because you don’t get that in other styles of music. It doesn’t help that the mainstream media tends to view metal like the sports media would view wrestling, not serious and slightly embarrassed by it. I think that the fans are the other area: they have this idea in their head. It’s almost like they don’t want to support the local guys, in case they get too big for their boots.

]

They go for bands because they see them in the UK magazines or playing the big festivals in Europe, although that’s slowly changing. The scene itself is very poor in communicating itself as well: we need a bit more credibility behind us. A band like Primordial are the biggest Irish band that you’ve never heard of and that’s a story that needs telling.”

Surely it is also a case of the scene not wanting to open itself to a wider audience, a point that Donnchadh accepts. “There is an elitism within the scene that can hold it back, the ‘I’m more metal than you because I listen to these bands and they release their music on cassettes’ thing.

Some bands on the death metal scene are obsessed with being underground and true. Then again, you don’t want to lose that either because the worst thing in the world would be to go back to the late ‘80s when it was all controlled by the labels and they just watered it down. Then you had grunge come in and they used it to beat metal up.”

If anyone is fighting the fight for Irish metal it is Donnchadh and his Day of Darkness colleagues. Despite some of the more lurid names on the bill, he doesn’t see it favouring any particular strand of the music.

“Probably the most accessible band is Celtic Legacy, who are very Thin Lizzy-influenced, and the most extreme would be Watain from Norway, who play very black, black metal,” he notes.

“Really, we try and work the bill so that there’s something for everyone. It’s pretty lightweight in terms of death this year: there’s a lot of doom, a bit of thrash....”

At this point, State has to stop him in his tracks. Although not adverse to a bit of Iron Maiden et al in our youth, we have to admit that the various sub-genres these days leave us a bit confused. One thing we do know though, it’s all got very, very loud

and aggressive.

Donnchadh smiles, “You have to condition your ears to it. A lot of the people into extreme music like to be challenged. I remember a time when I thought that Sepultura were completely repulsive because I’d started with AC/DC and Iron Maiden, but now they’d be quite middle of the road. The examples that we follow in terms of festivals are Wacken and Dynamo in Europe: both started as small gatherings of friends and stayed completely independent. They always have a mixed line-up of old school and new bands: Saxon followed by Cannibal Corpse. There’s something for everyone.”

With its five pubs, handful of shops, church and Garda station, Ballylinan wouldn’t seem the obvious spot for such an extreme gathering. How do the good people of Laois take to it all?

“All the metal guys sit in the pub drinking with the locals,” notes Donnchadh. “Every year, an old guy comes in and we put a t-shirt on him and people take pictures. He watches some of the bands. They’re really into it. The venue has had a few biker festivals over the years: actually, I think they were a bit disappointed that we didn’t have any strippers. We’ve never had any trouble.

People are there because they’re into it.”

Such support is perhaps unlikely, especially given the extreme nature of some of the acts on the bill, dealing in violent and confrontational imagery and music.

“There are people who are interested by that side but it’s all to do with familiarity and understanding,” he explains. “One of the things we decided to do with our posters was stick to the band logos. They’re not that easy to read and might be a barrier to some people but we’re not compromising ourselves.

We present ourselves the way we want.

Image is hugely important. Watain going around covering themselves in pigs’ blood may seem odd but it’s theatrics. It’s an aggressive form of music and it wouldn’t work in any other way.”

The whole black metal scene, especially the Scandinavian side that produced Watain and fellow festival act Nifelheim, has attracted a world of controversy for some of its actions and beliefs, some of which have strayed into dangerous right wing politics. Donnchadh has no time for it.

“There are four of us involved with individual points of view, but personally I wouldn’t go near any sort of music that championed any political ideology,” he notes. “Again, I’d go back to Wacken, where there is a big anti-

Nifelheim, Watain and, well, you’ve probably guessed by now, Mourning Beloveth

racist presence. We want to include as many different types of metal as possible and as many different sorts of people as possible. We don’t want to alienate people.

Anything like that constantly gets shot down over here whenever it’s raised.”

There is one line they don’t mind crossing however, that of religion. “We had Rotting Christ in 2005,” he remembers, “and were a bit worried that people would be ringing up Joe Duffy, but if you look into what they’re doing, they’re not Satanists: they’re against organised religion because it’s caused so much suffering.”

As Donnchadh would be the first to admit, the Day of Darkness has grown from humble beginnings to only a marginally less humble situation these days, but at least it is growing. The musical style may set it apart, yet the bands, promoters and audience probably have more in common with their indie and alternative counterparts than either would imagine. And if you think you’re into edgy, underground music, give the likes of Doomsword, Unleashed and Thy Sinister Bloom a go and we’ll talk about it then.

Day Of Darkness takes place in Ballylinan on July 4 and 5. See www.dayofdarkness.com for more details.

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State

The Ting Tings

Tings That Make You Go Mmmmmm Words by Saoirse Patterson

Mods took on rockers, then punks took on the world, acid house fought ‘80s recession with a smile, while Britpop’s sword was its ironyfilled pen… Ah, the good old days when over-zealous hacks could pin their lapels onto whichever music-based youth movement was going. Alas, in the trickier climes of 2008, with genre-bending MySpace stars filling the charts, there isn’t a slew of similar artists to make a collective golden cow, so when a contender emerges, they must shoulder the blinding glare.

The most recent victims of hysterical media hype have been northern English duo, The Ting Tings. Unless you’ve been living under a rock since Christmas, it’s been hard to avoid them: the duo featured in almost every ‘Tipped for 2008’ list and they’ve been proclaimed the saviours of pop more often than they’ve had hot dinners.

However, singer Katie White isn’t letting the weight of expectation get to her. “That’s just the media: we don’t pay them to say it. We’re just sitting in Salford making songs!” she tells State, a couple of hours before her headline show with partner-in-crime Jules De Martino at Dublin’s Budrising festival.

“We’ve actually been missing a lot of it because we’ve been in this tour bus bubble, just going from town to town. Every now and then you go, ‘fucking hell, we’re playing to bigger venues now’ and it’s like ‘oh my god, they were going nuts then!’ Whereas, normally you’d really have to try and win the crowd, but now they’re already there with us. It’s a bit of an odd feeling.”

And it’s only set to get odder. After the rapid success of singles ‘Great DJ’ and ‘That’s Not My Name’, their accomplished debut album, We Started Nothing has earned them even more plaudits.

It’s an infectious blend of indie, pop and new wave, its copious shameless hooks backed with clever instrumentation. They have often been slated for sounding tinny live; but there’s no evidence of that here, especially on the record’s finest hour, ‘Shut Up And Let Me Go’, currently to be heard on an Apple advert.

The blonde singer, who only began playing guitar last year, claims that their brilliant breakthrough single ‘Great DJ’ was a fluke.

“It was a happy accident,” she admits. “I was literally playing the D chord for about eight hours and Jules was like, you’re doing my head in! And I moved my finger and put it on the wrong string and it went ‘de de ne ne ne ne ne ne, da ne ne ne’. It would never have happened if I’d been good on the guitar.”

Katie describes their self-proclaimed garage-pop as, “a botch job, but in a good way. We produced the album ourselves as well, and we didn’t really know what we were doing so we’d go, ‘oh that sounds good!’”

Although Katie spits fire at the charts’ “polished shiny turds”, there is no denying the professional sheen eminating from The Ting Tings’ album. Behind the raw energy, We Started Nothing reveals two pop scholars steeped in the heritage of the genre but wide awake to 2008’s post-everything landscape and the iPod’s impact on the definition of an album.

Jules notes, “With your iPod, your favourite album becomes ‘Rocket Man’ by Elton John, followed by Rihanna’s ‘Umbrella’, the next song could be Madness, and that’s my favourite album because when you set your iPod on those six or 10 tracks, you can be like, ‘what a tune, what a tune’. So we went into this album thinking that we wanted tunes.”

Generally hidden behind enormous shades, multi-instrumentalist Jules is a few years older than Katie and she credits his production nous. As with their previous incarnation, Dear Eskimo, he has taken a back seat for most of their photo shoots, using the standard formation of pretty singer up-front/low key production whiz in the background that we’ve come to expect of similar bands, from St Etienne and Garbage to Moloko and Goldfrapp.

The pair remain candid when asked whether their friendship has ever developed into anything more serious, both making a noise that’s a mixture between “hmmmm” and “naaaaa”, before Katie confesses, “I’d be the crappest girlfriend in

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State

The Ting Tings

“You go from being this little thing into something quite important in people’s lives. Then there’s the hype around that from the press and the label. Because you’re making money, everyone wants to be your friend, and the minute you believe that, it’s over.”

the world at the moment.”

Having first tasted the industry as a teenage girl group poppet, the casually dressed star finds the current focus on her looks hard to understand. “I just find it quite odd because I’m not provocative on stage in what I wear. If I’m conscious of anything, it’s that I don’t want to alienate girls in the audience.”

Has Katie experienced the dumb singer stereotype often cast upon front-women? “Yeah,” she admits, “but Jules gets it as well, because people automatically go, ‘oh Katie, she’s the star’, but it’s not like that, it’s a complete joint effort. It’s getting less and less, as people read more interviews and realise that we both write the songs.”

As female singers go, Katie cites Tina Weymouth of Talking Heads and Tom Tom Club fame as her inspiration. “There’s not that many girls to look up to in music, but Tina Weymouth I really like because she was still really feminine, without showing off. She’s probably how I would, in an ideal world, like people to think of me. I don’t want to turn into a bloke beating my chest, just so that people judge my music properly. I am a girl and there’s nothing wrong with that.”

Both Katie and Jules are insistent on keeping The Ting Tings a duo, even resorting to loop pedals for the live show rather than using session musicians.

Jules says: “The thing is with duos, there’s an energy you have to find between two people. With five people, you can rely on the bass player: there’s five of you doing things and that adds up to the show. With two people, if you don’t put 100% in, it’s not as exciting.

“Like if you see Dresden Dolls’ performances, it’s amazing.

Same with Blood Red Shoes and The White Stripes. I think they have to dig deeper because there’s not enough of them on stage and that’s what appealed to us when we started this. We’d be 32

coming off stage exhausted and we started to realise that’s what we loved about it. If you’re not exhausted coming off, you haven’t done this properly.”

They’ll certainly be exhausted when their current five-month tour finishes at the end of festival season in August. They are taking in Europe, Japan, and now one of their biggest markets, America, where they triumphed at the South by Southwest festival.

Katie recalls: “There was supposed to have been 4,500 bands on and at all our shows, there were queues down the street, and some of them were 2,000 capacity venues, so we were really lucky.”

Jules adds: “It’s going really well out there, they want us out there all the time and we’re like, we’ll go out there when we’re ready because we’ve got stuff to do in Europe and the UK: that’s where we’re based and it’s important to us.”

It’s that steely will that has allowed them to retain creative control, even though they’re signed to a major label. For Jules, it’s the only way to avoid becoming another record industry casualty.

“Because we record our own stuff and do our own artwork, I think we’re much more in control,” he notes. “A lot of bands do lose control very early on, because you go from being this little thing into something quite important in people’s lives. Then there’s the hype around that from the press and the label. Because you’re making money, everyone wants to be your friend, and the minute you believe that, it’s over, because you become part of what they are.

“I mean we’ve got a really good label and they’re working on our terms, and the only way we can keep that is by making a statement each time we go on stage. And if the album does really well, we’re gonna call it a day sooner than they would like to, because I know labels always like to push albums until they’ve sold the last drop. We’ve always said that if it came to it, we’d just start another band.”

2CDs for E15 on Coldplay albums

Parachutes

A Rush Of Blood To The Head

X&Y

Coldplay - Live 2003 New version out now

Viva La Vida Or Death & All His Friends - the new album released 13 June*

Offer applies to stickered stock only

. Titles and prices subject to availability, while stocks last. Individual titles that appear elsewhere in the store, outside of this campaign, may be priced differently. Prices may vary online.

*Not included in the 2 for E15 campaign.

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State

Fred

Snappy, Crackling Pop Words by John Walshe

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State

Cork five-piece Fred’s third album, Go God Go is a testament to the power of pop music. Sure, it’s eclectic, and yes, it has elements of arty indiedom, but more than anything else, this is a collection of beautiful, life-affirming, joyous pop music, brass ‘n’ all.

With the advent of the boy/girl band and manufactured pap, the word ‘pop’ has become much maligned in recent years, but not for Fred.

“We like that word,” enthuses Joe O’Leary, vocals and guitar. “It’s pop but with a small sprinkling of indie and a small sprinkling of rock. And pop is popular: what band wouldn’t want that? I heard a great quote during the week from an American musician who said ‘indie cred is an excuse to fail’. I actually believe in that. Fuck it, everyone wants to get played on the radio.

I think there’s very few bands who want to stay in their bedroom and remain credible. Why would you let people hear your music if you really don’t want people to hear it? Fuck off.”

Joe’s disarming lack of bullshit is as welcome as it is rare, and he’s refreshingly cynicism-free for a frontman whose band have been quietly peddling their wares for nigh on a decade, and three albums.

“It’s our third album but our second proper one. We’re not proud of that first child at all. He was very bold,” he laughs. “We didn’t know what we were doing the first time at all. There are a couple of good tunes on it, but as complete albums go, the last two, we’re really happy with, particularly this one.”

He has a point. Go God Go is the sound of a band really hitting their stride, musically and confidence-wise. “With the first album, we were still forming as a band, finding out who the leaders and non-leaders were. When you’re finding your feet that way, it takes a while. We’re still at it, really. It’s a long, drawn-out process to create a good group that know their roles, where everyone plays their part.”

Everyone in Fred certainly plays their part, from Eibhlín O’Gorman’s delicious piano and gorgeous backing vocals, to the tight-as-a-fish’s-arse rhythm section of Jamin O’Donovan (bass) and Justin O’Mahony (drums), ably augmented by Jamie Hanrahan on guitar and backing vocals.

Considering this is their third album, State feels it’s fair to say that Fred have pretty much been operating under the radar for the last 10 years.

“The underground band from Cork,” Joe laughs. “Did we have our shit together? Maybe not. Are we based in the hub of national media and press? No. Were we good enough? I dunno, but I think we were. I think some of the songs off the last album were very good. But this is the first time we’ve got someone external into

Fred

mix the album and we’re hoping it’ll bring us up a couple of levels.”

It’s been hard work, rather than hype that has helped Fred to survive. “We’ve done it the hard way, without a doubt,” Joe admits.

“We have played every place possible, within reason. That’s how we’ve survived, through gigs in places like the Róisín Dubh in Galway, Dolan’s in Limerick or Mullarkey’s in Clifden. These places mightn’t exist on some radars but they do on ours and we get people to the gigs, and they rock out. The fact that we’re still around after 10 years and that we’re not too bankrupt is cool too.”

One of Fred’s more notable accolades over the course of their decade together was the inclusion of one of their songs as the theme tune to the Des Bishop-helmed TV show, Joy In The Hood. “I suppose Des, having been based in Cork in his early years, was trying to help out bands who were below the radar so they put ourselves, Stanley Super 800 and Rulers Of The Planet on it,” notes Joe, although if you didn’t recognise Fred as the musicians, you’d be hard-pressed to find their name anywhere on the credits.

They have also received some record label attention from the US, following rave reviews for their set at the highly influential CMJ Festival back in 2006, with The New York Post naming the Cork quintet as their highlight of the festival. Indeed, they’re heading back across the Atlantic in June, beginning in at North By North East in Toronto (the only Irish band to be invited), before taking in shows in Boston and New York.

Of course, before all that, they have the small matter of releasing Go God Go, followed by a whirlwind tour of the country.

“It’s great that we’re doing stuff that bands are meant to be doing, which is running and rushing all over the world, instead of just sitting at home,” muses Joe. “We hope this album raises the bar for us, and the next few weeks will tell a lot. If we can get our profile up where people don’t have to ask ‘Who’s Fred?’ anymore, that’d be great.”

This time around, they have a company looking after distribution, which leaves Joe in the unusual predicament of requesting copies of his own album for family members. State puts it to him that surely family members will be the first ones to buy it.

“After the amount of money they’ve given me over the years to fuel my musical habit, I couldn’t do that, even though they’d pay for it,” he laughs. “You have to draw a moral line somewhere.”

Go God Go is out now on RCM Music. Fred play Dolans, Limerick, on June 5; The Pavilion in Cork on June 6, and Crawdaddy in Dublin on June 7.

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State

Playing The Race Card

Saul Williams pounds onto the stage like a man possessed.

Feathers are jutting from his dreads. His face is decorated with paint. He wears a military-style jacket frilled with long synthetic hair. The next 90 minutes is an unrelenting barrage of ideas, poetry, monologues, beats and bass. That’s how 36-year-old Saul rolls.

He’s a musician, a rapper, a poet. During the show, he sermonises on the topic of racial divides: never lecturing, always compassionate. He adorns himself on stage as a character called Niggy, the personification of race and centrepiece of his third release, with the Ziggy Stardust-aping title of The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of Niggy Tardust.

“The purpose of Niggy Tardust was to create this character that was a symbol, a hybrid,” Saul explains. “I don’t believe you need a black father and a white mother to be a hybrid in this day and age. I think we all realise that race is a social construct that has done more to divide us than bring us together and we need to start thinking about how things connect us.”

Saul readily admits that the title was chosen to renew a dialogue on racial epithets in the States, citing the play on the controversial word ‘nigger’. “It’s supposed to show the transformative power of art, cos ‘nigger’ is a horrible word but ‘Niggy’ is adorable!” he chuckles.

“Sometimes, it’s not about the dialogue: sometimes it’s about the experience. Even the title itself creates a level of dialogue, y’know? A bunch of white people in America and I’m sure across the world were questioning whether they were allow to even say the name. Especially in America where there’s so much talk of the n-word so it’s like ‘Can I say it? I wanna say it...’, so that’s the beginning of dialogue there.“ So if White America is scared of the word, how does Saul feel about it?

“When I look at my generation and the fact that we

Saul Williams

Words by Niall Byrne ~ Photography by Feargal Ward

transformed the meaning of that word and have chosen to use it in a different way,” he muses, “maybe it’s a necessary, subconscious stage in the development of a psyche that is healing from abuse and self-hate to take words that have been used against [us] and transform it into something different.

“You would think at one point that word transformed us and made us into something we weren’t,” he expands. “And now, we’re finding the power to transform that word and make it into something it hasn’t been, which is ‘ This is my best friend, this is my nigga’. I think there’s power in that.”

Aside from a focus on race, it should be noted that the album was produced by Nine Inch Nails’ frontman Trent Reznor.

Saul calls the recording process “synergistic” and says it felt like “peers working together”, a huge contrast to his relationship with Rick Rubin on his first album, whom he refers to as being “more like a mentor”.

The resulting collaboration, Saul describes as “punk-rock with 808s, alternative music with banging drum beats, a hybrid of sound, like the character”. It’s frenetic, brimming with ideas, both harsh and gentle, infused by both hip-hop and rock. It’s the sound of both sides of the collaboration making their mark on each other.

When it came time to shopping the album around to labels, Saul began to realise that there was only one way to release it. “I was pretty sure I was going to cash in the fact that I was working with Trent and get a nice advance, put my feet up and go ...yeah, finally!” he laughs. “That’s what I expected to do. Once we finished the album, it sounded so unique and so original, that everybody I played it for, like the major record executives for example, I felt I

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State

Saul Williams

“Now, we’re finding the power to transform that word and make it into something it hasn’t been, which is ‘ This is my best friend, this is my nigga’. I think there’s power in that.”

had a leg up on them. I realised I had something more powerful than anything they had.”

Encouraged by Trent, Saul was tempted to go the digital download-only route but was still considering a major label release until Radiohead released In Rainbows and consequentially shat all over the music industry, causing music journalists and analysts to jizz their pants in the process. The column inches convinced Saul to go the same route as Thom Yorke’s mob, as he reasoned the major labels would only hinder Niggy Tardust.

“It became clear that I didn’t even need them at this point,” he notes. “They would work more against the album than for it, trying to decide whether it should go into their rock department or hip-hop department. They were so fucked up by race and that breakdown.”

On November 1, 2007, Saul began offering the album from his website in a variety of digital formats for two different price tiers – free and $5. In the first month, over 100,000 people downloaded the album and 30,000 of those paid $5. The latest figures totalled 300,000 free downloads and 100,000 sold for five dollars a pop. State asks Saul whether it disappointing that so many chose to take it for free rather than pay a measly $5.

“That wasn’t disappointing at all!” he avows. “The fact of the matter is, those people who didn’t pay, wouldn’t have paid anyway. The difference was, instead of getting it from a torrent site, they chose to get it from me because they heard it came with artwork and all that for free. So it was wonderful. That’s not disheartening. Yes, I want to earn a living as an artist: it’s extremely important. But people hearing my music and dissecting it and analysing it and dancing to it, being inspired by it is even more important to me.”

Saul has seen the pay-off at his live shows on his recent Tar

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Spangled Banner tour in the US, with extremely diverse audiences turning up, from thugs to indie-rockers to goth kids and college backpacker types.

Those familiar with the Niggy Tardust album may also question the reasoning behind the cover of U2’s ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday’. Saul has a rather personal response.

“I know about the massacre that occurred in 1972 but when I heard that song, I was in Brazil, I was 16 years old. I heard that song, I thought he was singing about us,” he laughs rather hysterically. “I did! The lyrics apply to our struggle here and that ‘How long? / How long?’ part: there’s a famous Martin Luther King speech from the day before he was murdered where he keeps repeating ‘How long? How long?’ and I thought that’s where those lyrics came from.”

Listening to the vociferous anger in Irish voices like U2 and Sinéad O’Connor (his two favourite artists at that age), Saul began to wonder why there was so much angst coming out of Ireland.

He saw parallels between Black America’s struggle and the Irish.

“I started reading up and finding out about what happened over there? How come these guys seem to be so angry? Who’s fucking with them? I really connected to that. That same year, I was listening to Sinéad O’Connor sing ‘England’s not the mythical land of Madame George and roses / It’s the home of police who kill black boys on mopeds’. I was like ‘Wow, Why do they love us so much?’”

When Saul played the song recently on his Irish tour, the room sang in a singular voice but with a duality representing each side of the Atlantic’s history. He breaks down barriers, encourages unity and is exhilarating in the process. That’s just how Saul Williams rolls.

Blog Standard The tracks and artists being noticed online this month

by Niall Byrne

a few years ago. They are all from the ‘70s, most of the covers had pretty much disintegrated in the humidity but the music on the vinyl stayed intact.” Carnivale. http://tinyurl.com/6kafzj

Ponytail Ponytail played their first shows in the same warehouse performance spaces where Dan Deacon and Beach House first plied their trade. Starting as a conceptual art experiment (Wait!

Don’t turn the page!), they quickly assimilated their influences into a four-piece rock band without bass or borders. Their new album Ice Cream Spiritual leaked onto the net ahead of release and has got the blogosphere buzzin’.

5

http://tinyurl.com/3raeao

Mates of State This husband and wife duo, Kori Gardner and Jason Hammel (pictured) from Kansas, have been writing catchy pop songs for over 10 years now, largely with just drums and an electric organ.

Their fifth album Re-Arrange Us is getting the blog inches, with Pasta Primavera calling them “super sweet genius pop song composers” while The Panic Manual says “Mates Of State could shit in a box and I would give it a good review ”. Intriguing.

1

blog of the month Palms Out Sounds http://www.palmsout.com

http://tinyurl.com/45x4gr

Ghislain Poirier: Bring The Fire Mix The Montreal producer and DJ is known for his remix work with the likes of Editors, Bonde Do Role and Cadence Weapon.

Most recently, his track ‘Blazin’ was remixed to devastating effect

by German techno duo Modeselektor. His recent Dublin DJ set showcased his ability to rock a dancefloor and this ‘Bring The Fire’ mix reinforces that skill. It features tracks from Dizzee Rascal, Jazzy Jeff and The Fresh Prince, K-OS, Black Sheep, Mr. Oizo, Dabrye and The Streets.

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http://tinyurl.com/6mhcbk

Hip-Hop Battles “Like Harlem World battles on the Zulu Beat Show/ It’s Kool Moe Dee vs. Busy Bee, there’s one you should know” (Beastie Boys – ‘Root Down’). A massive compendium of New York battle tapes are up online for hip-hop completists. The collection goes from 1978 to 1988, taking in both DJ and MC battles and legendary names like Grandmaster Flash, Grandwizard Theodore, Busy Bee, Kool Herc, Marley Marl and Biz Markie. The Beasties would approve.

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http://tinyurl.com/5kbkam

State Mix – Brasil Mix by T-Woc Over at state.ie, you can get your hands on a lovely 33-minute summer mix of Brazilian tunes (mainly samba) by Dublin DJ, producer, radio presenter and label founder of Alphabet Set, T-Woc. Says Mr Woc: “It’s a mix of carnival tunes I picked up in a sweaty basement record store in Salvador, Brasil, when I was there

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A trio of friends and founders of an independent music label based in Brooklyn jumped on the blogging bandwagon in November 2005. Initially, their modus operandi was to represent hip-hop music from a New York perspective. The blog is steeped in remixes, pop culture, politics and sports. A couple of regular features help set Palms Out apart: Remix Sunday – An exhaustive downloadable list of official and unofficial remixes every Sunday. Anything goes here as long as it has it has remix in brackets afterwards, but obscure or rare remixes are preferred.

Sample Wednesday – A fascinating (almost) weekly look at the songs that inspired and were utilised as samples by artists like MIA, Daft Punk, Nas (above), RJD2, Lily Allen, Madonna, The Prodigy, Basement Jaxx and Outkast.

Now running with 17 contributors, Palms Out also offers regular mixes, holds club nights and, y’know, offers TONS of empeetwees.

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State

The Trip To Tipp

For a whole generation of music lovers, Féile was Ireland’s rock ‘n’ roll Nirvana. For five years, the annual pilgrimage to Thurles was the undisputed highlight of the Irish musical calendar.

Féile, You Got Me On My Knees Words by Tanya Sweeney

If you’re of a certain age, you have most likely consigned band names like Flowered Up, Power Of Dreams, Energy Orchard and The Mock Turtles Wolfe Tones – disbanded in 1987. To say to the dustiest recesses of the back of your mind, where hair wraps, the Inter Cert and ox-blood Doc Martins also possibly languish. If so, you will also no doubt be fondly familiar with Féile, the infamous music festival commonly regarded as the frontrunner to the slick juggernauts that are Oxegen or The Electric Picnic.

Those who routinely complain about queues for organic cider stalls or cramped campsites in today’s open air offerings may well have been appalled by Féile’s basic, no-frills set up. Still, what Féile lacked in amenities and creature comforts, it amply made up for in sheer camaraderie, energy and carefree chaos...something that many contend to be sorely lacking from today’s more calcified festival experience.

In the early ‘90s, the Irish music scene was in famously rude health: by contrast, the country’s festivals calendar was arid dry. Ireland’s most notable music festival to date, the rather beardy Lisdoonvarna in Clare, had ceased operations by 1983, while the annual pilgrimage to Slane had been on hiatus since 1987 (yet resumed in 1992). Cork’s Siamsa Cois Laoi – a festival boasting 40,000 punters and featuring the likes of The Pogues and The

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that there was a gap in the market for a contemporary music outing was no small understatement, and MCD promoter Denis Desmond promptly sought to redress this balance in 1990... a move that Irish Times journalist Jim Carroll calls MCD’s “first big payday”.

Bizarrely, the arrival of Féile to Semple Stadium in Thurles was thanks in no small part to controversial politician Michael Lowry, then the TD for Tipperary North.

“Lowry played a big part in it all, as he was popular down there and was very much responsible for getting the locals on side,” recalls Sunday World journalist Eddie Rowley. “If I recall, the stadium had to pay off a large debt of some sort and the rental of the stadium to MCD went a long way in getting rid of it.”

Billed as a successor to Lisdoonvarna, Féile’s first line-up was – compared to the diverse sonic treats that would follow in later years –quaint, folksy and parochial, featuring a largely Irish line-up. The stadium opened for business at midday on Saturday: local heroes Hothouse Flowers headlined the

festival’s single stage on Saturday night while Van Morrison headlined on Sunday.

Other acts to perform included Deacon Blue, The 4 Of Us, Mary Black, Meat Loaf, Big Country, No Sweat, The Little Angels, Thee Amazing Colossal Men, Maria McKee, That Petrol Emotion, Energy Orchard, The Saw Doctors, Moving Hearts, and Tracy Chapman. Predictably, it was a resounding success.

“What no-one took into consideration was that people would come in their droves. I think MCD budgeted on about 10,000 people showing up, while twice that number came,” recalls Carroll, who was working on a merchandising stall at the time. In future years, the number of attendees would swell to 40,000.

Tom Dunne’s outfit Something Happens were also part of the glittering line-up in 1990 and 1991. True to form, the atmosphere was laid-back to a fault. Due in part to Health & Safety regulations that were only properly instated at open-air concerts in the mid-’90s, Féile’s security system was deliciously laissez-faire.

“I think we all drove down in our own cars,” recalls Dunne. “I didn’t leave ‘til quite late and I drove to the gate of the stadium, didn’t have a laminate or a pass or

State

Stiff Little Fingers

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anything, and I said to whoever was there, ‘I’m meant to be onstage in an hour’... they just waved me through. By today’s standard, it was little short of a miracle.”

“Jesus, it was lo-fi in the extreme,” agrees Carroll. “Rough and ready stewards picked out from the locals, there was easy availability of acid and ecstasy. If you took a look around, it was pretty obvious that most people were on something – there was no getting away from the stuff.”

For many people, headliner Van Morrison sticks out as an unforgettable part of the first Féile weekend in 1990...for more reasons than one.

“One of my more memorable moments was when Van Morrison ordered that the backstage area be emptied as he went through to go to the stage,” says Dunne. “Every other band was just standing around with bottles of beer.”

Morrison’s curmudgeonly tendencies notwithstanding, the backstage area was a hub of camaraderie at each Féile weekend; arguably a million miles away from the military precision of today’s current

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The Trip To Tipp

operations.

“The backstage area was so small that all the heroes and villains of the industry were in one spot,” recalls Steve Wall, then in The Stunning. “Everyone was swanning around wearing sunglasses and acting important: in fact, I think the journalists had more swagger in that respect than the artists. I do remember queuing for food in 1993 – all the artists got a coupon for a carvery or something – and I was behind Michael Hutchence and Helena Christensen. I was checking out her ass and got caught by Iggy Pop, who was doing the same thing.

“You had the portakabin for a portion of the day,” he adds. “Bryan Adams or someone had brought gym equipment backstage one year, while everyone was loafing around having beer, which was hilarious.”

Naturally, each Féile weekend gave Irish acts the opportunity to fraternise with incoming dignitaries.

“One highlight for me from that time was playing football with Tricky and Massive Attack in Cork,” remembers Jim Carroll. “True to his name, Tricky was a right tricky bastard...an even dirtier player

than John Terry.”

“Drinking with Wendy James, I think I felt like I’d died and gone to heaven,” admits Tom Dunne. “I saw Elvis Costello headlining and I didn’t have the nerve to approach him, much to my regret.”

Out front, things were decidedly less civilised: crêpe stalls, mobile credit stands and on-site launderettes were but figments of the future. Bell X1’s Paul Noonan recalls the lack of facilities he encountered when he made the pilgrimage to Féile in 1991.

“At the time, it was all good, I was just delighted to be there,” he admits. “I did see a dude being rolled around in a Portaloo though.

“I remember getting into improvised refrigeration,” he adds. “Wrapping a pint of milk in a wet cloth and leaving it outside the tent overnight in order to keep it cool, to line the stomach before hitting the Linden Village (cider). It didn’t help.”

Noonan inevitably found himself at the mercy of the locals during the course of the weekend. “Six of us paid the princely sum of one pound each to use

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The Trip To Tipp

“Six of us paid the princely sum of one pound each to use someone’s bathroom, to avoid being rolled around in a Portaloo, I’d imagine.

Six gangly 18-year-olds with questionable standards of hygiene at the best of times.”

sd & van courtesy of the national library of ireland

Paul Noonan, Bell X1

someone’s bathroom,” he recalls, “to avoid being rolled around in a Portaloo, I’d imagine. Six gangly 18year-olds with questionable standards of hygiene at the best of times...I think we behaved though.”

The locals in Thurles and Féile’s pop-hungry punters made for interesting, if reluctant bedfellows, although in the five years that Féile was held at Semple Stadium, wily locals entered into the spirit of things.

“I remember the town being a mess,” admits Noonan. “Crazy boozing, everyone on the make - card trick stalls, people selling egg ‘sangwiches’ out their front windows that had gotten the funk in the sun, and of course Mrs pound-a-poo.”

“The locals were selling stuff at wildly over-inflated prices, like £2 for a coke when it was probably retailing at about 50p,” echoes Nick Kelly, then of The Fat Lady Sings. “Anyone who had a Brennan’s loaf was in business.

“This is a terribly cliché but the strongest image I have from Féile was coming into Thurles of an evening and turning a corner in the bus,” he adds. “It was like a Heironymous Bosch painting.

There were 15-25 year-olds puking, getting off with each other, lying in the gutter.

“It was a bit like lunatics taking over an asylum, there was an element of the pop kids getting onto GAA hallowed turf, without wanting to sound too Michael D. Higgins about it!”

As the years progressed, Féile became an increasingly vital part of the musical calendar, and the line-up became more diverse than ever.

Frank Black’s unadvertised appearance in 1991 (playing Pixies songs) breathed untold amounts of life into the festival’s burgeoning reputation. With the advent of Britpop came a succession of big names, amongst them David Byrne (1992), Bryan Adams (1992), Blur (1994), Paul Weller (1995) and Bjork (1994).

“You’d have PJ Harvey playing alongside De La Soul and Transvision Vamp,” says Jim Carroll. “If I recall the choice of headliners was all over the place.

They’d have The Stunning headline over Primal Scream and Bryan Adams.”

Steve Wall readily admits to the

Sawdoctors (1991), Van Morrison (1990) and The Stunning backstage preparing to stand out against the black stage backdrop (1993)

peculiarity of this line-up: “We did a slot after Bryan Adams in 1992, and it felt really strange, passing him in the players’ tunnel as he was coming off and we were going up onstage.”

Within Semple Stadium, local Hare Krishnas habitually pitched a tent in the middle of the action: offering free bean feasts and shelter, their oasis became an unlikely Mecca for revellers.

“The Hare Krishna tent was such a cultural oddity in Thurles, but it was all pretty innocent stuff, despite some people’s reservations,” notes Carroll.

“Mainly just singing and dancing and food.”

By 1992, the line-up was even more diverse, including Chris De Burgh, Rage Against The Machine and the Jim Rose Circus Sideshow.

“I remember one episode where Chris De Burgh got a lot of stick for getting an actual stripper out on stage when he played ‘Patricia The Stripper’,” laughs Eddie Rowley. “I think she took her top off

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State

The Trip To Tipp

“The strongest image I have from Féile was coming into Thurles of an evening and turning a corner in the bus. It was like a Heironymous Bosch painting.

There were 15-25 year-olds puking, getting off with each other, lying in the gutter.”

Nick Kelly, The Fat Lady Sings

and there were some wobbly bits out, but it went down very well with the crowd. It was the mums and dads who heard about it afterwards who were horrified.”

For his part, Steve Wall recalls the RATM show vividly: “I remember watching Rage Against The Machine and I’d never seen anything like the crowd.

If the band had told them to shred the stadium with their bare hands, they’d have done it. There was this fog of energy coming off the audience, like racehorses after the Grand National.”

As for Mr Rose’s inimitable brand of circus sideshow tomfoolery: “I think Jim Rose caused all kinds of kerfuffle and there was definitely mild outrage on the part of the locals,” reveals Carroll. “It was the type of thing they would have rung Joe Duffy up about.”

Parents also fretted endlessly about the alleged availability of Class A drugs in Thurles during the festival.

“People mainly talk about doing acid there for the first time: for that generation, the weekend presented a chance to go buck wild,” observes Jim Carroll.

Adds Eddie Rowley: “Yes, there were definitely drug seizures but it was

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probably the same per capita as in any city on a normal weekend.”

By 1995, dance music was fast eclipsing rock as the focus of the Féile weekend. Another significant change was underfoot that year, as the festival relocated to Páirc Uí Chaoimh in Cork City.

Says Carroll of the move: “At this point, the locals (in Thurles) had grown tired of the whole thing: the novelty had worn clean off and they wanted to move on. I think five years was a fairly good run.”

DJ Mark Kavanagh played at Féile with Sound Crowd in 1995: “that was the first year that the festival really embraced club culture... we were on in between Primal Scream and The Prodigy, which I think Primal Scream were a bit miffed at! MCD made that conscious push into dance, clearly au fait with the fact that club culture was going full steam ahead in Ireland. It was the first year that there was a dance stage – even though The Prodigy were headlining one night. Carl Cox’s crowd were mental, like hearing an

Irish football crowd with Ireland scoring every ten seconds. Orbital were on the main stage too and they were bigger than anything going on in the Dance Arena.”

Orbital’s stirring turn in 1995 remains a true high point for anyone at their show, not least because they followed The Stone Roses. The Manchester outfit’s set promptly went down in the annals of Féile history... despite expectations, the gig was universally acknowledged as one of the worst of the year.

“The Stone Roses show was definitely the funniest one ever,” affirms Carroll.

“There was a huge build-up to them playing, because The Second Coming, and it was all about that big show. Ian Brown, of course, was flat as a pancake and couldn’t keep a fucking note to save his life. The UK press were over, as it was such a momentous gig and everyone was just crestfallen. They were then followed

by Orbital, who were simply in a different realm: they added a whole new dimension to the weekend. Anyone who was there will remember it: the whole crowd was so up for it, and went ballistic when they managed to mix in ‘Heaven Is A Place On Earth’ into ‘Halcyon’. Most people were

sop courtesy of the national library of ireland

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off their tits and it was an infinitely better way of ending the day than The Stone Roses.”

Alas, Orbital’s set was to signal the beginning of Féile’s slow but steady grinding to a halt. In 1997, there was no outdoor venue secured for Féile, so Pulp’s scheduled show at the Point Depot in Dublin became the foundation for a multi-act weekend (Pulp headlined on the Saturday).

The 1997 line-up boasted many indie heavyweights - acts on the Friday were Joyrider, The Jesus Lizard, The Afghan Whigs, Beck, Manic Street Preachers, and Foo Fighters, while the Sunday schedule included Alanis Morissette, Frank Black, and Mazzy Star – but the punters seemed less than impressed.

“That was really taking the piss, calling it Féile,” says Paul Noonan. “The outdoor bit was a section of fenced-in car park, like some kind of holding pen. I only went on one day, with the bizarre line up of Mazzy Star, Alanis Morrissette and Mundy.”

By 1997, Féile’s lethargic wheeze had grown to a full-on death rattle: The festival returned to Thurles that year, reduced

The Trip To Tipp

to a single day to allay local concerns about unruly campers. Acts included The Cardigans, Reef, Foo Fighters, Kula Shaker, Manic Street Preachers and The Prodigy.

To add insult to injury, no alcohol was on sale in the stadium. Instead of burning out in a blaze of glory, and with its currency effectively debased, Féile effectively faded into obscurity on August 27, 1997.

“It did, didn’t it?” muses Eddie Rowley.

“That would be true...I’m not sure of the business thinking behind it: maybe it was a venue thing. But at least Wittness came along.”

“At some point, the core audience moved on too and started going to the festivals in the UK,” suggests Jim Carroll.

Despite its less than dramatic demise, Féile retains a huge spot in the affections of Irish gig-goers at the time.

Music fans recall the Féile events – 8 in all – with a rather sepia-tinted glow.

“Kids in their 20s now have become a lot more sophisticated as festival-goers and expect nothing less than an immaculately organised festival,” surmises Carroll. “If they were transported to Féile, they’d

Revellers back in the heady days of sitting on shoulders and crowd surfing - as you can see, HIGHLY dangerous activities. Sultans Of Ping (1993)

probably be freaking out. But back then, the normal rules didn’t apply.”

“These days, punters are totally spoiled for choice; they’d probably be more critical of the facilities, as opposed to actually focusing on what’s happening on the stage,” adds Tom Dunne. “If a gig is great, you could put up with anything back then.”

Paul Noonan sums up thus: “I do remember the classic liberating festival atmosphere of openness, talking to strangers, free of the dour urban living.

We were camped beside a bunch of college girls, us having just done the Leaving Cert in all-boys schools. We enjoyed that a lot. There was an innocence about all this that’s kind of attractive, given how heavily branded many of the festivals are now. Though why a beer or mobile phone company wants to bask in the reflected glory of Julian Casablancas getting paid €100,000 to be a drunk obnoxious asshole escapes me.”

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State

Martha Wainwright

Sister Act Words by Kara Manning

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State

It’s taken State an hour and three different subway lines to make our way to Brooklyn’s Complete Music Studios, a rehearsal space frequented by local residents John Legend and Philip Glass. It’s also where Martha Wainwright is set to chat with us, prior to rehearsing with her band for her late spring tour, supporting her second, cheekily named album I Know You’re Married But I’ve Got Feelings Too, the follow-up to her eponymous 2005 debut.

Four minutes before our appointed interview, Wainwright’s management rep. texts State to reschedule the meeting.

Apparently, Martha has been “MIA”, according to the text, and they’ve not been able to confirm the interview with her. When we ring up and ask if she might be able to talk when she arrives for rehearsal, State is warned that she might be in a bad mood. Hmm. Facing the woman who penned ‘Bloody Mother Fucking Asshole’ in an irritated frame of mind might not be ideal.

When Wainwright finally arrives 45 minutes later, she’s windblown but affable, clutching two grande Starbucks cups (“I couldn’t figure out what I wanted so one’s coffee and one’s sencha”) and graciously never mentions her management’s muck-up.

Casually attired on this breezy afternoon in jeans and a cerulean blue jacket embroidered with the words ‘Ski Club Moreno’, the blonde Wainwright, 32, smiles broadly when complimented on the dangling conversation of an album title she’s given her sophomore effort. She says that given her last album’s stormy songs, she thought the title, plucked from lead single ‘Bleeding All Over You’, was disarmingly funny.

“I thought to go with [‘Bleeding All Over You’] but it seemed very menstrual from a female artist,” quips Wainwright. “A lot of the material is intense and desperate enough. I just wanted to make light of something and let people know I have a sense of humour.”

But the 13 tracks on Married… aren’t harbingers of a sunnier, sentimental Wainwright, despite her recent marriage to her producer Brad Albetta. There’s an uneasy, melancholic undertow to tracks like ‘The George Song’, which examines a friend’s suicide, and ‘In The Middle Of The Night’, inspired by Wainwright’s mother, Canadian folk icon Kate McGarrigle, and her battle with breast cancer. How is her mother doing? Wainwright waves her hand vaguely at the digital recorder. “For the sake of this, she’s fine,” she says matter-of-factly.

Despite its darker hues, Wainwright concedes that Married… is a more emotionally balanced endeavor: while the songs are personal, they’re not necessarily “about people making me feel like shit.” She’s proud of the anti-war ‘Tower’ and

Martha Wainwright

the effortlessly catchy, albeit heartbroken ‘You Cheated Me’.

“It’s my first attempt at writing a pop song,” she says, taking a sip of coffee. “I started it, there was this hooky chorus, and I went ‘oh my god, what have I done?’ But instead of going to a strange chord or changing time signature or swearing, I went ‘I’m just going to go with it.’ And it was finished in 20 minutes.”

Along with contributions from her mother, aunt and brother, several big-name collaborators lend instrumental muscle to Married…, like Donald Fagen who plays on ‘So Many Friends’, The Band’s Garth Hudson on ‘I Wish I Were’ and Wainwright’s new friend Pete Townshend on ‘You Cheated Me’ and ‘Coming Tonight’: (“[I said] you don’t have to do this,” she says of Townshend, windmilling her arm, “you can even play a glockenspiel.”).

“In many ways this feels like a first record,” Martha opines, “because I was able to walk into making it simply as a musician, artist, a singer and a songwriter, so there’s a lot of freedom in that.

With the first album, a lot of it was trying to get out of the shadow of my family. But with this [record], it’s a real expression of a fullyformed artist.”

Wainwright’s eminent folk rock lineage – her mother, aunt Anna McGarrigle, father Loudon Wainwright III and brother Rufus Wainwright - has been both ballast and a ball-andchain for the singer (‘Bloody Mother Fucking Asshole’ is about her dad). Martha’s mercurial love life has also been fodder for some of her more vociferous songs, prompting her to try a different tack on this album with ‘Niger River’, born during a stay in Bamako, Mali.

“I wanted to write a real love song for Brad, my husband, who has been referenced in songs in a really negative way,” she explains. “I’ve written so many songs about being unhappy, unrequited love or ‘you jerk,’ and then I was like, god, we’re getting married, he’s been really helpful and I really should try to say something nice for a change!”

Albetta is one of three producers on Married…, joining Martin Terefe (KT Tunstall, James Morrison) and Tore Johansson (Franz Ferdinand, The Cardigans). Why three producers and not just Albetta?

“It was for me to have more control,” Wainwright says bluntly.

“I just didn’t want one old guy to ejaculate all over my record. I wanted to keep some control and pit people against each other.”

She laughs juicily. Does she mean her own husband?

“No, his ejaculation is fine,” she parries back. “I trust it fully.

I didn’t plan on making the album with Brad, but I came back to that because he knows me. I can’t charm him and I can’t bullshit him, and what happens is that he gets a truer performance.”

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State

Joe Chester, Mark Geary, Neil Finn

Gathering three contemporary singers from different parts of the world into one place provided some valuable insights into the process of making music independently, no matter where you’re based.

Global Gathering Words by Phil Udell ~ Photography by Marcelo Biglia

To the casual observer, the three men meeting in a city centre hotel one late do end up wondering how you’ll get it out spring morning are probably quite unremarkable. Yes, they are all dressed in black, the tallest has a charismatic, some might say rock star, air about him and the guy with the beard may look strangely familiar. They certainly wouldn’t guess that they have come here from points scattered across the globe – New York, New Zealand and good old Dublin. They are, in order of location, Mark Geary, Liam Finn and Joe Chester.

State has gathered them here to discuss the way all three have approached their respective careers. Yes, there are similarities: all three have ploughed their own independent furrows and are, there’s no avoiding it, singer-songwriters, but as our discussion develops, clear differences emerge. At the start though, the three find some common ground.

“The process of making music has become quite solitary for me over the past two or three years,” begins Joe. “It’s the same for me,” agrees Mark.

“It almost doesn’t matter who’s going to be out there to receive it, your label or whoever. You read in the newspapers that the music industry is in turmoil or whatever, but what the fuck do I do with that information? Absolutely nothing.

I still make music because it was never about fame or getting money.”

“We’re not in a situation where some label’s going ‘we need the record by this date’,” notes Liam. “’Here’s some money and go and make it no matter what’. You

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there when you’ve finished it but you’re not thinking about that while you’re making it.”

From his days as a producer and as a member of local heroes Ten Speed Racer to his second solo record, Joe Chester has certainly seen enough of the music industry to have developed a, shall we say, realistic, view of its machinations.

“It’s not a life that you’d ever choose,” he confesses. “That’s not to be complaining but you’d want to be stupid to willingly go about doing this. It’s something that you have to do. I personally give up music three or four times a year but always end up writing a few songs and getting back into it. Sometimes you wish it wasn’t in you.”

What then drives the people who play covers in bars, night in, night out – often to little or no reaction? “I’ve thought about that a lot and I think that’s real music, when you see people who are not careerist about it in any way, that’s proper music,” Joe answers, perhaps through rosetinted glasses.

“Talk to those guys and find out their motivation,” says Mark. “If they say ‘we’re doing this because we love it’, then beautiful, but if they’re going, ‘our manager got us this gig and we really have a bunch of our own songs’, then that’s a fucking tragedy. That’s the X Factor, all of

those shows. They promise so many things if you’re talented but in reality it’s so different. I know it’s celebrity rather than anything else but it’s dangled in front of credible music.”

Ah, the continuing debate about ‘real music’ versus the manufactured output of TV shows. It is and always has been, as all here readily agree, a fairly futile one, although it does bring up the question of the true nature of pop music.

“Probably the term has been derailed a bit by all those shows,” opines Joe.” I don’t think any of us would complain if we found we’d written a great pop song.

For me, maybe it’s a term that needs to be rehabilitated. There’s no shame, and actually a lot of good, in writing great pop music.”

Liam agrees: “You’re always trying to write songs that people can relate to and will like. The difference between us writing something as simple as us singing ‘I love you’ and some manufactured pop star doing the same is huge. You can sing the exact same words but the fact that we wrote it and believe it is instantly what sells it. I really think it comes down to how genuine the song is to the writer.”

Although all three are ostensibly solo artists, they each take a very different approach to presenting their music in person. For Geary, that involves standing there alone.

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Joe Chester, Mark Geary, Neil Finn

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“When I started in New York I had to play solo,” he recalls. “I couldn’t find the musicians. They were either session heads who wanted $500 per night or mates who were messers. It was out of necessity that I started to play on my own.

It’s a contradiction but the idea that it’s just about me, even though it is just me, is strange to me. As a writer, they always say, ‘write about what you know’ and I do know about me. The personal becomes universal, that’s what I’ve learnt. The closer I get to hitting some truths about what I’m feeling, the more people get into it.”

“I don’t think people listen to music to find out about the person who’s singing it,” adds Liam. “They relate it to their own lives. You might pick up the wrong meaning in a song but if it effects you in some emotional way, that’s the beauty of it.”

Joe, on the other hand, has often returned to the safety of a group of musicians. “It’s something I definitely struggled with, that identification thing.

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Joe Chester, Mark Geary, Neil Finn

I find it very uncomfortable when people identify the music with you on that personal level. I try very hard to remove any sense of my ego from the music: it’s about the songs. You have to commit to the songs. I remember seeing Mike Scott at Other Voices and he was singing some songs I didn’t really care for and yet I was completely enthralled. He believed it 100% and because of that, I did too. I could have listened to him singing the phone book and I would have believed it. That is what a performer should be for me.”

Finn sits somewhere in the middle, recording practically solo and playing live as a duo with EJ Barnes and a mass of effects, samples and loops. It’s getting him noticed, although he had to move to London to do it, leaving his native New Zealand – a country and music scene that would seem to have a lot in common with Ireland.

“The difference is that we are so isolated from the rest of the world that

maybe 2% of artists get the money together to go somewhere else and stay long enough to make an impact,” he argues. “In a way, that can be a beautiful thing for art because it’s done without any intention of selling it to someone else, but it can also it can lead to people getting too comfortable with their mates patting them on the back.”

“I wasn’t comfortable in Dublin,” says Mark, “so I went to New York and became what I became. That city is full of 10 million of that example, people who have gone there to reinvent themselves.

Ireland is very insular, everybody knows who you are, so it was great to go there and do that. If ever there was an example of the difference, I could get on a stage and be absolutely shit and get on a stage the next night and it wouldn’t matter. In Ireland, to fail is a terrible thing: over there, failure is part of it. I thought you had to be amazing every time but that’s not the case.”

Joe nods.

“You can reinvent yourself every day, it’s very liberating. Every day is a clean slate.”

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Joe Chester, Mark Geary, Neil Finn

“You read in the newspapers that the music industry is in turmoil or whatever, but what the fuck do I do with that information? Absolutely nothing. I still make music because it was never about fame or getting money.”

Mark Geary

“The question,” continues Mark, “is do you challenge yourself or stay where it’s comfortable for you? The idea of going somewhere new is ‘sink or swim’ stuff. It says a lot about the person.”

“You don’t discover much amazing art that’s been created out of comfort, songs about how sweet life is,” says Liam.

Mark smiles: “Yeah, look at all that great music coming out of Switzerland.

That’s a difficult idea to sign up for, that life is going to be tough and your only reward is your music.”

Yet for all his time spent swimming against the tide, Geary has not been without his mentors. “I’ve always discovered people,” he asserts. “Of the 10 bullshit artists, you discover that one is genuine and gets what you’re doing. Maybe it’s a promoter or someone who has a club in Chicago. I’ve always wished for and found those people who were further down the road than me.”

So what did he learn?

“Try not to take things personally.

It’s really not about you,” he warns.

“When I look at these magazines, there’s a real danger to go, ‘why’s that not me?’

The assumption is that someone has made this absolute judgement and the truth is that it’s circumstantial. Just get on with it.”

“That kind of advice is really valuable,” adds Finn – whose father Neil is one of the mainstays in Crowded House and has grown up under the watchful eye of Eddie Vedder. “To make you feel better about what you’re doing, rather than just saying how you did things yourself.

The only way you can learn things is by following your gut instincts, whether it’s right or wrong. What is really comforting from meeting other musicians, or talking to my father about stuff, is watching how they’ve dealt with the highs and lows of being judged.”

Mark, for one, has learned not to take things to heart. “If you do a gig and 99 people are going wild and one guy is standing there with his arms folded, what

(L-R) Joe, Liam and Mark

do you do? I used to ignore the people who are loving what you do and focus my entire attention on the one asshole and try and prove that you’re valid, the real thing. At the end of the gig, you realise that there was no reason to do that, or worse than that, he has all your records and was just listening. You’ve totally misread the situation and your entire energy has been wasted.”

And so they must leave us, these three engaging young men, thankfully on a high note. “Since questioning if I even wanted to make music, I’ve gone and made the best record I’ve ever done simply by not compromising at all,” Liam enthuses “Now more people are more interested than ever.

It’s made me realise that’s how you have to keep going on.”

Mark drains the last of his coffee.

“To be a working musician, that’s heaven.

That’s what we’ve got.”

Liam Finn’s I’ll Be Lightning, Mark Geary’s Opium and Joe Chester’s The Tiny Pieces Left Behind are all out now.

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Lifeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s A Cabaret Words by John Walshe Photography by Jim Newberry

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Baby Dee

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A harp-playing bear, an accordion-wielding cat, a high rise tricyclist, sideshow performer and circus freak: Baby Dee has been all these things and more over the course of her five decadesplus on the planet, like a living, breathing John Irving novel.

Most recently, however, the transgender street performer has reinvented herself as one of the most unique songwriters and performers, capable of spiralling from the bone-jarringly powerful to the highly farcical with a flick of her hair. It’s cabaret, Jim, but not as Sonny Knowles knows it.

“Oh boy, I’m so sick of my colourful life,” laughs Baby Dee. Later, however, when pushed as to how her previous performing experience has manifested itself in the confines of a rock ‘n’ roll show, she admits that “working on the street and yupping it up with people, working in side-shows, freak shows and cabaret kind of things, that kind of connecting with people becomes so much a part of you that you’re not aware of it: it’s part of your personality.”

While she has been performing in various guises throughout her life, it wasn’t until Dee’s late 40s that she began to write actual songs.

“I always had a feeling that it would come eventually,” she confesses. “Even from when I was the smallest child, I knew I wanted to write music but I never knew I was supposed to write songs. It was a combination of being really tied up in knots, really backward socially and I had this thing about beginnings and endings: I didn’t mind beginnings so much but I hated endings.

Even when we’d take piano lessons, I’d find a place in the middle that I liked and I’d play it over and over again until somebody made me stop. It was almost like being autistic, I guess.

“Sometimes I meet kids, mostly young men, who have this quality: a doggedly stupid desire to do something without a fucking clue. They’re on their own weird little trip. I think I would have probably stayed there if it weren’t for the shit that happened. But I didn’t really write songs seriously or record until I was around 47 or 48.”

So how easy was it when the songs started to come?

“If you listen to the first couple of albums I did, it was just this huge wave of sorrow,” she admits. “I didn’t want to go there but once I went there, things came easily in a sense. But I was making music that I never really expected anybody to hear.”

Dee had returned home to Cleveland, Ohio, after half a life of street performance and sideshows. It was, she says, “a place I didn’t want to go to. My father was dying and he ended up taking a good two and a half more years after I showed up. I thought I was going to a funeral and it turned out I was going to a live-in nursing home. I ended up being the care giver, so I found out what that was like. It was doing that which opened up the gates to being able to write music.”

Baby Dee

Dee’s first recordings (Little Window and Love’s Small Song, released on David Tibet’s Durtro label) make for extremely difficult listening, but her fourth and current album, Safe Inside The Day, sees a change of approach. Despite the bleakness of much of the subject matter, musically they’re much more upbeat and approachable, thanks to the addition of a full band (including Will Oldham) to complement Dee’s musings, which previously were very sparse piano or harp driven affairs.

“The thing about these songs is that I didn’t feel particularly good about putting them out in the world. It felt a little bit like a doomsday machine,” she grins. “The songs that define the album, that give it its character, are kind of dark – ‘The Dance Of Diminishing Possibilities’, ‘Fresh Out Of Candles’, ‘Teeth Are The Only Bones That Show’. But I can’t pick what I want to write about and that was what was coming to me.”

Indeed, according to Dee, the only song on Safe Inside The Day not rooted in honesty is ‘Big Titty Bee Girl (From Dino Town)’, which sees its protagonist going all Tony Soprano on a hapless albino. “I don’t know any albinos and I’ve never abused one,” admits Dee. “But everything else is totally true. Bobby Slott, Freddie Weiss, they’re all real. If I could make up names like that, I’d be fucking Shakespeare.”

A good friend of both Antony Hegarty and Will Oldham, State wondered how much of an influence these two unique talents had on Dee’s music, particularly Antony, who has covered some of Dee’s material.

“I don’t think you can have friends like that and not be influence by ‘em,” she admits. “My musical influences are more arcane and archaic, and also very homely, like my grandmother singing ‘Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition’. But as far as putting music like my early songs out into the world, Antony had an influence there because otherwise they wouldn’t have got to the world. Most people write a song, make a demo and send it out to anybody they can think of. I made one copy and sent it to Antony, hoping he would want to cover it, because I didn’t want to be a singer.”

Now, however, Dee seems happy to be fronting her own band, and the music is definitely presented on a much bigger canvas.

“It’s taken on a real life that’s not just me in my own little bones. I like that,” she smiles. “How weird is it for someone to play music all their life and not have a band until they’re 54? The first time I toured with a band was last October. It was a revelation.... Before I knew it, the songs had opened up into this rock ‘n’ roll bigness, which I had never dreamed of before, but it was brilliant.”

Baby Dee plays Dublin’s Vicar Street on June 15 as special guest to Bonnie Prince Billy, as part of the Future Days Festival. See page 55 for more details of the festival.

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Dan Deacon

Breaking Down Boundaries Words by Niall Byrne Photography by Bob Jones

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Undoubtedly one of the highlights of last year, or any year for that matter, were the shows Dan Deacon played here in Ireland. To call these events ‘gigs’ or ‘concerts’ would be an injustice. Quite simply a Dan Deacon live event is an experience like no other.

Deacon made one important decision when he began to perform live, which became crucial. It was to always set-up his equipment off-stage, in the audience. The resulting performance breaks down barriers of nonchalance and chin-stroking and encourages participation, whether it be a dance contest, joining his choir or bowing to Deacon’s demand that you sing the lyrics of one of his songs into a stranger’s eyes without flinching.

Deacon is the giddy messiah, the electronic master of ceremonies.

So, how does he do it?

“I just try to make the setting as even as possible for everyone, socially comfortable but still insane,” he explains. “If everyone does something weird, is it still weird? A lot of it is about challenging the idea of what a crowd at a show can do. I think a lot of people are tired of standing around and watching a band: they want something to do and I just try to provide weird things for weird people do. I don’t want my set to be like live Youtube.”

And provide he does, his table of equipment is supplemented by his ‘trippy green skull’ (also a song from his recent Spiderman Of The Rings album) which is as much part of the show as Deacon. It must be difficult at times to play in a melee where issues like space, tangled cables, the inebriated and the physicality of being surrounded by many sweaty bodies can affect your performance?

“It’s challenging at times and sometimes it’s rather unpleasant if you have a bunch of meatheads who don’t understand that it’s still a performance and there are still boundaries and parameters to work within,” he admits. “But most of the time, it’s awesome and fun. It’s always helpful when the people in the very front watch my back, as it’s hard for me to focus on anything but playing.”

With such an energetic and unique live show, it may be hard to believe that Deacon studied electro-acoustic and computer music composition in New York, but he is sure his time in the academic world gave him one thing: “A few solid years to experiment, try out ideas, and be exposed to a wide array of music in an academic setting. It also gave me a comfortable setting to figure out my live show.”

In June, Deacon will play his biggest Irish date yet alongside Jape, White Williams, Deerhunter, High

mick o

Places in the large capacity venue Vicar Street. State is curious as to whether playing larger venues like this can hinder the performance for the audience.

“The show isn’t about watching me, so that’s fine,” he notes.

“I won’t be doing this same type of performance for long. I’ve been working on a new format and soon I’ll be touring with an

Dan Deacon

ensemble to play the parts live that are currently tracked. I’ll still be in the crowd, but it’ll be different. The future.”

A major reason the new stage show will change is down to the future, specifically his new album (working title Bromst) which Deacon is currently putting the finishing touches to. It will depart from previous material with more unprocessed voice than his usual pitch-shifted vocals, less computer and more recorded live performance.

“It’s very percussion focused,” he tells State. “The overall tone of the record is a lot more intense and mature sounding.”

Much of Deacon’s lyrics veer on the inane side with songs like the famous ‘Wham City’ containing the following lines: “There is a mountain of snow / Up past the big glen / We have a castle enclosed / There is a fountain / Out of the fountain flows gold / Into a huge hand / That hand is held by a bear / Who had a sick band”.

His current work in progress sounds a lot less frivolous thematically: “The album is about cycles, a ghost, and the eminent dark age that is approaching. It’s the story of a ghost and that man that became the ghost and the worlds that exist today.”

If it all sounds a little too OK Computer, judging by Deacon’s final piece of advice to State we needn’t worry: “Don’t take yourself too seriously, it’ll stop being fun.”

We’ve Seen The Future And It Works

Dan Deacon plays as part of Future Days, the brainchild of two of Ireland’s most active independent promoters, Foggy Notions and Forever, which takes place in Vicar Street and Andrew’s Lane Theatre, Dublin, from June 12-15. The festival also features performances from Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy, Low, Jape, Matmos Deerhunter and Baby Dee. It’s certainly one of the most interesting line-ups of the year, with each artist chosen for their maverick tendencies as much as their talent, crossing genres with wilful abandon.

The full line-up is: June 12, Andrew’s Lane Theatre: Matmos, with J Lesser and Si Schroeder.

June 13, Andrew’s Lane Theatre: Low, Atlas Sound and The Holy Roman Army.

June 14, Vicar Street: Dan Deacon, Jape, Deerhunter, White Williams, High Places.

June 15, Vicar Street: Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy, Baby Dee, Paul Curreri.

June 15, Andrew’s Lane Theatre: Metronomy, Spilly Walker.

See www.myspace.com/futuredaysfestival for more details.

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Rachel Unthank And The Winterset

Folk The Begrudgers Words by Phil Udell

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The upstairs venue at Whelan’s in Dublin may not be Shea Stadium, but for Rachel and Becky Unthank, it will do quite nicely. After all, the last time they were here, earlier in the year, they were playing a slightly less prestigious venue on the Walkinstown roundabout. It is typical of what has happened to the pair since they released The Bairns, the second Rachel Unthank and Winterset album last year. Even Ireland, not exactly a hotbed for English folk music, is proving welcoming. Their beginnings, however, were a lot simpler.

“The reason we started playing as a duo was so we could get into folk festivals for free,” explains Rachel.

“We’d always sung a bit,” continues Becky. “Then people would ask us to play tiny little festivals and then they started to pay us. We were going, ‘What? You want to give us thirty pounds just for singing at your festival? Oh my god’.”

It began way before this, though, with the Unthank sisters growing up immersed in folk music, thanks to their parents, spending each summer weekend at some festival or other. Indeed, State first met Rachel as a teenager a decade ago at the 10- day event at Sidmouth in Devon. In contrast to their image, the festival circuit was full of vibrant young people doing what vibrant young people do, just to a different soundtrack.

“People think they’re full of bearded men with tankards – and they are – but there’s also that other side of partying and having fun,” Rachel laughs.

For the two sisters, though, they also took the opportunity to increase their musical knowledge. “We’d go to other festivals where they’d have a lot of other, older Irish and Scots singers. We’d always go off on our own and discover people for ourselves,” she recalls. “That process has always gone on, since we were little, but as we grew into our teens and early twenties, we started to listen to more music from other styles. We’re always looking for new music to listen to.

We’re really into stuff like Sufjan Stevens and Antony & The Johnsons. Being lovers of music generally can’t help but lead you down different avenues, which informs the way you think about it.

“Discovering Robert Wyatt really opened up my creative imagination,” she continues. “To have been such an amazing drummer and then have that ability taken away from you, only to invent something equally as wonderful: that made me realise that the fact that I’m not a virtuoso instrumentalist doesn’t have to limit the way I make music.”

“The arrangements in his music, the way if changes form,

Rachel Unthank And The Winterset

are really exciting,” agrees Becky. “When we make our music, we try and do similar things to make it interesting for ourselves.”

Such an outlook is reflected by their records, imbued as they are with a sense of high drama and otherworldliness. They have been joined on this journey by various musicians, notably Anglo-Irish fiddle player Niopha Keegan, to explore a wealth of traditional song. Is it getting harder to find material with a modern relevance?

“It’s definitely out there,” says Rachel. “‘Blue Bleezing Blind Drink’ (The Bairns’ stark tale of domestic violence) wasn’t a hard song to find, it was just something we heard my dad sing around the house.”

Unthank And The Winterset are just one of a number of young acts – Jim Moray, Bellowhead, Seth Lakemen, Eliza Carthy - doing interesting and innovative things with English traditional music, something that doesn’t seem to be happening in Ireland.

Perhaps, we wonder, this might be because it’s relatively easy to make some sort of living over here by playing straight trad to undemanding audiences.

Rachel ponders the point. “I hadn’t ever thought about it like that, but you literally couldn’t go and play in a session in England every week and get paid for it.”

Niopha, however, disagrees. “I think people are less appreciative of traditional music over here, the money that you get is a lot less than you would for a folk club in England. It’s a lot rarer commodity in the UK. I studied in Limerick and there are some really exciting young bands coming out of that course that are actually travelling more in the UK and Europe to get gigs.”

It’s not a problem that presents itself for these young women though, as first the folk establishment and then the wider media has continued to sing their praises. For Rachel, the interest of the latter is certainly not going to turn her head.

“There is this mainstream nod at folk music but I don’t feel part of that as it’s coming from somewhere else, the acoustic songwriter thing,” she notes. “It’s looking for something different and it’s wonderful and it is making the mainstream look at the folk scene and remember that it’s there. That gives more opportunities for bands like us but sometimes they’re given the watered down version and it’s not that interesting. I think that the more people of our age who get to see this sort of music, the more will get to understand it. We get a lot of people who come to our gigs who say, ‘I don’t like folk music but I like you’. That’s actually because they’ve been told the stereotype and not the real story. Our music is folk music and that’s the deal.”

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iggy & the stooges

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Nazi S&M photo shoots. Covering Madonna songs.

Iggy Pop and lead Stooge Ron Asheton discuss their long strange trip to the top and their often strained relationship.

Words by Paul Byrne

Ron Asheton has got to be one of the most patient people in the world. Otherwise, Iggy Pop would be dead. Long ago. next 59

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Today, with The Stooges finally getting the critical acclaim, and even enjoying monetary reward, the band’s two leading lights get on like a house on fire.

It’s certainly a far cry from their early troubled history, when the man Rolling Stone voted the 29th Greatest Guitarist Of All Time was banished to bass by his old school friend just as the band released their second album, 1970’s Fun House.

Being the kind of guy he is, Ron accepted his new role and the fact that another old school buddy, James Williamson, was now playing his riffs when The Stooges went out on stage. What Ron Asheton couldn’t accept, however, was what Iggy had to tell him when they ran into one another at a late night party back in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

“It was my worst moment with the band,” he says ruefully.

“I met some friends up-city, and they said they were heading down to the Morgan Sound Studios. Iggy was there with James, and he came up to me and said, ‘Hey, by the way, James and I are going to England. I got a record deal’. He never told me any of this, and I wasn’t invited or considered. So, for me, that was the worst time. It was more like super-sadness than betrayal.

“I know that I actually went out to where there were some trees and I just hugged a tree and cried. Then I just walked home in a daze: a serious 10 miles or more walk home, at night. That was the worst time for me.”

It was only last year, when the band were in Dublin to play their headlining gig at The Electric Picnic festival, that Iggy Pop finally got around to apologising to his friend for the pain he had caused, 35 years after the event.

“We were just talking about stuff,” continues Asheton. “We have our meetings every now and then, and the subject of me being demoted from guitar to bass came up – although, I didn’t see it like that - and Iggy said, ‘You know, I never thought of it in that way: I’m really sorry’. And he was really sincere. He had never said anything.

“This was just last summer, in Ireland. He actually apologised.

He never understood what it would have been like…”

Not that Iggy Pop is about to get all sentimental today over such things. He knows that he’s spent pretty much all of his life looking after number one. Even his son, Eric Benson, grew up seeing his Pop about as frequently as the rest of us.

“Being in a band is tricky, you know,” smiles the now-proud grandfather (having visited Eric, and his wife and child, just recently). “I always think of that great Young Ones episode about the heavy metal band…”

He’s actually referring to the Comic Strip’s Spinal Tap-esque Bad News outings, from the early ‘80s, featuring many of the Young Ones cast.

“The bass player gets out of the van on the side of the road, and he says he won’t get back in until they say that they’re a heavy metal band. That’s my favourite rock’n’roll comedy moment.”

Iggy adopts a mockney accent. “’Say we’re a metal band, or I’m not getting back in!’. Well, that’s what being in a band is like. For me, anyway…”

Iggy and Ron let out a laugh, and give each other a look.

There’s no need for hugs or sharing anything with the group, not when you go this far back.

“I never hated him,” is how Asheton decides to wrap this particular subject up. “There are no fights between us. We never exchanged angry words or blows. It was never like that. It was just

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tossed around in life, until it was time to come back and do what we’re doing now.”

The paths of Iggy Pop and Ron Asheton rarely crossed, from The Stooges bloodied and bowed break-up in 1974 to the band’s first tentative reunion for the former’s 2003 solo album Skull Ring.

The drug-free Ron played with a series of bands (including The New Order, Destroy All Monsters and The Powertrane) while, due to an almost-constant lack of funds, regularly moving back in with his mum in Ann Arbor.

Iggy, meanwhile, headed off on his hedonistic adventures, sleeping on couches, cardboard and silk sheets, whilst constantly looking for new ways to step over the edge. That he managed to give us the mighty fine Bowie-produced albums The Idiot and Lust For Life in 1977 meant Iggy was also capable of creating the odd masterpiece too.

During all that time, the legend of the gone-but-notforgotten Stooges just grew and grew. Punk’s two pivotal bands, The Ramones in the US and The Sex Pistols in the UK, included Stooges songs in their sets. And they weren’t the only ones inspired by Detroit’s short-lived wonder.

So, how does it feel, to have designed this roaring, magnificent engine, and then see so many other bands shoot across the finishing line with it?

“It’s kinda hard to keep track of them all,” says Pop. “They tend to come in waves, and sometimes I can see the influence, absolutely, and with others, it’s kinda like, ‘Eh, okay… great!’.”

Then comes Iggy’s laugh, a demonic chuckle which peppers our conversation frequently.

“Personally, I always loved it when people came up to me and told me about how we were the inspiration for their band,” says Asheton. “It was flattering, of course, but also, I felt that these bands cheering us on would be a good thing for getting us back together. And it was.”

Having first met up in the Ann Arbor school choir (yep, Iggy was once angelic), it wasn’t until Ron and his brother, Scott – the duo having moved to the Michigan city from Davenport, along with their mum, Ann, and their sister, Kathy, after the death of their father, Ronald - took to hanging outside the local Discount Records store on Liberty Street that the seeds for The Stooges were sown. Inside, the young Jim Osterberg had an after-school job.

It was a meeting that Iggy would later immortalise in Dum Dum Boys.

“There was no great masterplan about the band,” offers Iggy.

“We started a group because we thought that would be really cool.

And it would be really cool if we got to make a record – wow! And it would be really cool if we could play on a stage, and get girls, and live in a house, and smoke joints, and have enough money to live! And that’s still what we do.

“That purer attitude probably resides more with the rest of the group than me, though, because I’ve been through 30 years of trickery. So, I kinda know…”

One of the rare times that Iggy Pop’s and Ron Asheton’s paths did cross after the demise of The Stooges was on August 11,

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Iggy Pop & The Stooges

Iggy is restrained by Ron (in Nazi uniform) at Rodney Bingenheimer’s English Disco in 1974 in Los Angeles, California

michael ochs archives/getty images

“He seemed invisible to the police, and he just went into this downward spiral of drugs. He didn’t die when he OD’ed. He always got out of any mess he was in. Do you know anyone who can take eight qualudes, or 50 valium, and still function?”

1974, at Rodney’s English Disco, 7561 Sunset Boulevard. Having ordered bassist Nigel Harrison to bring a guitarist, a drummer and a virgin, the increasingly frazzled and very, very drug-addled Iggy also called on Ron to assist in his not-so-spectacular spectacular, Murder Of A Virgin.

There’s a photograph from the event that just about says it all. Ron, whip in hand, looking both resplendent and somewhat reticent in a spotless Nazi uniform, is standing on the bloodspattered chest of an unwashed and somewhat slightly dazed Iggy. Nice.

Ron takes up the story: “That was so weird. The Stooges were no more, but Iggy came around one day to ask if I’d join him in ‘this little thing I’m doing at Rodney Billingheimer’s’. He asked me to bring a whip, and wear one of my Nazi uniforms.

“We had gotten our hands on some outdoor electric cable for the whipping, but I just couldn’t bring myself to do any real

damage, even though Iggy was screaming ‘Whip me! Come on!’.

One of my buddies eventually let him have it, but, I guess that wasn’t enough for Iggy though.”

“It never is…” interjects the man himself, with a shake of the head.

“He got up, and he went into the audience, and there was one black guy, and, as Iggy does even now, he might get up in your face and challenge you without actually saying anything. He was saying, ‘Cut me! Cut me!’. Somehow, Iggy ended up with some old pocket knife, and he inflicted the wounds upon himself. “The whole thing ended with Iggy tied up in a gunny sack, in the gutter outside. It was nuts.”

Iggy lets out another one of the devilish chuckles.

“Wasn’t it all?,” he says. “And wasn’t that pretty much the point?”

Still, as lost weekends go, Iggy Pop managed to drag his out

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for quite a few years. If not decades. Was it all a cry for help? A peacock dance? It doesn’t sound like he was searching for a hug…

“I think he’d gone so far with playing,” says Asheston, as Iggy mulls the question over, “and had gotten away with so many things, he just felt he could get away with anything. He seemed invisible to the police, and he just went into this downward spiral of drugs. He didn’t die when he OD’ed. He always got out of any mess he was in. Do you know anyone who can take eight qualudes, or 50 valium, and still function?”

State met a horse like that once, but that’s about it…

“Iggy was with his girlfriend in my apartment once, and the elevator didn’t work, so he had to go down the stairs. And he’s super-stoned. He goes down the stairs, and he missed the first step, and tumbled down a flight of stairs, and lay crumbled at the bottom. And his girlfriend said, ‘Well, I hope he’s dead’. And I went, ‘Oh, no, I think he is’. So I went down there, and he was just out because he was stoned.”

“I really should have married that girl,” adds Iggy. “She obviously cared for me very deeply.”

Nonetheless, there may be some truth in Ron’s claim that his buddy believed himself to be invincible. It’s there in Iggy’s teenage years too, walking away unscathed from a flipped and totalled ’57 station wagon on Highway 31, his high school girlfriend, Lynn Klavitter, by his side…

“Ah, yeah, Lynn…” says Pop, momentarily basking in the memory.

According to Klavitter, Pop reckoned he was pretty much indestructable after that.

“I actually don’t remember saying anything like that,” smiles

Iggy Pop & The Stooges

Iggy. “Which is something that really pisses people off about me: I have an incredibly unusual memory. I just forget everything that apparently I don’t want to remember.”

Given the dangers that Iggy Pop put himself through, both onstage and off, being stamped on by neo-Nazis or totalling cars, he must have either had a death wish, or believed he was indeed somewhat invincible?

“Doing those things,” he continues, “it’s probably based on having a very narrow and specific list of conditions under which life is for real. And if those things aren’t in play, then you’re dead anyway. That would be my position.”

Time for another Iggy chuckle.

“He was just living an anything-goes kind of life back then,” interjects Asheton. “I don’t think Iggy is on any kind of death wish mission these days. Finally, he’s gotten to a point now where a night of debauchery is two glasses of wine. I’m serious. That’s it for him.”

Iggy hangs his head in shame.

“It’s true, I’m afraid,” he deadpans. “The biggest thrill in my life right now is sleeping with my girlfriend. That does it for me.

And I sort of… I like air and space. Air, space, water, green things, all of that. I didn’t have a lot of those for a long time, and I’m enjoying those things now. They’re helping me out.

“I sort of made a comeback with listening to music. I wasn’t able to listen to much music when things got really rough, but since the late ‘90s, I’ve started listening again, for pleasure. So, Augustus Pablo, Albert Ayler, Ornette Coleman… oh, gosh, who am I listening to lately, right now? Well, I’ve got some fresh Stooges riffs that they send me. Bill Munroe…”

Sharing a stage with Iggy & The Stooges is not an easy task for any band, but State reckons The Kills will do just fine.

Another band trading on the dynamic of their relationship, The Kills (aka Alison Mosshart and Jamie Hince) have reached a plateau of understanding in the last eight years. ”We know each other a lot better so there’s much more psychic behaviour,” Jamie tells State. “We’ve always been quite volatile with each other, we’ve never held back. I think we know how far we can push each other musically. It used to be a little sense of fear that one of us would leave the other one, but there’s much more trust there now. We both realise we’re in it ‘til the end.”

That’s not to say it’s all plain sailing. While recording their third album Midnight Boom, the duo’s insular recording sessions became fraught with apprehension. “There was a black day where everything seemed to be going wrong. All our relationships back home were in disarray, we hadn’t seen our friends for ages, credit cards were getting declined and we realised we were running out of money,” Jamie explains. “It’s a really absurd life, being focused on a record for that amount of time and I think we had a breakdown of sorts and wanted to get away for a bit.”

They decamped to Mexico without telling their label and the time away from the studio put those sessions into a more optimistic light.

The end result is their best album to date, informed by nursery rhymes, playground chants, beats by XXXChange (of Spank Rock) married with

strong, simple melodies. When State informs Jamie that The Kills would be sharing the stage with not only Iggy & The Stooges but with Stiff Little Fingers also - his reaction was at first, delirious delight (“Really???”), followed by despondency and self-doubt (“Oh my god… Oh my god...”). On the evidence of Midnight Boom, he has nothing to worry about.

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State

Iggy Pop & The Stooges

“We started a group because we thought that would be really cool. And it would be really cool if we got to make a record – wow! And it would be really cool if we could play on a stage, and get girls, and live in a house, and smoke joints, and have enough money to live! And that’s still what we do.”

“Iggy’s just enjoying the fruits of his labours,” offers Asheton.

“All the years and all the bangs, now he likes being by the ocean, by his swimming pool, sitting in the sun. His fun and excitement are all tame now: he likes reading. There’s no more chasing; he’s got a nice girlfriend. So, he’s pretty happy, and that makes me happy. We’re all pretty happy.”

and moving forward, you just have to ignore the past. You can’t worry about going back and comparing: that would drive you crazy. My idea is, do a lot of stuff now, and you’ll find something in there.”

Last year, The Stooges came back from the The only rain falling on The Stooges’ spectacular comeback parade today is the challenge of living up to their own reputation. And the fact that the band can often find themselves looking out at thousands upon thousands of concert-goers – such as when they played Electric Picnic, or supported the likes of The Red Hot Chili Peppers or Madonna – music fans who are very, very aware of who The Stooges are, but they don’t actually know any of their songs.

“Well, then they can just buy the t-shirt,” deadpans Iggy.

“Seriously though, I think it was Ron who said, ‘If we put it out there, it connects’. And Ron has seen that happen very much on a street level. The nine-year old who hangs out at his favourite liquor store in Ann Arbor – the kid’s dad owns the place – saw us playing on TV, and he just looked up at Ron, awestruck, and said, ‘You guys play great!’. So, you know, I always thought pre-teens were our natural audience anyway.”

“Absolutely,” laughs Asheton. “These guys at the liquor store, they’ve known me for five million years, and they didn’t realise that the band I was talking about were actually successful. I get it at customs now, everywhere.

“The thing about living up to our own reputation though,

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wilderness with The Weirdness, an album that, perhaps inevitably, got mixed reviews.

“We have 42 tracks left over from that album,” says Asheton.

“There are tracks that I like that won’t work for Iggy, because he needs certain things to work off, to get his teeth into. My only consideration when sending him over a bunch of riffs is knowing what he likes. He likes his descending patterns, things that he can get off on…”

“And you’ve got to remember,” interjects Iggy, “the first four or five albums, nobody had a good word to say about them. So, you know, I don’t give up easily in those areas.”

Listening to The Stooges final show, released as Metallic K.O., the song ‘Cock In My Pocket’ made State realise, James Osterberg probably wouldn’t have become Iggy Pop if, instead of his oftenseen impressive schlong, the kid had been born with a small dick.

Iggy Pop takes a moment to let the question sink in.

“Yes,” he eventually replies, followed by a laugh. “It is, to be fair, part of a blues tradition. I was always baffled by the metaphor these guys would come up with for getting laid. And since I was a virgin relatively late, at 18, and playing in blues bands, I was always scratching my head over lines like, ‘I’m up early in the morning, baby’. Or Muddy Waters getting heavy on the original

State

‘Satisfaction’, ‘I Can’t Be Satisfied’: ‘Well, I feel like snapping/Pistol in your face’.

“There are these strains of sex and violence that were running through the music that I liked best. I just thought it better to say it straight.”

Nice. So, now that Iggy Pop is living the good life in Florida, with a good woman and some real money in the bank, where’s the blood, sweat and fears for his art?

“Well, my problems help me a lot,” he says. “I’m a weird bird, so, what I’ve really done is developed a fresh set of problems for myself that allow me to keep working as an artist. I don’t mean artistic problems: I mean real problems, dude. They’re much nicer ones than the ones I had before.”

They won’t actually kill you.

“Exactly, exactly. Things start going too well once in a while, and I’ll get home from being on some long outing with The Stooges, and then thinking about more work, I’ll think, Jesus, I don’t have any real problems; how am I going to do that?

And then that lasts about four or five days, and then I have a big problem.”

And how does it feel being the godfather of punk, a cultural icon, an object of immense desire still at 61?

“I don’t really think about it all that much,” says Pop. “I’m listening to you, and at the same time that I’m listening to you, a part of my brain is going, this guy is writing in a certain format, and therefore that implies a certain embellishment level…”

There goes that laugh.

“And then that’s to be compared to the sort of insane Canadian gardener who stopped me at the ATM machine the other day, screaming, ‘DUDE! YOU’RE IGGY POP! BLAAAAH! YOU’RE THE MAN!’ Different people have different messages.

You get messages from people all the time now – and there was a long time there when I was getting no messages.

“So, I’ve got a lot of voicemail coming in right now, and it really varies widely, and I don’t know if I need to figure out what it means. But I’m alert to it.”

Isn’t that just what the young Jim Osterberg wanted – insane Canadian gardeners screaming out his name?

“I wanted to be Bo Diddley. I’m working on it.”

martin philbey

That The Stooges are now finally getting the recognition they so longed for 40 years ago means that Iggy and Ron are finally ready for their close-ups. A recent request by Madonna – who had The Stooges as support on the opening night of her Reinvention World Tour at Slane Castle in 2004 – to have Iggy and the boys perform two of her songs at her induction to the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame in March had the band once again questioning their purpose here on this earth.

“We had about a month of grumbling about this one,” smiles Iggy. “You know, the whole identity crisis thing, and lines like, ‘We’re not a disco band!’. In the end, I argued that, if you give The Stooges the national anthem, or a Madonna song, or the phone book, or anything else, it’s all going to pretty much sound like The Stooges by the time we practise our reductive arts.”

“Yeah,” nods Asheton, joining in on the laugh. “That’s what I love about this band the most…”

Iggy & The Stooges, The Kills and Stiff Little Fingers play Dublin’s Royal Hospital

Iggy Pop & The Stooges

Easy Rider

Some bands have weird requests for their backstage rider, from fresh flowers to HP Brown Sauce, but very few have a sense of humour about it. Iggy Pop seems to be the exception, or at least one of his roadies is, according to The Smoking Gun. Allegedly penned by longtime Iggy associate Jos Grain, the mammoth 18-page wish-list is peppered with hilarious gags, some of them very non-PC. Highlights include our hero requesting a “monitor man who speaks good English and is not afraid of death” or threatening to burn any inferior mixing desks. Then there’s the bit where he asks for two industrial-sized fans to practice “that scarf thing they used to do in Bon Jovi and Heart videos” and insisting that the dressing room contains “somebody dressed as Bob Hope doing fantastic Bob Hope impersonations”.

Writing out a rider is generally one of the most boring jobs in the world, second only to ensuring said rider is present and correct when the rock stars come to town. Serious kudos to Jos for making it not only readable but fun. http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/1004061iggypop1.html

Grounds on June 16. See www.pod.ie for more details.

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Holidays By Mistake Fake being a local around the world

Into Africa

[

Headless chickens, defecating donkeys and lethal bootleg liquor: welcome to Kenya.

State stood staring with a dead-pan expression at the dhow captain, wondering when he was going to say it was all racing fiesta. a joke.

Flip flops were clearly the wrong things to wear when trying to dodge copious amounts of shit-piles upon disembarkation at the pier edge. Now he wanted us to mount the creatures responsible for these atrocious dumps and head off into the sunset like something out of a warped new-age nativity.

“But you have no other form of transport here, take it or leave it, Mzungu.”

Now State is not mistaken. This is not India and these animals are no revered cows. But somehow when they said there would be donkeys here, we had no idea what that actually meant.

Not just a couple scattered around here and there. No no. Literally hundreds of donkeys. All roaming carelessly through the narrow streets, pooping at will and all the time being afforded the kudos one would usually associate with royalty.

This is the Kenyan island of Lamu, where 3,000 donkeys cause mayhem worthy of a drunken Spanish bull

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Words by Louise Healy Photography by Louise Healy and Anthony O’Meara

Moan at will, but this is Africa and here, as State found out, anything goes.

Get There British Airways fly from Dublin via London to Nairobi.

Look Around Kenya, like many of its neighbouring countries, is unfathomably big.

Landing in Nairobi, the capital, one would be forgiven for thinking that this place really does live up to its infamous title ‘Nairobbery’, with shady characters seemingly at every corner.

State however threw caution to the wind and decided to get inside the cosmopolitan hub and head out for an African dance class. Two hours later and just about surviving the hi-jinks, we managed to cosy into a bar in central Nairobi to wait for the live traditional dance show, hailed here as a spectacular event.

And what a bizarre little spectacle

]

it turned out to be. A fully grown man dressed up in a woman’s swimsuit with white face paint and a fur-trimmed possum hat convulsing on the floor, trying to reenact some crazy tribal dance is just plain strange, even for Africa.

The best advice is to steer clear of downtown Nairobi. This is the city that up until 1890, still had lions and rhinos roaming freely through the streets. The lions have migrated to the grasslands but other unsavoury characters are lurking in the shadows and muggings are commonplace.

While in town, make sure to take a trip to nearby suburb of Karen to check out Karen Blixen’s former house, now converted to a museum. You’ll get a real sense of where the Out of Africa author got the inspiration for her writings between 1914-1931. Don’t miss a trip to the Kazuri bead factory, about 10 minutes walk from here. The factory employs local women and single mothers and produces some of the most beautiful African pottery and jewellery you’ll ever come across. Its pieces have been worn by celebrities such as Meryl Streep and Hillary Clinton.

One of the funniest things to do in Nairobi is to visit the Rothschild Giraffe Sanctuary: what you may miss on safari, you’ll surely find here. And the most entertaining of things is to feed the giraffes food –mouth to mouth. Now this may sound slightly warped to some but it’s a truly gratifying experience. When the giraffe goes in for the kill, stand assured in the knowledge that giraffe’s saliva is all anti-bacterial. A face wash for free. We like.

Spend a few days in Nairobi and then head for the grasslands of Masai land.

Visiting the Masai Mara national reserve is one of the most spectacular things you’ll do here. The game reserve in south west Kenya is really a continuation of the Serengeti National Park in Tanzania and is famous for its exceptional population of game and the annual migration of zebra and the millions of wildebeest in July and August.

It is also one of the rare places to catch a glimpse of the Big Five: the lion, elephant, black rhinoceros, hippo, and cheetah. Here

Making time Get in the mood or simply be an armchair traveller

you can watch the local women saunter by with huge baskets of seeds and vegetables, clad in the signature high rise necklaces and brightly coloured dresses. Don’t take their pictures: Masai women are very modest but when irked, will wreak havoc, screaming and spitting in your direction.

Be also wary of the ‘undocumented’ Masai tribal people who in the Masai Mara reserve appear seemingly from nowhere dressed in traditional Masai tribal gear yielding the ubiquitous swords, trying to sell jewellery etc., only to put on their Levi’s and hoodies once your safari truck is out of sight.

For a great way to relax, take the train from Nairobi to the seaside island of Lamu. The Muslim island is the Zanzibar of Kenya, and somewhat more appealing.

Lamu town epitomises Swahili culture, with its ornate architecture, narrow winding streets and an atmosphere that belies its new found fame as a tourist attraction. State recommends renting an apartment: it’s cheaper than the guest houses and will give you sweeping views of latticed roof tops, exotic trees and minarets that spread across the sleepy landscape and spill out on to the sea.

When in Rome... Ah, the old adage.

In Lamu, it’s seemingly all about killing chickens for dinner. Up ‘til our visit, State had never seen a headless chicken in the flesh and we are ashamed to say it was indeed quite funny. We ate that poor animal in a stir fry that night and savoured every last mouthful after the trauma both it and us had endured.

Altogether Kenya is an exhilarating, frustrating and downright bizarre place.

You won’t find anywhere quite like it again.

Eat Kenyans tend to give short shrift to vegetarianism and ‘nyama choma’ is the national dish of barbecued meat.

‘Carnivore’, outside Nairobi, is the undisputed most famous nyama choma

Get this album Benga is the contemporary dance music of Kenya, characterised by bounding bass rhythms and electrical guitar licks. Check out DO Misiani and his group Shirati Jazz. One of his best contributions is on Piny Ose Mer/The World Upside Down (1989).

Watch this music video Safari Sound Band: ‘Mpenzi’ – the original.

Download this single Congolese linala or dance music, also known as soukous, is the choice of most Kenyans.

Check out Fadhili William’s famous ‘Malaika’ (Angel) and ‘Jambo Bwana’, Kenya’s unofficial anthem.

restaurant in Kenya and has twice been voted among the 50 best restaurants in the world. When you enter, you’ll be greeted by the world’s biggest barbeque pit, laden with real swords of beef, pork, lamb, chicken and the controversial game meats such as camel, ostrich and crocodile. There is, however, a hefty 26% tax and service charge added to the bill.

Drink For something a bit more low-key, head to ‘Casablanca’ on Lenana Road. This hip new Moroccan-style bar with hookahs and rustic setting has become a hit with Nairobi’s fastidious ex-pat community.

Listen For information on live gigs in Nairobi, check out ‘Saturday Nation’, a complete gig guide for the entire country. ‘Going Out’ magazine is also a safe bet for impromptu live shows in the city.

Party Party ‘Simmers’ on Kenyatta Avenue is the best place to rediscover a bit of real African rhythm. The atmosphere at this open-air bar/restaurant is invigorating, with bands belting out anything from Congolese rumba to Kenyan benga.

Altogether, Kenya is an exhilarating, frustrating and downright bizarre place.

You won’t find anywhere quite like it again.

Rent this film Out of Africa, directed by Sydney Pollock.

Read this book Ngugi was Thiong’o (pictured) is one of Kenya’s most revered and controversial writers, whose harrowing criticisms of the Kenyan establishment landed him in jail for a year and lost him his job at Nairobi University, eventually leading him to exile. It’s documented in Detained – A Prison Writer’s Diary.

Drink this Kenya has a long tradition of producing its own bootleg liquor and while it is enticing, State highly recommends you stay well clear of Chang’a. In 2005, 48 people near Machakos died after drinking a dodgy batch of the stuff.

Some of the most dangerous Chang’a comes from Kisli and it is fermented with marijuana twigs, battery alkaline, formalin and cactus mash: just slightly lethal. We recommend pombe, a local beer usually made with bananas or millet and sugar. It won’t kill you.

Eat this Chapatti: the ubiquitous wholemeal bread made with salt and water that is fried up and used for breakfast, lunch and dinner in East Africa.

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State

Alanis Morissette

Jagged Little Album Words by Joe Crosby

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State

Alanis Morissette is calmly gazing out at the Los Angeles expanse from the 12th-story window of a West Hollywood office building, when State enters the room. She’s serene, content even, and in the brief moment before she turns to greet her distraction, you can see that this is someone who has recently passed through an existential crossroads. Granted, that’s not the sort of thing someone looks like, but if crisis survival wore a face, this would be it.

It was “an existential cracking open”, she’d later correct. And this, despite her well-known spiritual inclinations and emotional songwriting, should come as a surprise.

If you were to look back, say, 13 years, you’d find an international debut that has, to this point, been her insurmountable benchmark. In fact, four albums and seven Grammies later, Jagged Little Pill continues to be her defining work.

But not necessarily for the obvious reasons.

Morissette’s music, then and since, has been introspective, but as much, it’s been reactionary: a self at odds or in accordance with the world around it. To wit: Jagged Little Pill was filled with all the heavy-loaded, lyrically candid exclamations of a feminist against the world, while 2004’s So-Called Chaos dripped with the sweet, saccharine honeydew of someone in love. So, even as the tone and delivery of her songs changed, thematically, they were coming from the same place: a place born in the fire of that first record. No matter the sound, each time Morissette was carving her piece in a grander puzzle.

But for her latest album, Flavours Of Entanglement, she’s tossed that template out the window. Her examination of identity is certainly aware of the external forces of life, yet it seeks to exist despite them, not with or in reaction to them. Sort of a ‘self for self’s sake’. Hence, the existential crisis. Hence, the surprise.

“I’d rather put my focus on what’s going in here [she points to her head], rather than put it on what’s going on out there, in a symptomatic way,” she explains. “I can’t control it, but I can control this.”

Her songs almost explicitly make such proclamations, but not with the ease that she may speak of it today. With allusions to a life lived and ensuing aspirations, there’s the sense in her lyrics that she is reluctantly moving on. It’s not something she wants to do, per se, but rather something she has to do.

“There is an imperative energy to this record, subject matterwise. It’s really letting go of all of my addictions: love addiction, workaholism, holding onto things,” she admits. “And having hit rock bottom in the way that I did over the last couple of years, there was really nothing else to do.”

Rock bottom, in her view, hit when she and her former fiancé, actor Ryan Reynolds, ended their long engagement in February 2007. Somewhat coincidentally, it was just a month prior to that when Morissette and producer Guy Sigsworth (Bjork, Imogen Heap) began working together on

Alanis Morissette

this record.

In fact, Morissette says, everything on Flavours of Entanglement was written in real-time, as this break up was happening, where before, she had always written in hindsight.

“Usually if something perilous is happening, I can’t write, I’m just paralysed,” she admits. “So, to show up in the studio every day was like a life raft for me.”

Suffice to say, if her songs carry with them the air of reluctance, it might be most accurately explained by the causal relationship between her personal life and her songwriting. Causal as it may be, she is still letting go, disencumbering herself from what might otherwise be laments, had this occurred a decade, or even an album, earlier.

“And that’s kind of what’s happening with this phoenix rising thing: that’s what the last year has been about,” she says. “[Before] I kept thinking that at some point, I’d reach the proverbial finish line. And it was torturing me, because I was constantly living like ‘When that happens, I’ll be OK, but for now I’m tortured.’ So it really just inspired me to figure out how to have some semblance of well-being and peace now.”

If her inspiration is decidedly different than her previous work, so too is Sigsworth’s technical hand in production.

His electronic touches are in stark contrast to the broad instrumental strokes found elsewhere in Morissette’s catalogue.

Just when you think some eastern influences (strings, percussion) might lay the groundwork for one of Morissette’s slower, vocally quivering siren calls, heavy bass and synth drive in, and an understated intro immediately becomes a thumping dance-rock beat. While his computer tinkering doesn’t always comfortably complement her voice sonically, it does, at times, aid in matters of conveyance.

To be sure, that dichotomy – her peace existing separately from the surrounding emotional turmoil – couldn’t be expressed honestly by her words alone. If she had attempted to do so, she would only be trying to control both factors through her lyrics.

At which point, her claims of focusing inwardly would seem clichéd and disingenuous. But that’s where Sigsworth steps in. His production offers the tumult to her unfettered serenity. In that way, he keeps her honest.

The Morissette-Sigsworth collaboration and resulting electronic turn may be lost on some Morissette loyalists, but Flavours Of Entanglement might still deliver its message. That is, as Morissette has learned, “to accept one’s humanity: the fragility, the frailty, the fierceness, all of the colours, just letting it be OK ... to be human. It’s intense to be human.”

While this record won’t likely replace Pill’s benchmark status, it’s reasonable to assume that this new Alanis Morissette would be OK with the results either way.

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S AT U R DAY J U N E 21 AN D R E W S L A N E TH EATR E

D O O R S 7. 3 0 • T I C K E T S 1 8 F R O M R O A D R E C O R D S , C I T Y D I S C S , S P I N D I Z Z Y , W A V B O X O F F I C E 1 8 9 0 2 0 0 0 7 8 & O N L I N E AT W W W. T I C K E T S . I E

W W W. M Y S PA C E . C O M / U M A C K P R O D U C T I O N S W W W. M Y S PA C E . C O M / L I A R S L I A R S L I A R S

15.6.08 12.6.08

13.6.08 14.6.08

14.6.08 14.6.08

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Input 73

State reviews & previews

albums Can Coldplay finally win over the doubters? State isn’t so sure but is impressed by the results. The old guard of Weller, Diamond and Green attempt to ring the changes.

Jape, Halves, Carly Sings, New Amusement and So Cow fly the flag.

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{

★★★★★ ★★★★ ★★★ ★★ ★

digital More from Nine Inch Nails, the complete picture from My Morning Jacket, African guitars and old skool hip-hop.

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dvd After the hype has died down, does Juno live up to its billing? Rom-com purgatory with 27 Dresses, and the stirring true story of The Diving Bell And The Butterfly.

Plus the latest music DVDs doing the rounds.

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tv Here comes the summer, there goes the telly: the shows that are worth watching and one that most definitely isn’t.

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books Patrick McGrath’s fascinating new novel Trauma, punks in pictures and the only self-help writer worth reading.

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games

op by sam lare

Has the PS3 finally got its first classic shooter franchise since Resistance? Ubisoft’s Haze gets the State treatment.

With their new album clocking in at just half an hour, Oppenheimer waste no time making their pop point. Rich in synth-pop hooks and supplemented with guitar fuzz, Take The Whole Midrange And Boost It is a perfect antidote to anything with a less sunnier outlook. That would be everything then.

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Albums

Coldplay

illustration by brenb

Viva La Vida or Death And All His Friends

(emi)

As with every record since their debut, Coldplay’s fourth album has been talked up as a voyage into pastures new and the introduction of Brian Eno as producer suggests only one thing – stadium rock band attempt to become interesting. Throw in Chris Martin’s frequent forays into hip-hop and the album’s bizarre title/artwork combination and the world is primed for something a bit different from Coldplay. Odd then that they chose to lead with ‘Violet Hill’, a record/download/ marketing tool that doesn’t exactly tear up the blueprint. Cast aside the fuss about its method of delivery and Coldplay’s brave new dawn was looking decidedly overcast.

As it is, it doesn’t take Viva La Vida long to state its case, nor to demonstrate Eno’s influence. ‘Life In Technicolour’ arrives, not with a bang or even a mournful piano, but with a wave of shimmering keyboards. As the track builds, you wait for that first big chorus yet it never comes, nor does the appearance of any vocal outside of some background effects. Coldplay mark 4 are here and they’re not in any hurry.

When you do get to the album’s first song proper, it’s a weird one alright. “There’s no light over London today” offers ‘Cemeteries Of London’, an entry into the world of witches, ghosts and the dead set to what sounds like a bizarre old folk song. Aside from the ‘la la’ chorus and brief snatch of piano at the end, you’d be pushed to identify it as Coldplay – which is probably the point.

Most strikingly, it feels less and less like the Chris Martin show. For such a charismatic frontman, he fulfils an understated role here. His vocals are more intimate, warmer and less reliant on the overused falsetto of the past. The lyrics too avoid big issue sermonising for the personal.

“For some reason I can’t explain, I know St Peter won’t call my name” he offers on ‘Viva La Vida’s cheery take on self doubt and disillusion, while the record’s other title track finds him imploring “come over and be patient, just don’t worry”.

If Martin’s performance is low key, the rest of the record staggers with its ambition. ‘Lost!’ offers programmed percussion, Hammond organ and a gospel feel alongside Jonny Buckland stadium rock guitar; ‘42’ moves from a ’70s Elton John first half, through an Eastern style middle eight into a stirring upbeat song; ‘Strawberry

Swings’ is built on an almost African guitar and mesmeric percussion. It is far more than the work of a standard bass, drums, guitar and vocals rock band – there is in fact precious little straight guitar on the record – but more a genuine exploration of what they could achieve in the studio. It could have all been a disaster, collapsing under the weight of intent (several tracks are made up of two separate songs) but somehow it all works, this madness – although you shudder to think what would have happened if the rumoured Timbaland collaboration had materialised. As it is, Eno has guided them with a steady and graceful hand, balancing the extravagant with the simple and serene. Coldplay’s grand folly it isn’t.

Will any of this change the two opposite perceived wisdoms surrounding this band – that of the millions of those who have bought their previous three albums and those who break into a sneer whenever their name is mentioned?

Certainly some of the former may find Viva La Vida hard to take and it would take a seismic shift to alter some negative opinions, but the truth is that Coldplay have recaptured their own destiny and made a record that may well come to define them. ~ Phil Udell

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Albums Damien Dempsey The Rocky Road

(sony)

The idea of Damien Dempsey doing a ballads album was hardly a worry, as it’s such an obvious move. He deals with ‘The Rocky Road’ and ‘Schooldays Over’ with aplomb (as if he’d written them) but it’s the sight of ‘Rainy Night In Soho’ on the track listing that makes one quake with the prospects ahead.

Covering Shane McGowan’s most fully realised song (next to ‘Fairytale Of New York’) is the one to be squeamish about: it would be best if he re-shone this particular diamond instead of recutting it. He does it beautifully, however, an understated delivery treating the original Pogues arrangement with the respect it deserves and singing those beautiful lines in perfectly measured tones: “Sometimes I wake up in the morning / The ginger lady by my bed / Covered in a cloak of silence / I hear you talking in my head / Well I’m not singing for the future / And I’m not dreaming of the past / I’m not talking of the first time / I never dream about the last.”

Elsewhere, this a huge home win. Dempsey’s voice has matured beautifully and his singing style is a little less forceful, with the Dubliner clearly lost in the history of all these wonderful words. ‘The Twang Man’ conjures up a log fire, a glass of Bushmills and rakes of pints (the history of these songs are imbued with alcohol). By the time the record gets to ‘The Hacker From Grouse Hall’ we’re into hardcore old school ballads territory, while ‘Madam I’m A Darlin’ very much reminds of Christy Moore. Indeed, Dempsey is wonderfully at ease with everything here and there’s hardly a blemish on show.

There’s been many loose platitudes and hasty words about Damien Dempsey joining the ranks of the great Irish folk singers. By taking the bull by the horns, he’s asking for absolute judgement, and the good news is that he comes through unscathed: a giant singer, standing with the best. ~ Durell Connor.

The Whigs Mission Control

(ato records)

For a casual observer, the signs are fairly ominous from the off for Atlanta, Georgia outfit The Whigs: signed to Dave Matthews’ ATO imprint, there could very easily be a stench of boring old-man rock off them. Yet, their boss’ jaded MOR shenanigans haven’t really rubbed off on the duo. Instead, they look to more audacious elder statesmen like Robert Pollard or Paul Westerberg for inspiration.

Nonetheless, mere talent, strong influences and ferocious toil do not necessarily produce a quality record. While Mission Control strives to embody the spirit of American underground rock of the past few decades, it more often that not comes up short.

It is a real pity, as there is genuine potential

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here. Opener ‘Like A Vibration’ is a hardworking rocker with pop hooks, and while not exactly wildly original, it should be a template for a healthier outing. When they break from convention, The Whigs show some true form: ‘I Never Want To Go Home’ is a charming slice of sweet southern rock that almost resembles a less-beefy, and indeed beardy, version of label-mates My Morning Jacket; while ‘Hot Bed’ deftly blends Go-Betweens’ jangly guitars with strong rhythmic movements, showing what could have been.

Perhaps next time out, The Whigs will think more outside the box. ~ Ciarán Ryan

Joan As Police Woman To Survive

(reveal records)

A record to put the fear of god into anyone with intimacy issues, Joan Wasser follows up her acclaimed 2006 debut Real Life with a careful, delicate, and at times verrrrry slooooow sophomore effort. With a voice so piercing and immediate that even a beaten up taped copy of this fine album would still sound like she’s in the corner of the room singing to you, every note is caressed perfectly.

To Survive starts not with a bang but with four minutes of foreplay, on the somewhat frustratingly patient ‘Honor Wishes’. In fact, things don’t swing into action until about halfway through, as more gentle toying with our affections occurs on ‘Holiday’ and the album’s low point ‘To Be Lonely’. But just when you think she’s going to confound previous predictions of idiosyncratic genius by becoming a one trick pony, she soars on ‘Magpies’, upbeat horns and all. Then comes the seductive industrial echo of ‘Start Of My Heart’, beautiful despite the feedback reaching Nick McCabe levels of distortion.

The clever, dark funk of ‘Furious’ would make best bud Loud Reed proud, while the swirling ‘Hard White Wall’ will have Rufus Wainwright pulling that spiky hair of his out in frustration at not thinking of this wonderful melody first.

Admittedly, on first listen, parts of To Survive can seem like a mish-mash of half finished ideas, but

once Wasser gets you in her grip, it becomes addictive. For those thousands already in love with her voice, this will be everything they could have wished for. ~ John Joe Worrall

Booka Shade The Sun And The Neon Light (get physical) “Out in clubland having fun and now I’m hiding from the sun,” is how Marc Almond described it in ‘Bedsitter’. The empty space that torments the brain after too many occasions watching the dancefloor’s searing lights turn to the burn of a new day: a much loathed state that plagues artistic creatures of the night. For dance duo Booka Shade, The Sun And The Neon Light is their comedown album after their euphoric breakthrough record, Movements, and the mammoth world tour it spawned.

The Berlin-based pair have turned their backs on the infectious grooves that made ‘Body Language’ and ‘Manderine Girl’ 2005’s biggest tunes and the all-encompassing, glorious emotion of ‘In White Rooms’, in favour of sobbing strings and tense, insect-like drums that wash over the majority of these tracks.

Although things look up on the stylish synth pop number, ‘Control Me’ and the languid ‘Karma Car’, lead single ‘Charlotte’ is the most upbeat and commercial song by far. Its funky saxophone line tries to cajole but the momentum is still only at waltz pace compared to past efforts.

Those drawn to electronic music’s more minimal aspects will enjoy the trip on offer here.

However, in terms of futuristic melancholia, it pales when held up to the likes of Goldie’s ‘Inner City Life’, Massive Attack’s ‘Unfinished Sympathy’ or the average Carl Craig record.

The Sun…is the sound of a burnt out band exorcising their demons and as that, its point is made eloquently. However, for Booka Shade’s true brilliance to shine, the nurse recommends a few nights in with Radox before album number four. ~ Saoirse Patterson

Jape Ritual

(co-op)

During the lengthy period of anticipation for the release of Richie Egan’s third album, Jape has built up a massive live following and quite a reputation as ‘the act most likely to’, with music fans eager to hear his near-fabled set of new songs.

Finally immortalised outside of the live show’s party-zone, a closer listen to these stonkingly bombastic tunes divulges their richly profound nature and the delicate voice behind the infectious carousel choruses.

Egan is a distinctly Irish character; the ‘cheeky messer’. When he was younger, he probably made funny sounds from the back of the class and answered back to teachers. Now he has transformed his energies into mashing together

Albums

[

Will Oldham’s alter ego adopts a much sunnier disposition... and it works.

]

Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy Lie Down In The Light

(domino)

Now I see a lightness; in the wake of the intimate tone and portentous strings of last year’s The Letting Go, Lie Down in the Light finds our favourite hirsute mountain prophet doing just that. The album, Will Oldham’s fifth under the Bonnie moniker (numerous side projects and collaborative efforts notwithstanding) betrays both lyrical optimism and richly textured musical arrangements, neither of which are immediately synonymous with this most singular of artists.

Oldham’s weighty thematic preoccupations – sin, redemption, love, god, the importance of family – may be recurring but they are expressed in less sombre fashion than we have come to expect. None of which is to suggest that these songs will be worrying the dance charts any time soon and in truth, the record is of a piece with the other fine albums in Oldham’s catalogue.

As was the case with The Letting Go, the singer’s worldly-wise, half-spoken vocals are at times accompanied by a female counterpart, in this case Ashley Webber, to winning effect, especially on the playful ‘You Want That Picture’, their wistful harmonies creating a sunny glow indicative of the album as a whole.

Although Oldham’s countrified acoustic guitar strumming is to the fore, Nashville producer Mark Nevers (who has worked with Calexico and Lambchop) has textured his traditional whiskey-soaked sound with layers of inventive instrumentation that lends the record an expansive feeling, never more so than on the sinuous clarinet solo that appears In the middle of ‘For Every Field There’s A Mole’.

Lyrically honest and musically adventurous, this is the strongest set we have had from Oldham in some time. ~ David O Mahony

rock guitar (see the snake-charming riff of ‘I Was a Man’), crunchy hip-hop beats, synthesized bleeps and bloops, vocoder harmonies, transcendent pop melodies, and lyrics like “We smoked a tea-bag/ To see what would happen”.

The simplistic yet striking everyman philosophising which defined ‘Floating’ continues here with lines such as “There’s a tournament in my soul/ It’s a tournament I can’t televise” and ‘Graveyard’s “It’s such a short, short distance from the nipple to the soil”.

This is an album concerned with the thematics of death but the tonality and audaciousness of life. On the almost anti-folk ‘Phil Lynott’, Egan reckons that when he dies he’ll be reduced to being “a dead man who plays the bass, from Crumlin”. But going by the strength of this record and the instrumentation employed, he’ll be known for more than just that. ~ Bobby Aherne

Subtle ExitingARM

(lex)

ExitingARM may be one of the poppiest records to come out of left-field this year, but Subtle are in no danger of losing their “genreless” niche. As

the final instalment of a cerebral three-part story arc, what separates this album from its predecessors is the presence of obvious singles.

Yet despite being laden with hooks and harmonies, the catchiness of songs such as ‘The Crow’ only highlights the opaqueness within. As ever, Doseone’s rapid-fire poetry bombards the listener with cryptic metaphors, abstract imagery and tongue-twisting enunciations, while depicting a nightmarish realm of elaborate mythology.

It’s a landscape that challenges you to scratch beneath the surface and, as much as one may try to take the music at face value, with each listen the album increasingly resembles an unsolvable puzzle. While this raises the question of whether these songs can stand apart from the conceptual labyrinth of the album, it also proves that you don’t necessarily need to understand a song to enjoy it.

Although fans of 2006’s alternative masterpiece For Hero: For Fool may find this venture far less groundbreaking, its pleasantly confounding pop sensibilities are bound to send curious newcomers searching through Subtle’s back catalogue. Whether the attention spans of the download generation can grant it the time it requires is another matter. ~ Cian Traynor

Alphabeat This Is Alphabeat

(charisma)

We’ve known for some time that the ‘80s were back (only slightly more refined): Mr Men and Hong Kong Phooey t-shirts are back in the shops, Dallas is to be made into a film, and albums like This is Alphabeat continue to appear on the shelves.

The six-piece from Denmark have been called the best Scandinavian band since Abba (the Cardigans must be turning in their grave). But if that doesn’t put you off, and you’re a fan of all things ’80s, then this might be essential summer listening for you. At this stage, most people have probably heard or seen the video for ‘Fascination’, the toe-tapping track with the kitsch-est use of tambourine since Wham.

Meanwhile, opener ‘Fantastic Six’ sounds like it could be something by Electric Six (only without the humour), ‘Boyfriend’ is reminiscent of early Madonna, ‘What Is Happening’ starts off with a Cerys Matthew-esque drawl, before descending into elements of the B-52’s. Elements of Prefab Sprout run throughout and ‘Touch Me Touching You’ is pure Duran Duran.

Half of the tracks are vaguely reminiscent of theme tunes to ’80s sitcoms (you know the ones

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Albums

[

A hotch-potch of punk and soul, both raw and polished, It shouldn’t work, but it does, beautifully.

]

White Denim Workout Holiday

(full time hobby)

White Denim’s first full-length is a package composed of their two selfreleased EPs which brought them such sudden acclaim, along with some new material. It’s a glorious mess of a record. These songs simply shouldn’t fit together as well as they do, with the knocked-about punk of the opening tracks leading naturally to the melodic soul on display elsewhere: the band don’t care if you’re moving out of pent-up frustration or heartfelt joy, as long as you’re moving.

The mixed palette of styles on display here is intriguing, with White Denim switching smoothly from crafting delicate guitar structures on instrumental tracks like ‘WDA’ to the exhilarating, soulful group vocals of ‘Darksided Computer Mouth’. The overall effect matches their DIY ethic, with James Petralli’s vocals, at once impassioned and raw, underlining the simplicity of these songs.

While the noisier tracks make for a fine introduction to the band, it’s the more straightforwardly melodic cuts that shine. Highlight ‘Don’t Look That Way At It’ melds dreamy guitars with soaring vocals beautifully, while other tracks are put together in an almost cut-up fashion. Their fondness for the bluesy soul of rock ‘n’ roll’s past is certainly their greatest strength, as shown on the final track ‘IEIEI’, a psychedelic jam that abruptly trades its electric guitars for acoustics. It’s a fine closer to the album, showing the band’s knack for bringing youthful originality to an old genre. If you don’t mind the mess, there’s plenty of fun to be had here. ~ Shane Culloty

Sonny J Disastro

(emi)

It’s safe to say that you will hear excerpts of Sonny J’s Disastro before the summer is out.

The thing is, there’s a strong possibility you won’t realise what it is you’re hearing, as it accompanies a goals highlights package, a home renovation show or the ‘best’ moments of some ‘Big Brother’ bore. But the likes of ‘Can’t Stop Moving’, ‘Handsfree’ and ‘Belly Bongo’, with their background party vibes, are prime fodder for plundering by television producers.

That’s the major snag Disastro encounters, it being a record that can often be ignored and easily forgotten. It’s a shame, because the album does throw up some fantastic moments, such as opener ‘Enfant Terrible’, which combines sinister Stooges-style guitars with French schoolgirl chanting. Actually, it’s when Sonny J moves away from the more obvious feel-good big beats that his talent is made apparent. The wonderfully melancholic ‘Cabaret Short Circuit’ is a case in

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point, where plaintive strings meet harps, flutes and harmonica to glorious effect.

Sonny J does pilfer from a multitude of genres, which at least makes the record an interesting listen. ‘Sonnrise’ manages to be influenced by both Indian and country music, while ‘No-Fi’ is both reggae-tinged and Hawking-voiced.

Disastro probably sees itself in the same territory inhabited by the likes of The Go! Team and The Avalanches, yet it never reaches the sonic inventiveness of either. For all its potential, there’s not enough magic to take this album beyond being another average sample-led hip-hop based record. ~ Shane Galvin

Ashlee Simpson Bittersweet World

(polydor)

Junior Simpson’s third album plays like the soundtrack of an American teen-movie. And like such films, it’s the punchy gym-hall cheerleader slices that provide the most fun.

Timbaland-produced single ‘Outta My Head (Ay Ya Ya)’ is by far the most successful offering. With hints of Gwen Stefani’s snarling vocal strength, the track is a pretty perfect pop song: nicely catchy and guaranteed to get high school kids dancing in the stands. In a similar high-energy vein, ‘Ragdoll’ is another of the self-penned record’s standout tracks and wouldn’t seem too foreign coming from a more-together Britney.

Heady and languid, ‘Boys’ covers the summer beach scene intrinsic to every glossy teen flick and will no doubt receive much airplay in the southern American sun.

But it’s when the Texan singer veers into ‘kick-ass’ party-scene territory that things get as cringeworthy as a line from Ms Spear’s Crossroads. A breathy talk-through opens ‘Rule Breaker’, in which Simpson enthusiastically joins Avril and Pink’s school of punky pop. And a similarly knowing spoken dialogue threads through the whole of ‘Hot Stuff’, making for a track few will be able to sit through more than once, despite a catchy hook. Rounding off the record’s various tones, ‘Little Miss Obsessive’ ticks the power ballad box, yet doesn’t come close to topping her biggest hit ‘Pieces of Me’.

Without apology, Simpson confirms that unashamed pop is alive and well in the all-American girl. ~ Jo-ann Hodgson

Flying Lotus Los Angeles

(warp)

It seems Warp are on the money again with their latest signing, introducing Flying Lotus, a soulboy from LA who mixes hip-hop and bleeding edge dance music to create some exhilarating, otherworldly sounds. On Los Angeles, Fly Lo (as he’s known by his homies) wanted to create a ‘visual narrative’ of life in LA.

aubrey edwards

The Golden Girls, Diff’rent Strokes) and all in all, Alphabeat’s debut album churns out infectious retro pop - great background barbecue music (presuming we get a warm summer), but not an album you’ll listen to much once the autumn comes. Enjoy with an ice-cold beer while the weather’s good. ~ Maia Dunphy

5)& %&#65 "-#6.

065 /08

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Albums

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Lush instrumentation and a knack for writing a killer chorus make for a delicious debut. C’est bon.

]

Carly Sings The Glove Thief

(carlysings recordings)

You write musicals at 12; you’re half Russian, half Spanish; you grow up in Wicklow and you end up buying a guitar in Paris two years ago that changes your life. What are you? You’re the jauntiest thing to hit the Irish airwaves in a few years, Carly Sings, that’s who you bloody well are.

Moving on from Henry Kelly-esque introductions this is a debut that is bizarre, beautiful and barmy in places: a record with lyrics that head in an inordinate amount of directions, from obsessive love to malfunctioning hard drives and even a bloke called George who makes Carly horny when he plays with his pony.

‘Worth a listen’ doesn’t really cover this: it may not be the best album of the year by any stretch of the imagination (the dull folksy hum of ‘Eyes Closed’ completely wastes an interesting, vaguely creepy narrative, for instance), but it’s nice to hear someone feeling out their talent in such a gentle, natural manner.

The relative rookie cleverly surrounds herself with able help, including Halfset’s Steve Shannon, and, for the most part, it pays off handsomely.

However, it’s the Adrian Crowley-feted singer’s breathy, sexy, intelligent voice that keeps you coming back, rather than the musicianship or the sometimes twee melodies.

‘Marie Galante’ and ‘L’Amour’ are the (State can’t believe it’s writing this) pièces de résistance: two cute little humdingers in French so darned sweet, they had us searching in vain for the old French to English Collins dictionary from the Leaving Cert. That translates as ‘impressed’ in our language. ~ John Joe Worrall

It’s comes as no surprise to learn that he spent his formative years as a film student: the 17 tracks here play like the soundtrack to a film which captures both the glitter and grime of LA life: no other artist has touched upon so many genres since DJ Shadow.

His imagination and production are both boundless and mouthwateringly creative. We are treated to lush analog waves, gritty distortion, grooving breakdowns, pounding bass and electronics so ambient, it sounds as if they have been somehow passed through water.

Los Angeles is an album of our times, which could only have been created in 2008. It is a sign of our both our ever expanding musical palette and the speed at which we want our music delivered: the songs are presented at a breakneck pace, barely leaving the listener with time to breathe and digest the million beats per second they have just taken in. It’s best to sit back, relax and let them wash over you. ~ Tia Clarke

Al Green Lay It Down

(emi)

When a ‘legend’ reaches a certain age, they are essentially faced with two options: going on an endless tour to pay for pipes and slippers (and whatever else it is that modern pensioners

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splurge on), or requesting that their label hook them up with some hip youngsters. The Reverend Green, vying for the latter, has recorded his new LP with helping hands from the likes of Ahmir Thompson, John Legend and Corinne BaileyRae; kids who have found their fortune trading on Green’s teachings and whose involvement here warrants the shredding of several IOUs. Lay It Down is definitely a ‘nice’ album. The outstanding production makes every instrument sound thermally warm, and Green’s vocal chords, which remain the centrepiece of his work, are as finely-tuned as ever. But this doesn’t merit the effort of listening to songs with cliché-ridden titles like ‘Just for Me’, ‘No One Like You’ and ‘Stay With Me (By The Sea)’.

Soul music, by definition, is music which speaks from the soul, but it seems wrong to suggest that the soul contains nothing but thoughts of earnest fidelity. ‘I’m Wild About You’ is the closest thing here to having lyrics with more than one layer of meaning, but only because Green admits to having written it whilst watching Animal Planet. So admittedly, the snare drum sounds fantastic and his voice is lovely, but does anybody really want to hear a 62-year old man telling them that “I either love you or I die/ I gotta have you in my life/ I really wanna make you my wife/ You got the love I need, babe”? ~ Bobby Aherne

The Fratellis Here We Stand

(island)

The sophomore effort from Scottish indie guitarniks, The Fratellis is pretty much a case of as you were. This is feel-good rock, and will doubtless go down a treat on the summer festival circuit, but this time around, State had hoped for a little more substance behind the ‘70s-inspired rifferama of ‘Shameless’ and ‘Look Out Sunshine’.

Instead, we get the same combination of running guitar licks, frenetic drumming and shouty backing vocals. While tracks like current single ‘Mistress Mabel’ and ‘Acid Jazz Singer’ are surefire radio hits, it all becomes a little indie-by-numbers two thirds of the way through, with ‘Babydoll’ sounding like a Cast cast-off , the T-Rex-lite of ‘Tell Me A Lie’ and the Who-aping ‘Lupe Brown’.

‘Milk And Money’ and ‘A Heady Tale’ are more interesting, proving that they can up their game when the mood takes them. The former’s a cracking ballad-turned-stomper that allows the lyrics to shine, while the latter starts gently, before the middle eight transforms into a country-tinged hoedown on Sauchiehall Street. At least it shows a willingness to experiment that’s sadly lacking throughout the rest of the album.

In Jon Fratelli, they have a lyricist of some talent, who’s more than capable of penning a cutting couplet when the mood takes him. Unfor-

Albums tunately, the band’s glam-heavy riff-robbing isn’t quite as on-the-money. ~ John Walshe

Royworld Man In The Machine

(virgin)

Despite the name, which conjures up images of train spotters and anoraks, UK indie darlings Royworld are certainly worth a listen, with this catchy, melodic debut managing to stay just the right side of pop, without sinking too deep into the overly commercial, radio friendly material that’s churned out quicker than the charts can keep up.

However, by the end of these 12 tracks, there’s an overwhelming feeling of having heard it all before. Not surprising when you realise how much Royworld raid the ‘80s for inspiration, with echoes of Fleetwood Mac, Talking Heads and Peter Gabriel throughout.

That said, frontman Rod Futrille has a decent voice, which perfectly complements tracks like the infectious ‘Elasticity’, current single ‘Dust’

Digital

and the title track, a slightly eclectic guitar driven tune that will keep you coming back for ‘just one more listen’.

The majority of Man In The Machine is radiofriendly in the extreme, albeit with a couple of tarnishes, like the needless vocal effects on ‘Astronaut’. That aside, this is a solid collection from a band we’ll surely be hearing more of as the year progresses. ~ Ciara O’Brien

So Cow I’m Siding With My Captors (covert bear records)

As a general rule, truly great pop records must be short: they should hit you with all the power of a juggernaut, then whiz off into the distance, leaving you reeling and lusting for more. There is no room for poncey middle eights or fiddly outros. A good pop album is like a weekend fling: it offers cheap thrills and never outstays its welcome. With 11 tracks clocking in at a succinct 28 minutes, So Cow’s second album I’m Siding with

My Captors is the perfect pop bed-fellow.

It’s a rush of jangly gems that sound like some forgotten Postcard Records release, chock-full of glorious fizzy treats that leave you as giddy as a twirl on the Waltzers. Sparky and wry, Brian Kelly can create tunes that sound as vital and as exuberant as The Television Personalities, with a dash of Dan Deacon for good measure. Look no further than the sublime ‘One Hundred Helens’ or the effervescent album opener ‘Exclamation Mark’. With its fuzzed-up guitars and basic drum machine beats, it’s Graham Coxon without the self-indulgent whinging, although So Cow’s odes to wistful teenage growing pains and brief encounters has got more self deprecating lyrics than you can wave a damp hankie at.

“I’m the boy that hormones forgot” the Tuam tunesmith cries at his Belle and Sebastian best on ‘Halcyon Days’. Tweeness aside, I’m Siding With My Captors’ simple pure pop genius will leave you goggle-eyed in wonderment, with your trigger finger firmly on the repeat button. This is a catchy, captivating bone-fide pop album which deserves to be cherished. ~ Jennifer Gannon

~ Niall Byrne

but is available for free download right now.

Last year, Reznor released Ghosts I-V, a free 36 track instrumental album and this continues his digital download explorations. Also, it’s bloody good, so that helps. The Slip is available for free in the following digital formats: MP3 lossless (FLAC or M4A) or better than CD Quality WAV files and it’s under a Creative Commons licence so you can remix it, share it with friends, give it to strangers, put in on your blog etc.

to record a live session consisting of two of the highlights from 12 Crass Songs and two unreleased tracks, ‘Wait it Out’ and ‘Wildflowers’. http://tinyurl.com/6nghrv

http://theslip.nin.com/

Various Artists Forgotten Guitars from Mozambique

My Morning Jacket Full Catalogue

By now, us across the Atlantic should surely have caught up with our Yank counterparts regarding the brilliance of these Kings of Southern Rock. The imminent Oxegen appearance may help matters somewhat, as will their new album Evil Urges. eMusic’s subscription-based service allows you to dip into their back catalogue at your own pace. The complete collection is available, from studio albums to live releases, EPs and other odds and ends.

Available on eMusic

Nine Inch Nails The Slip

Hailed as a return to form for Trent and company, The Slip will be released on CD in July

These field recordings, captured by Hugh Tracey, of solo and duo performances during the ‘50s demonstrates that the blues were rife all over the southeastern African country during the period. The guitar work sounds strikingly similar to the likes of American blues legend Blind Willie McTell but with distinct African singing voices like Felicano Gomes who, we’re informed, sings about the about the problems of having children, the promiscuity of women, snobbery, jealousy and the supernatural.

Available on eMusic

Jeffrey Lewis and the Jitters Daytrotter Session

After releasing a covers album of ‘80s British punk band Crass’ songs late last year, in his own unique folk style, Jeffrey, his brother Jack and band dropped into the Daytrotter studio

The Cool Kids Bake Sale EP

Illinois-born Chuck Inglish and Mikey Rocks call themselves “the new black version of the Beastie Boys” and their sound certainly harks back to Licensed To Ill era Rick Rubin jams. This 10-track EP (album, no?) utilises the same minimal arrangements used back in the days of LL Cool J and Kool Moe Dee. The usage of spoken words on ‘What Up Man’ instead of bass and clap samples is genius. The Cool Kids – Bringin’ ’88 back.

Available on iTunes, eMusic

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Albums The Charlatans You Cross My Path

(cooking vinyl)

Tim Burgess’ trademark indifferent Mancunian snarl hasn’t changed a single bit since he was a fledgling in the UK baggie scene, and these 10 tracks of blissed-out indie rock sound like we’ve been directly transported to a muddy festival in 1995 and are watching The Charlatans in our ripped denims and Blur t-shirts.

Single ‘Bad Days’ is one of the highlights, a brooding Joy Division-esque track featuring a killer riff which creeps up on you, coupled with neat drum beats, and a dark and catchy chorus.

Then Burgess goes all Sylvia Plath on us: “Playing dead under the covers/ I don’t ever feel like waking up”.

‘The Misbegotten’ is a melancholic yet glam rock lament. It suggests that even Burgess is disillusioned with his stature as an indie messiah: “It seems lately I’ve been struck/ With what I really am/ You can’t see it in a picture/ Or in a photograph”. Although these lyrics mark a definite maturity, it seems Burgess is not quite ready to hang up his god complex just yet, as the title track sees him proclaiming, “I am the voice of the Almighty/ I am the sound of your own dreams”.

Megalomaniac lyrics aside, You Cross My Path has some great music, with definite blues influences, gospel organs, stabbing guitars and wailing vocals. It’s inevitably going to go down well with long-time fans, but for newcomers looking for something to spark their interest, it’s all too derivative to warrant further inspection. ~ Tia Clarke

Neil Diamond Home Before Dark

(columbia)

Despite a long and varied career, few household names polarise listeners like Neil Diamond. Now in the twilight of his years, Diamond has realised (at the insistence of producer Rick Rubin) that if he is to be remembered as a songwriter worth canonising, he has a point to prove.

With 2005’s stripped-back 12 Songs, Diamond

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properly engaged the creative process for the first time in decades, surprising the critics. Home Before Dark represents another shot at redemption.

Backed by the fine musicianship of Heartbreakers Mike Campbell and Benmont Tench, its themes of regret, second chances and the desire to make good are perfectly apt.

Though Rubin has banished the over-the-top orchestrations once more, the lack of embellishments leaves Diamond’s melodramatic vibrato exposed, straining awkwardly into lines such as “We have the power of two...me and you”.

Where others treat intimate sentiments with subtlety, the showman finds restraint difficult and frequently confuses sincerity for bombast.

Overall, its laboured simplicity smacks of an artist plagued with self-doubt, desperately searching for a swan song that will finally rid the stigma.

This album is unlikely to win over those who have never taken Neil Diamond seriously. It will, however, appeal to those who may have once considered him a credible force, a demographic that also happens to acquire music the old fashioned way. ~ Cian Traynor

The Legacy Beyond Hurt Beyond Hell

(visible noise)

Hailing from the steel city of Sheffield, hardcore metal upstarts The Legacy are already synonymously linked with metal of the material kind, and are making serious inroads into the musical kind.

There is nothing overtly new sound-wise, but originality in arrangement and a broad influence base see them though. Some sterling, melodic but meaty riffs see The Legacy sporadically teetering on the edge of the kind of commercial validity that fills arenas. ‘Fire And Brimstone’ opens with a familiar guitar intro, reminiscent of The Pixies, before returning to crashing tidal chords: brief flashes of the epic make this a stand-out, whilst hinting at a potential rarely seen in Europe and capable of slugging it out Stateside.

However, potential aside, at present the majority of tracks will lend themselves far better to the live scene: the locomotive punk of ‘Ill fated’ and ‘Remnants’ will have purist mosh monsters planning stage invasions months in advance of any upcoming gigs.

If they’re to progress from the club into the stadium however, they’ll have to evolve, but on the strength of this early promise, we wouldn’t bet against them. ~ Martin McIver

The Bug London Zoo

(ninja tune)

The Bug, essentially the alias of Kevin Martin, is firmly rooted in London streets, Brixton soundsystems and the Notting Hill Carnival – a multicultural pick ‘n’ mix. Alongside the obvious Jamaican dancehall and reggae influences, he

also incorporates dubstep, electro and grime.

London Zoo is awash with guest collaborators, from Warrior Queen to Tippa Irie, Spaceape, Killa P and Ricky Ranking. Beginning aggressively in your face, the album settles a little over its course, leaving the listener in a slightly stand-offish position by the end.

Commencing with a furious ‘Anger’, Tippa Irie lists all the things that enrage him, encompassing everything from poverty to suicide bombers, to the destruction of the Ozone Layer. Unfortunately, the track never really gets going, which reduces the power of Tippa’s message. ‘Skeng’ suffers from banal clichéd lyrics (“Smoke Weed? Yes, indeed, that’s what we need”), delivered poorly in a yawnsome monotone. Warrior Queen puts in a superior performance, resulting in the most successful collaboration on the album, which also works as a much needed contrast to FlowDan’s pseudo-macho rantings on ‘Jah War’ and Spaceape’s tired complaining on ‘Fuckaz’.

But the problem with London Zoo does not rest solely with the vocalists. Even when The Bug presents us with an instrumental track, in the shape of ‘Freak Freak’, it just meanders sinisterly without doing anything constructive. These tunes may work on a massive dub soundsystem but as an armchair listening experience, London Zoo ultimately disappoints. ~ Shane Galvin

Halves Haunt Me When I’m Drowsy (hate is the enemy)

Post-rock: bastion of the pretentious, where music is described by fans with such gravity you’d think they were listening to the whispering voice of Jesus trapped in a seashell, rather than the musical doodlings of some ex art students.

It seems to be universally accepted that bands who create “soundscapes” as opposed to pop songs occupy a loftier musical plane than your average Trilby-donning skinny jean clad guitar bands, but just as there appears to be an endless supply of production line Doherty wannabes, there are just as many sensitive souls tinkling on their Casios, dreaming of geysers and glacial surroundings.

Dublin quartet Halves wear their influences on their tatty sleeves, the swirling guitars, the chiming bells, the ethereal vocals, the delicate arrangements: so far, so familiar. Their mini album Haunt Me When I’m Drowsy is filled with the hypnotic fragile splendour one expects from the genre. It elegantly envelopes the listener in its aural lushness on tracks such as the muscular, surging ‘May Your Enemies Never Find Happiness’, the electro-tinged ‘Medals’, with its pretty jewellery box tinkles and the Godspeed-esque ‘The Lamp Dies… A Sleeping Circuit Wakes’.

Like an aural postcard, Haunt Me When I’m Drowsy is undeniably beautiful and very polished but ultimately remains quite blank and hollow, lacking in the strength, depth and atmospherics

Albums

[

Jason Pierce returns from a near-death experience with a more considered, acoustic collection.

]

Spiritualized Songs in A&E

(spaceman recordings)

They say what doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger, and Jason Pierce’s brush with death has clearly breathed life into his sixth album. The macabre title refers to the Spiritualized chief’s bout of double pneumonia during the recording process.

“Think I’ll drink myself into a coma/ I’ll take every way out I can find”, he croaks on ‘Death Take Your Fiddle’, over the creepy accompaniment of a respirator aiding a patient’s gasping breath, while the album’s closing track, ‘Goodnight Goodnight’ fades out with the words, “funeral parlour, funeral parlour…

However, in J. Spaceman’s trademark style, he manages to make what could be a morose affair into something ultimately uplifting, thanks to his beloved orchestral arrangements, gospel choir and the otherworldly ‘Harmony’ sections.

Pierce’s penchant for musical interludes is continued here with a twist: phases and drones have been replaced with six eerie classical soundscapes, named in honour of Harmony Korine, for whom he composed the score for last year’s film, Mister Lonely (and whose wife Rachel duets on ‘Don’t Hold Me Close’).

While there’s a mini wig-out on the album’s longest track, ‘Baby I’m Just A Fool’ and the wah-wah fest, ‘I Gotta Fire’, the wall of sound, kaleidoscopic glow that was central to Spiritualized’s allure is muted here. The relentless acoustic introspection won’t suit all fans, but the new maturity and honesty in Pierce’s songwriting should soothe the sick and weary. ~ Saoirse Patterson

needed for it to be truly memorable. Hopefully, given time to progress, Halves will manage to create something that elevates them from able emulators to true originators. ~ Jennifer Gannon

Bon Iver For Emma, Forever Ago

(4ad)

Written and recorded in a log cabin in Northern Wisconsin at the end of 2006, For Emma, Forever Ago, the debut album from Bon Iver (Justin Vernon) was initially released in a limited edition of just 500 copies. However, word-of-mouth saw the American indie-folkster striking a collective nerve (probably just below Devandra Banhart’s elbow), with the result that it’s now getting a wider release.

If acoustic, introspective soul-searching is your idea of heaven, with gently strummed guitars, vocals so falsetto they make Neil Young seem like a baritone, and lyrics so oblique they’d make Thom Yorke jealous, then look no further. The entire album is ostensibly a paean to love lost (the Emma of the title is apparently Vernon’s ex-girlfriend).

Most of For Emma... is gorgeous. Opener ‘Flume’ is the finest three and a half minutes of whimsical melancholy you’re likely to hear all year, while ‘Skinny Love’ is the best kind of campfire singalong. The multi-tracked vocals, particularly on ‘The Wolves (Act I and II)’ give a

nice choral effect, like a bunch of sopranos in Nashville, while the tattoo-like drums on ‘Team’ and the brass on the beautiful ‘For Emma’ are welcome additions. It does all get a little pastoral after a while, however, and could probably have done with a little change in pace and some more ‘oomph’ injected into proceedings. Perhaps with a little more money and maybe a strong producer, Bon Iver will create a real masterpiece, but for now, this is a hypnotic opening salvo. ~ John Walshe

Quiet Village Silent Movie

(!k7 records)

It’s fitting that Quiet Village should list “BBC library music” among their chief inspirations, for one of the first thoughts provoked by Silent Movie was the BBC Sound Effects Volume 5 record that was the bane of Chris the Sheep’s existence in Father Ted. That’s not to say the album isn’t musical, just that the duo, London crate-diggers Joel Martin and Matt Edwards, are keenly aware of the power of everyday sounds to delicately alter moods. This approach is subtly exploited throughout their debut LP, from the waves and seagulls action of ‘Victoria’s Secret’ to the coffeehouse chatter that underpins the free-flowing Massive Attack-meets-Zeppelin Unplugged vibe of ‘Free Rider’.

The concept is simple: Martin and Edwards take fairly standard pop tunes from the disco era and, rather than applying a hatchet, pick out specific themes and work them. So the gorgeous, haunting oboe motif from the Chi-Lites’ ‘The Coldest Days Of My Life’ is remixed and becomes ‘Victoria’s Secret.’ It sounds amazing: we’d expect nothing else from people who’ve devoted their lives to listening closely to records with headphones on. And yet the idea is never developed, recast in a new sonic context or introduced as a recurring theme later on: it’s just an idea plucked from obscurity, and there it remains.

The lingering dullness of this cagey reproduction is made all the more frustrating by the success of tracks like ‘Free Rider’ and ‘Pillow Talk,’ busy multifarious arrangements that succeed by radically re-contextualising their subjects rather than repeating them in a slightly different voice. ~ Dave Donnelly

Gary Dunne Simple Truth

(honesty records)

Simple Truth is London-based Irish singer/ songwriter Gary Dunne’s second album release, and it’s full of very radio friendly folk pop songs, destined to stick in your heads for a long time.

Dunne’s songs have catchy tunes as well as meaningful lyrics, an ideal combination if

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Albums

[

Sprawling double-CD collection shines in places, but ultimately falls short on quality control.

]

Paul Weller 22 Dreams

(universal)

Recorded over a year in Weller’s own Black Barn Studios, his ninth full length solo outing is a kaleidoscopic double album, brimming with the product of an experimenting talent. Roughly half of the tracks are decent efforts.

Notables include the lead off, ‘Light Nights’, with its bluegrass strings and Weller’s Steve Earle-like falsetto, the haunting, Mike Skinner influenced protest song ‘God’, the sparse, piano laden ‘Invisible’; and the passionate ballad about fatherhood in ‘Why Walk When You Can Run’.

‘Echoes Round the Sun’, which features long time collaborator and fan Noel Gallagher, is a rousing effort , reminiscent of U2’s ‘Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me’. Others who have joined the Modfather on this album are Blur and Oasis guitarists, Graham Coxon and Gem Archer, respectively.

There are also a handful of instrumental tracks, like ‘Song for Alice’, which wouldn’t go astray on a James Bond soundtrack, and the aptly named ‘A Dream Reprise’.

Weller’s penchant for experimentation is evident throughout: he is forever the musical chameleon. 22 Dreams will either thrill you with its eclectic mix of rock, funk, soul, free jazz, krautrock, classical and spoken word, or it will make you feel like you’re watching a disjointed movie where an everchanging plot ends up leaving you feeling lost and none the wiser. ~ Pamela Halton

you’re aiming to bring across a message. His eclectic musical taste shines throughout, from funky rhythms straight out of the Stevie Wonder songbook to lyrics that recall musical poets such as Neil Young and Thom Yorke. He does upbeat anthems particularly well with ‘Vacuum’, creating a modern day Creedence Clearwater Revival vibe, while the title track contains a very accentuated melody with banjo and steel guitar backing.

While Gary Dunne may not be the best singer in the world, his music and lyrics make up for it, and even a cursory listen to this album will make most music fans curious to see him live. ~ Sean P. Feeny

Get Well Soon Rest Now, Weary Head! You Will Get Well Soon

(nude)

Singer, songwriter, producer and philosophy graduate Konstantin Gropper is the creative mastermind behind the genre-flouting Rest Now, Weary Head! You Will Get Well Soon. In opening his arms as readily to classical music as to straightforward indie rock, the Berlin-based artist has conjured a neurotic film-score of an album: palatial and idiosyncratic, quirky and sprawling.

Gropper clearly holds Radiohead in high esteem and the album is littered with homages to Thom Yorke. In fact, at times he veers a little close to imitation. Still, while fans of the Oxford quintet will find many familiar strains to enjoy here, Gropper is ultimately innovative enough to transcend

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the influences he wears on his sleeve.

Gropper is a musical schizophrenic and his album is like a circus, at turns garish, epic, macabre and, now and again, gleefully odd. ‘Witches!

Witches! Rest Now In The Fire’, for example, is one of the few songs in the modern pop canon that deals with the sticky issue of burning heretics at the stake.

The superior arrangements constantly keep the listener guessing and, although some of the songs themselves are on the sluggish side, the album achieves a certain depth through the richness of its musicality and instrumentation.

Gropper cites the films of Stanley Kubrick as the most appropriate comparison for his music and, like the idiosyncratic director, he is likely to inspire at least one vehement detractor for every adoring fan. Which is usually a good sign, of course... ~ Chris Russell

Inside, her sound is as polished as ever, including little of the more organic sound hinted at by her last live record. As such, there’s nothing here to scare away the daytime radio brigade,but nothing much to entice a new audience either.

Frustratingly, there is a fine storyteller tucked away amongst the polite guitars and safe production. Largely, it becomes clear through her lyrics, creating characters with a warmth and an eye for the smallest detail.

Only when she plays it simple do they really get the chance to shine. ‘Tuesday Night Ladies’ is as accurate a vignette of city life as you could find and the title track closes matters on a stirring, massed vocal note. As highpoints go, they are magnificent but just too few and far between.

Her established audience will find themselves delighted but you just can’t help believing that Juliet Turner has something more to give. ~ Phil Udell

Juliet Turner People Have Names

(hear this!)

Much has changed on the domestic music scene since Juliet Turner was last making any serious play for our attention. The hold of the singersongwriter on the national consciousness is loosening, replaced by a far more eclectic notion of the Irish musician. For Turner, however, it is business pretty much as usual, although People Have Names has a strange feel of understatement about it, from the low key black and white sleeve art onwards.

Oppenheimer Take The Whole Midrange and (fantastic plastic) Boost It It’s fitting that this Belfast two-piece’s songs were featured in All-American TV shows like Ugly Betty and Gossip Girl, as their music is loud, brash and accessible, like most US sitcoms. That’s not insolence on State’s part, rather admiration on how Rocky O’ Reilly and Shaun Robinson seem to so easily produce one pop gem after another.

This 30-minute album is crammed with so

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Albums many layers of instruments and bombast that it’s clear the title was the blueprint for the arrangements. From short opener ‘Major Television Events’, it’s obvious that the plan is to accompany Oppenheimer’s synth-pop sound with fuzzy guitar, without falling off the sprightly poptastic tightrope. They sound giddy and convinced that a drop in tempo will lose the listener’s attention, so the album is always reaching for those melodic highs, swathing in celestial synthesizers, saccharine vocals and anthemic choruses.

Single ‘Look Up’ is infused with glockenspiel chimes and crystal clear drumming, while the title track is a string-led number with turbocharged bits. The vocoder comes out on ‘Stephen McCauley For President’ and ‘I Don’t Care What Anyone Says Of You, I Think You’re Alright’.

Lyrically, there are a lot of American-centric references (a result of duo spending a lot of time there) and occasionally, the harmonies are a little too sickly sweet. It matters little when each song is such a powderkeg of pop energy bursting into ephemeral flames. ~ Niall Byrne

pop R&B. But it’s the young singer’s background in music production, teamed with the influence of Mark Ronson and Gorillaz’s producers The Rural that really add interest to the album. ‘East End Blues’ provides a jumpy fairground dance prance with dirty guitar reverb, ‘Trusted You’ echoes Ronson’s old school brass band and cymbal-bothering signature and ‘Jumping off the Block’ is an attractive light guitar riff, offset with ’80s synth-beats.

Without this holy trinity of tracks, the game may well have been up before it had really begun for Jean Marie. ~ Jo-ann Hodgson

New Amusement Any Port In A Storm

(any other city)

Dublin quartet New Amusement’s debut mini album may contain just six songs, yet it gives enough of a flavour of where the band is coming from to allow listeners to form an opinion.

Any Port in A Storm is full of contradictions, as New Amusement cross genres with impunity over the course of these half-dozen tracks. The sound isn’t as polished as some of their contemporaries, allowing them an edge that’s far from shiny.

Opener ‘Are We Winners’ begins proceedings with aplomb: upbeat and infectious, it’s everything that a relatively unknown act needs to hook listeners. ‘Gone To Sea’, on the other hand, is more thoughtful, melancholy and utterly beautiful, while ‘Lights Go Down’ will have you humming its melody long after you’ve laid down your headphones. Then there’s the pacy ‘Cecil’, the shouty singalong of ‘Whitewash’ and the plaintive but plodding ‘When We’re Leaving’. All in all, a short, but sweet, introduction to New Amusement’s brand of indie pop. ~ Ciara O’Brien

Leon Jean Marie Bent Out Of Shape

(universal)

Promoted as ‘Funk ‘n roll’ and ‘Rock & B’, you may expect urban guitar-based oomph from this East London boy’s debut. What Bent Out Of Shape actually delivers is a poppy mix of light synthy dance beats and smooth R&B vocals, served with the occasional wedge of electric guitar riff.

Jean Marie’s past as a teenage member of ’90s R&B group Syndicate is all too obvious in the 24 year-old’s songwriting and lyrical approach, which is frighteningly reminiscent of 10-year-old

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a barely audible bleep on the horizon when Ladytron began their ’80s-tinged sonic adventures.

As they approach 10 years together, the EnglishScottish-Bulgarian four-piece have just produced the perfect record to show their mastery of the scene they helped create.

Their manifesto is laid out more clearly than ever, with self-assured, straightforward songs that have an ethereal feel, thanks to the previously unused lush instrumentation. None of these 13 tracks will be burning up the dancefloor, but in terms of strong single contenders, ‘I’m Not Scared’, ‘Runaway’ and ‘They Gave You A Heart, They Gave You A Name’ are up there with current release, ‘Ghosts’.

More than ever, the girls’ opposing vocal ranges are beautifully employed, either to add to the spectral atmosphere (Mira on ‘Season Of Illusions’) or to provide light relief (Helen on the hypnotic ‘Predict The Day’).

Their last album, 2005’s Witching Hour and its lead single, ‘Destroy Everything You Touch’ propelled Ladytron into the mainstream consciousness:Velocifero sees them at the peak of their powers. ~ Saoirse Patterson

The Sleeping Years We’re Becoming Islands One

By One

Eleanor McEvoy Love Must Be Tough

(moscodisc)

In releasing her seventh album, Eleanor McEvoy has decided to see the world from another angle: a male one. Essentially a covers album, Love Must Be Tough takes songs originally performed by men and sprinkles them with female charm.

Tinting the album with jazz melodies, she opens with a cover of the Rolling Stones’ ‘Mother’s Little Helper’, and it’s the worst song here by far. Both the title track, co-written with Johnny Rivers, and ‘Old New Borrowed And Blue’, with Beautiful South’s David Rotheray, are catchy and apt for the Dubliner, who’s singing her way through her 16th year in the business. Stepping slighting out of the heavy jazz session, these tracks are the album’s best.

McEvoy continues with covers of Sly Stone, Rodney Crowell, Butch Hancock and the only female artist, Priscilla Bowman. Going out with gusto, album closer ‘I Knew The Bride’, written

by Nick Lowe, is powerful but pretty. Its lyrics gel with the rest of the album: refreshing and honest.

Despite the rusty start, Love Must Be Tough is a solid attempt at a new musical direction.

McEvoy settles into her mature vocals and has you believing she’s been doing it this way for years. ~ Elaine O’Neill

Ladytron Velocifero

(nettwerk)

The recent explosion of synth-driven rock was

(rocketgirl)

The Sleeping Years is the new project from singersongwriter Dale Grundle, former frontman of Irish indie wunderkinds The Catchers. The band began with a trilogy of EPs in 2007 and, a year later, following critical acclaim and widespread airplay, it has morphed into a full-length album.

Grundle’s vocals combine Stephen Fretwell’s world-weariness with Tom McRae’s fragile, trebly tones and on We’re Becoming Islands One By One he spins 10 tender tales of detachment and loss, underneath sensitive, often deeply moving acoustic arrangements.

One thing of which Grundle is truly a master is mood. This record is soaked in a pervasive melancholy, undercut by a subdued, patient menace. The songs themselves drift, island-like, amongst the flotsam and jetsam of Grundle’s expansive soundscapes, whilst instruments collide occasionally with vocals almost as if by accident.

It’s effective and strangely soporific.

What you’re left with after 45 minutes is an overall feeling, rather than the memory of any specific moments. In this way The Sleeping Years is sort of the musical equivalent of Kate Moss: rather beautiful and extremely elegant but without anything obvious to grab onto.

Nevertheless, Grundle clearly never intended to steer a course towards hook-laden pop and where he succeeds most convincingly is in creating an album that speaks with great heart of the steady marching of the years, the ghosts of times past and the inevitability of change. It’s a slow burner, and one that burns with greater intensity after each listen. ~ Chris Russell

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Reissues & Compilations As the best band of the last decade, of course their Best Of is fuckin’ great.

Radiohead The Best Of

(parlophone)

Collecting 29 tracks from Radiohead’s Parlophone years onto two CDs, The Best Of pretty much does exactly what it says on the box. All the finest moments from The Bends and OK Computer are present and correct, alongside their breakthrough single, ‘Creep’, )one of only two tracks lifted from their debut, Pablo Honey), and their later, more difficult albums. ‘Talk Show Host’, one of the finest b-sides ever recorded, is also included, as is the stunning ‘True Love Waits’ (first released on live EP I Might Be Wrong).

The running order here works superbly, balancing the infectious (‘Fake Plastic Trees’, ‘Let Down’, ‘Just’ etc) with the oblique (‘Idioteque’, ‘The National Anthem’). What’s perhaps surprising is how well these songs, some recorded more than a decade apart, sit so well together.

While they may have become a little too esoteric for their own good on Kid A, Amnesiac and Hail To The Thief (State doesn’t see a major problem with big bands including a chorus in at least some of their tunes), there’s no denying that the Oxford quintet have been one of the most original and influential acts of the last decade and a half. The fact that they managed to take elements of jazz, electronica and even krautrock and make at least some of it palatable is a testament to their talent. Since they first made waves back in 1993, Radiohead have been one of the most remarkable rock bands on the planet: gathering their best bits in one place was always going to be a winner. ~ John Walshe

Midnight Oil Diesel And Dust

(sony bmg)

The mid-’80s were a fairly desolate time for rock music. MTV had taken hold and a bland homogeny was taking over, as bands from all over the world looked to the US for their lead. On the other side of the world, however, Midnight Oil decided to focus their attention on something a little closer to home, embarking on a tour of Aboriginal settlements. From these unlikely roots came Diesel And Dust, the record that would break them on a worldwide level. 21 years on and it still stands up, probably because it stemmed from such timeless subject matter.

Midnight Oil certainly dealt in rock of the mainstream variety but they had the edge to make them stand out from the crowd. Peter Garret was a great frontman rather than a great singer, something backed up by the Blackfella/Whitefella tour documentary DVD that accompanies this release. While occasionally his lyrics do slip into cliché, most of the time Garret hits the mark in giving Australia’s forgotten community a voice.

For songs over 20 years old, they are strangely prophetic too, detailing the corporations’ destruction of the Australian outback.

Thankfully, the music is stirring enough to deliver the message in an upbeat fashion, even delivering an unlikely hit in the shape of ‘Beds Are Burning’. The album’s highpoint though is ‘The Dead Heart’, managing to sum up the entire experience in one song. They’d go on to do more

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(including Garret quitting music to become the Australian Environment Minister) but this will always remain their legacy. ~ Phil Udell

Daemien Frost Spirito Di Daemo

(learn to love)

Instrumental Dublin oddballs Deamien Frost always seemed to be on the fringes of the capital’s underground network. Their flirtations with metal probably meant they were too abrasive to fall in with the post/math rock kids, while their live outings were often shambolic, endearing them to many but leaving others just plain confused.

Now, posthumously, they release Spirito Di Daemo, a compendium stretching back to their turn-of-century origins.

The fact that only four of the 11 tracks on Spirito Di Daemo are hitherto unreleased may point out that Daemien Frost were running out of steam by the time they disbanded after flittering gigs a few years back. Of these newbies, the groovy ‘Ya Basta’ sounds like Don Cab messing about with a chainsaw, while ‘Cocorico!’ is spectacularly frantic.

The rest of Spirito is the remastered seven tracks that made up the Frost’s 2001 record, Corpus Daemo. The songs have aged surprisingly well: ‘In League With The Amazons’ swerves from eerie intro to twitchy staccato, while closing number ‘The Song Break Up’ is a close as Daemien Frost are going to

get to a Constellation release.

Completists out there will love the extra DVD (despite a, perhaps apt, sloppy edit job), and the fabulously meticulous hand-crafted sleeve, printed by none other than June of 44’s Jeff Mueller. All in all, a fitting epilogue for Daemien Frost. ~ Ciarán Ryan

Guns N’ Roses Greatest Hits

(geffen)

Of all the indicators that the release of Chinese Democracy is disappearing further and further over the horizon, the re-release of 2004’s Greatest Hits is the clearest so far. What felt like a stop-gap four years ago now has the air of utter desperation about it, as the G ‘n’ R circus descends into increasing farce. What this does prove is that the music was worth much more than that.

Of course, you could argue that a Guns N’ Roses best of already exists in the form of Appetite For Destruction and the inclusion of a mere three tracks does feel a little paltry, but what tracks they are. The effect of ‘Sweet Child O’Mine’ and ‘Paradise City’ may have been dulled by years of wedding discos, yet they still bristle with energy and danger. More surprising is how well the Use Your Illusion era material has stood up, the ponderous ‘November Rain’ and ‘Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door’ aside. ‘Civil War’ proved they could do epic without such pomposity and

Reissues & Compilations ‘Yesterdays’ showed a more self-reflective side.

The problem was and remains that this is a far as it went. All they can offer after that is half-arsed covers and a succession of departing members.

Even this Greatest Hits, devoid of any sleeve notes or insight, smacks of a band who just can’t be bothered anymore. Axl and Guns N’ Roses could have changed the world. Right now, he needs to change our minds and prove that this isn’t a sad end to the story. ~ Phil Udell

Mogwai Young Team

(chemikal underground)

Mogwai are currently in the studio putting the finishing touches to their sixth record, with plans to tour the album this summer. But before all this, the band have taken a step into their past with the reissue of their inaugural record Young Team on this, its tenth anniversary (with nine bonus tracks, including live versions of some of the album’s standouts).

Mogwai have become one of the forerunners of the post-rock music scene and Young Team is a testament to their best years. The album treats us to a masterclass in subtle instrumentation and layering melodies that eventually explode into post-rock monsters. All the favourites are contained in the remastered package: ‘Like Herod’, ‘R U Still In 2 It’ and the epic closing track, ‘Mogwai Fear Satan’, which builds and builds for a whole 16 minutes before finally unraveling and exploding before us.

Instrumental music has had its detractors, but Mogwai have the ability to evoke deep emotional responses, sometimes saying more with no words than most conventional lyric-based bands could dream of. ~ Tia Clarke

an essential album for fans of the genre.

Losers, Kings and Things We Don’t Understand is another compilation featuring cover versions, singles, demos and session tunes, again with a DVD. Some of the material here resounds, whilst others fall wide of the mark.

Throughout these reissues there are numerous references to the sugar dispensing Pez, a sweet shooting collectible beloved of two members of the band. You do sense that Less Than Jake, being collectors themselves, attach more credibility to the value of the rarity than most of us, and so these reissues will only serve hardcore fans or the most avid music anoraks who hoard the obscure.

on a Sinatra release to date, with all the old classics tarted up for 2008. Whether the Reprise versions of the likes of ‘Luck Be A Lady’ are the definitive ones is up for debate, but these 22 tracks, including the previously unissued ‘Body And Soul’ (vocals, 1984; orchestra, 2007) are stunning.

Nothing But The Best might not be a required purchase for those who own the originals (or who prefer the Capitol output), but as an introduction to both the swingin’ side of Sinatra and Frank the lounge lizard, it’s hard to fault. ~ John Walshe

~ Martin McIver

Spoons: A Collection of Remixes, Collaborations & Interpretations (casino gravity)

Frank Sinatra Nothing But The Best

(reprise)

Less Than Jake Goodbye Blue and White/ Pezcore/ Losers, Kings and Things We Don’t (cooking vinyl) Understand

Less than Jake enjoy a cult status with those who harbour ska/punk sensibilities. An old school hardworking touring band, they’ve never made the big time themselves but are frequently cited by their peers as a band of musical sway.

Goodbye Blue and White (named after the demise of their first touring van) is a platter of B sides and rarities which seeks to fill some gaps in the band’s anthology. However, be prepared for some wildly varying production values, due to various source materials. It’s accompanied by rare DVD footage, giving a glimpse into their frenetic live shows, which is reasonably entertaining in its own right.

Pezcore, on the other hand, was a solid, worthy debut album of happy-go-lucky punk, punctuated with upbeat drums and stabbed by snappy brass:

Jeff Martin

Does the world need another Sinatra collection?

Not really, but if Nothing But The Best means that another generation of listeners gets to fall in love with that golden voice, then it’s worth it. This CD/ DVD collection features the best of Frank’s Reprise years, the label he formed himself in 1960 when he decided not to renew his deal with Capitol.

Sinatra sounds at his most relaxed here, whether joking around on ‘Come Fly With Me’ or lounging on ‘The Best Is Yet To Come’, one of the many stand-outs featuring Bill ‘Count’ Basie and his orchestra.

The DVD is a live concert from the Royal Festival Hall, with some interesting choices amongst the material, as Sinatra wraps his tonsils around George Harrison’s ‘Something’ and Jimmy Webb’s ‘Didn’t We’, as well as more predictable standards

by Rogers & Hart, Cole Porter and Rodgers & Hammerstein.

With sleeve notes penned by classic producer, Charles Pignone, and a wealth of photos and quotes, the CD enjoys arguably the finest sound

Jeff Martin has quietly released two solo albums in the downtime of his involvement with Halfset.

His most recent was 2004’s Spoons and this remix album has taken four years to come to light. That long stretch is probably down to the calibre of remixers and interpreters who contribute to this 12-track project but it was worth the wait.

The donating artists are drawn largely from the realm of electronica, laptop folk and alternative music, and as such, much of the material is given just a subtle electronic make-over, so there’s no banging house, dubstep or drum ‘n’ bass versions, but the collaborators are on the same wave-length musically as Martin. Decal’s remix inflects ‘Balancing Act’ into more electronic drum beat territory while Isan’s take on ‘Magnet Line’ deviates the mood slightly from the original.

John McEntire of Tortoise (who mixed the original version of Spoons) alters ‘The Promise’ on one of the album’s highlights, while fellow Halfset head Stephen Shannon tackles ‘Make Change’.

Other standouts include first track ‘Shuttlecock’ as remixed by Bristol electronic musician Minotaur Shock into a stuttering organic workout, Chequerboard’s reworking of ‘Strange for a Tuner’ makes it his own and John Parish’s (producer of PJ Harvey) eight-minute downtempo epic ‘Veelow Pt.1’.

The impressive cast is supplemented by artists like Dublin Guitar Quartet, Mice Parade, The High Llamas, Jeniferever and David Pajo. As most of the songs occupy a similar tempo, they can be hard to differentiate from each other but that’s just a slight niggling problem for a compilation with plenty to enjoy. ~ Niall Byrne

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TV DVD

[

Juno came out of left-field to stun cinema audiences and awards panels alike, but is it really that good?

Juno Director: Jason Reitman. Starring: Ellen Page, Michael Cera, Jennifer Garner, Jason Bateman Running Time: 96 minutes.

Extras: Deleted scenes, Gag reel, Cast and Crew jam, Screen tests, Featurettes, Audio commentary.

Written by former stripper, blogger and journalist Diablo Cody, it’s easy to see why Juno received an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay. The film is a witty, refreshing outlook on the outcome of a teenage pregnancy on 16-year-old Juno Macguff and those around her. Page is wonderful as Juno, the awkward teenager faced with a big problem (“I’m the size of a planet!”) who is both endearing and youthfully quirky throughout, as she tries her best to approach the imminent adoption of her baby by married couple, Mark and Vanessa Loring (Garner and Arrested Development’s Bateman).

Cody does a fantastic job of avoiding teenage platitudes with both her main adolescent characters, Juno and father of the baby, Bleeker (the ever-brilliant Cera), instead filling their mouths with humorous wisecracks and sharp-tongued dialogue. The typical high-school stereotypes of jocks, nerds and cheerleaders make no dent here as the youngsters are portrayed with a realworld truism - inexperienced people, yet to find a foothold in their own sense of selves and in the society around them. Indeed, Juno’s family are similarly cliché-free: supportive and understanding rather than dysfunctional.

Ruptures are revealed in the Loring marriage,

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]

brought on by Juno and Mark’s shared interest in music and gore movies and Vanessa’s uptight yearning to be a mother. As the adoption plan begins to unravel, each supporting character, from the dumb-founded Bleeker to best friend/ confidante Leah, as well as both of Juno’s parents, come into their own. Director Reitman allows the plot to progress with a subtle, spine-tinglingly light touch, granting the cast the chance to breathe real emotion into the film, to the point where it becomes a touching portrait of a young girl “dealing with things way beyond her maturity level”.

Juno scored big on the music stakes, with the use of acoustic folk songs from Kimya Dawson and her band The Moldy Peaches, which perfectly soundtrack the understated story. In fact, the music was suggested by Page herself during filming.

The usage of the best-known Moldy Peaches song ‘Anyone Else But You’ should see teenage viewers scurrying to YouTube to learn the chords.

Juno hits its mark, the kind of film that’s impossible to resist. It doesn’t deal in extremes. It’s comic without being crass or rude. It’s charming without being too sweet. It’s never too smart for its own good. And, it’s made a star out of Page, which is reason enough itself to seek it out.

For Fans Of: Rushmore, Knocked Up, Ghost World. ~ Niall Byrne

27 Dresses Director: Anne Fletcher. Starring: Katherine Heigl, James Marsden, Ed Burns Running Time: 107 minutes.

Extras: Featurettes, Deleted Scenes.

Katherine Heigl is carving out a niche as the actress of choice for romantic comedies. Pity, because she may have more to offer outside the comfort zone of such a frivolous genre. As it is, Heigl is the only redeeming feature of this tired and typical movie. No points for guessing the plot. Jane (Heigl) is “always a bridesmaid, never the bride”. Left in heartache when the boss (Burns) she secretly yearns for proposes to her sister, Jane is left to selflessly organise the wedding and deal with a wedding reporter (Marsden) and his cynical marriage outlook, all the time oblivious to his interest in her. Guess what? Things aren’t what they seem and she finds love in ‘the most unlikely of places’ - eh, the wedding reporter. Anne Fletcher makes no attempt to hide the obvious clichés and we get exactly what is expected of the genre - heartbreak, promise, heartbreak, wedding - in that order. Having said that, it’s probably very comforting if you’ve just been dumped by your boyfriend for being the kind of person who enjoys this mawk.

For Fans Of: The Runaway Bride, The Wedding Planner, How to Lose a Guy in Ten Days. ~ Niall Byrne

DVD TV Music DVDs Cara Dillon – The Redcastle Sessions Running Time: 85 minutes. Extras: None.

Such is the relaxed and intimate nature of Cara Dillon’s music that it is entirely fitting that her first live DVD should be filmed, not in some enormodome, but in a converted hospital in her home county of Donegal. Even stuffed full of equipment and guest musicians, The Redcastle Sessions still maintains a homely – if polished – feel. 15 tracks of largely acoustic material does stretch the attention somewhat, but the beauty of Dillon’s voice and delivery is unquestionable.

For Fans Of: Kate Rusby, Sandy Denny. ~ Phil Udell Emmanuelle Seigner in The Diving Bell And The Butterfly

Dan In Real Life Director: Peter Hedges. Starring: Steve Carell, Juliette Binoche.

Running Time: 94 minutes.

Extras: Commentary, Making Of, Scoring the film, Outtakes.

Widower Dan Burns (Carell, 40 Year Old Virgin, American Office) is a newspaper columnist and single father of three girls, trying to cope with the vagaries of parenthood – one daughter wants to drive his car, another wants a boyfriend and only the youngest isn’t causing him ulcers. When he takes them to the family’s summer home for a weekend, he unwittingly falls in love with his brother’s girlfriend Marie (Binoche), who he meets in a bookstore when she mistakenly thinks that he works there.

While the always likeable Carell is as good as ever, kinda nerdy but nice, and the film has some moments of real humour, overall, it plays out like a movie-length episode of The Gilmore Girls or Party Of Seven, albeit better than either.

It’s hard to hate Dan In Real Life and it’s more than watchable, but the schmaltz factor can be a bit too hard to take (particularly the family mass aerobics session).

For Fans Of: You’ve Got Mail, Sleepless In Seattle, The Lake House. ~ John Walshe

The Diving Bell And The Butterfly Director: Julian Schnabel. Starring: Mathieu Amalric, Emmanuelle Seigner.

Running Time: 107 minutes.

Extras: Director’s commentary; Making Of documentary, interviews, photo gallery, theatrical trailer.

A true story, based upon the novel of the same name by Jean-Dominique Bauby, the former editor of French Elle magazine, who survived a stroke with almost his entire body paralysed, aside from one eye, leaving him with “locked-in syndrome”. Bauby invented a system whereby he was able to dictate his thoughts with the blinking of his eye, narrating an entire book’s worth of

thoughts and reminiscences. The result is far from harrowing, however, and is one of the most life-affirming books State has ever read. But what of the film? First up, it’s intriguingly shot – much of the action we see through Bauby’s eyes, blurs and blinks included, which gives us some idea of his sense of helplessness and humiliation. Schnabel treats his subject with compassion, and the result is as moving, inspiring and heart-breaking as the book it’s based on.

For Fans Of: Shine, A Beautiful Mind. ~ John Walshe

Ashes To Ashes – Series One Starring: Philip Glenister, Keeley Hawes, Dean Andrews, Marshall Lancaster, Montserrat Lombard Running time: 480 minutes Extras: Commentaries, documentary features.

They couldn’t resist it, could they? Once the impeccable Life On Mars came to a natural end, talk immediately began of an ’80s-based sequel, largely to meet the demand for more of the character Gene Hunt. Ashes To Ashes is undoubtedly his show, the writers giving Philip Glenister the best lines throughout, almost to the point of cliché. The story takes the Life On Mars premise and twists it slightly, giving Hawes’ Alex Drake some insight into what is happening to her. As a plot device, it’s fine, yet too much time is spent tying her character up in the surreal set pieces. When it’s good though, Ashes To Ashes is very, very good, lampooning the fashion and cultural crimes of the decade perfectly, allowing the ensemble cast room to develop as characters and building an enticing sexual tension between the two leads, all to a top notch nostalgia soundtrack. By the end of four discs, though, you feel as though it’s enough and that the clamour for a second instalment may not be so deafening.

For Fans Of: Life On Mars, Dempsey and Makepeace.

Less Than Jake – The People’s History Of Less Than Jake Running Time: 210 Minutes. Extras: Band commentary.

Although they are to be commended for maintaining a largely underground career for 15 years, a little Less Than Jake goes a long way.

Stretched out over two and a half hours of live footage, however, the enthusiasm for seeing Americans in large shorts jumping up and down begins to fade. They do have a great line in brass-fuelled punk pop (plus if you’ve ever wanted to see a man smoking a fag and drumming at the same time, this is the place for you) but this is for the hardcore only.

For Fans Of: Blink 182, NoFX, Jackass. ~ Phil Udell

Steve Earle – Live From Austin TX Running Time: 74 minutes. Extras: None.

When Steve Earle first appeared on the Austin City Limits in 1986, he was the new kid on the country block, twanging his way into alternative hearts. 14 years and five albums later when he returned, his face wasn’t quite so fresh. What hadn’t killed him in the meantime had been used to steer his songwriting into the grittier depths of human emotion. Presented in the confines of a TV environment, much of the energy of the originals is lost – although ‘Copperhead Road’ is still fiery. An extraordinary talent that has been served better.

For Fans Of: Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, Hank Williams. ~ Phil Udell

~ Phil Udell

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TV Here Comes the Summer…

Words by Maia Dunphy

We all remember as kids during the summer months, the television calendar. It’s as if TV never being told to turn off the TV and to get outside into the fresh air. And to be fair, we rarely needed much encouragement, as living in Ireland gave us more than enough dreary days and dark nights to sit in front of the box. The first glimpse of sunshine on these shores and we are all staggering out into its rays, squinting up at the sky in disbelief, like stowaways who have been in the hold of a ship for six months.

Well, it would seem that over the years, while we were out playing rounders, a sort of Darwinism was at work, because summer telly evolved as if no one was watching. It became rubbish. Sure, the soaps plod on (but even they save their best storylines for the winter season), and we get all sorts of summer specials and sporting events (anyone for tennis? No? Didn’t think so), but on the whole, June to September is rarely the highlight of

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really grew up and it still takes summer holidays.

Usually, no one really notices – why would anyone want to sit indoors when there’s boozing and third degree burns to be had outdoors? But occasionally, during a summer as bad as the one we endured last year, we’re forced to stay in, and only then do people sit up and say. “Hey, what happened to TV?” Yes, during the summer, we lose a bit of interest in telly. But it turns out, it’s actually the other way around: it’s telly that loses interest in us. The big US shows all end in May (although thanks to the writers’ strike, this will not be a normal summer in TV-land as many shows will carry on slightly longer than usual).

All the big chat show hosts on these shores take to the Riviera for the summer months (leaving Miriam O’Callaghan struggling to hold the fort with myriad

D-list guests until Pat, Ryan et al come back with their tans). All our favourite homegrown shows finish up, promising to be “back with a bang in September”, and even the football’s gone till Autumn.

Is this TV’s way of telling us to get out into the sunshine and ride our bikes for a while? Or did execs just think “well, no one’s watching anyway, so we may as well save the good stuff till September”?

A bit like your granny bringing you a cup of tea in the stained mug and telling you that the good china is for when “someone important calls in”.

However, our viewing habits have also evolved: so, are traditional TV seasons out of date? On demand TV and internet downloads mean we should be able to watch whatever we want, whenever we want, so we don’t need to be at the mercy of schedules. Unfortunately though, Ireland is still lagging behind.

Our broadband market remains pretty

TV Ones to Watch

Angelo’s RTE 2, Friday 9pm Angelo is a widowed Italian café owner with a not-so-subtle intolerance for foreigners, and his greasy spoon is home to some surreal and brilliant characters. This sitcom fell under the radar a little when it was shown on BBC last year, but RTE are repeating it so it’s well worth tuning in if you’re sitting in on a Friday night.

The F Word Channel 4, Tuesday 9pm It’s been back for a couple of weeks now, but if you’re a fan of the man with the furrowed brow and the filthy mouth, then this new series won’t disappoint. Unfortunately, the irrepressible, irritating Janet Street Porter is a recurring feature again.

under-developed by European standards, and even if it were up to scratch, most of the TV download sites don’t work in this country for one reason or another (that’s another day’s work). But by the time we do catch up with the States, seasonal TV will be a thing of the past.

We will spend the summer catching up on series we have missed; and they won’t be fuzzy, buffering videos on our computers, but pristine, legal copies of shows and films on our HDTVs. The movie industry knows the end of viewing seasons is fast approaching. Big movies, which would usually have been saved for summer release, are now being released on any given Friday in March. The game’s up and TV is following in its footsteps.

Speaking of the game being up, there are two words which sum up summer TV to me, and have done for the last nine years: Big Brother. Three months it lasts these days. Three months. Does anyone

(Left) Miriam O’Callaghan holds the fort. (Above) Big Brothers Little Brother presenters George Lamb and Zezi

watch it anymore? Can we not just let it go now? Year one was a novelty; year two, mildly distracting. After that, they all blend into one bumper issue of Heat magazine. Admittedly, it’s a dream for channel execs as it, alongside its various spin-offs, fills pretty much all of Channel 4 and E4 for the entire summer. Sort of like a school janitor who pops in and out of the school over the summer to make sure the building is still standing while everyone else is enjoying the holidays. I don’t think I know anyone who watches it anymore, except for one person who has an allergy to sunlight. Or at least she claims to, but frankly the photos on the mantelpiece of her in Tenerife before she discovered Big Brother would imply otherwise. Still, it’s a good excuse.

Greek BBC 3, Sundays from end of May This new US comedy drama follows the lives of young people looking for freedom, love, sex and friendship, while dealing with cheating boyfriends, nerdy younger brothers and girls obsessed with beauty and popularity. Received mixed reviews in the States so it could just be more summer telly to be avoided. Make your own mind up!

Ray Mears Goes Walkabout BBC2, from end of May Over four episodes, real life MacGyver, Ray Mears undertakes four mini-expeditions through the wilderness of the Aussie outback.

He’s no Bruce Parry, but his shows are still worth watching nonetheless.

House Guest ITV1, Monday 3pm This should be in a ‘ones to avoid’ section. Even combining the banality of daytime and summer TV, this is a new low. Five couples accept what we’re told is “the ultimate hosting challenge” – having a stranger stay overnight in their home.

They then get marks for food, accommodation and hospitality. What an incredible concept - we call it a B&B.

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Books Stress Test Words by Paula Shields ~ Photography by Marion Ettlinger

Trauma Patrick McGrath

bloomsbury

‘Physician, heal thyself’ is the phrase that springs to mind on reading Patrick McGrath’s gripping new psychological thriller, Trauma. New York psychiatrist and narrator Charlie Weir fluently establishes a family portrait of stark dysfunction in the first paragraph: mother prone to depression, father prone to violence, both heavy drinkers, and a mysteriously hostile brother.

There is, of course, a link between the family troubles and Charlie’s chosen profession: “It is the mothers who propel most of us into psychiatry, usually because we have failed them.” But the damage, in

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this tale, is not just personal to the Weirs.

Trauma is that rare novel now, a book about pre-9/11 New York, set in 1969 and the 1970s, when the World Trade Center is still under construction and the term ‘post-traumatic syndrome’, in the face of returning Vietnam vets, is brand new.

One of the vets is Danny, the deeply disturbed brother of Charlie’s wife Agnes, his illness the reason they meet, his death the reason they split. His spirit haunts narrator and narrative, the mystery of what happened to him in the south-east Asian war and on the night of his suicide unfolding gradually over the course of 200

pages. Though Vietnam stories have been told many times before, McGrath invests his tale with a convincing freshness, a strong sense of professionals working at the coalface of the mind’s war wounds, just as the war itself dragged to a close.

Charlie’s private life contains as much pain and chaos as his public one. Trauma begins in February 1979 with the death of his mother, an event which triggers a surreptitious affair with his ex-wife and the beginnings of a breakdown in a psychiatrist who seems to be in worse condition than his clients. At the same time, he embarks on a new relationship with Nora, a friend of his brother Walt’s, and before long, she has moved in to his apartment, re-creating a home like his mother’s where the tearful female writer taps away at the typewriter and their roles metamorphose from lovers to healer and patient.

Art and mental health are inextricably bound here. Even as her misery accumulated, Charlie’s mother wrote a couple of well-received books in later years; Walt is a famous, successful artist; and only their father is a ne’er-dowell, long since vanished from their lives.

In his own words, the psychiatrist’s role sounds like that of the novelist: “I feel my way into your experience with an intuition based on little more than a few years of practice, and reading, and focused introspection; in other words, there is much of art in what I do.”

But Charlie himself has never had therapy, can only follow the dictates of his own decline, which send him back to the Catskills, where his own trauma story will re-emerge in a bittersweet ending that sends the reader back to the beginning of the novel, now that the mysterious root of his own illness has been revealed.

“We see nobody clearly. We see only the ghosts of absent others, and mistake for reality the fictions we construct from blueprints drawn up in childhood.”

The enigma of human nature lies at the heart of McGrath’s fine novel, a stylish, thoughtful work of prose and a fascinating read.

Books

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A preview of the month’s more interesting releases.

]

Made in the UK: The Music of Attitude 1977-1983

By Janette Beckman (photographer), powerhouse Vivien Goldman (author) The mid-1970s were some of England’s darkest, dreariest hours. Unemployment was soaring out of control, alongside power cuts and the threeday working week. It was time for a new order.

Made in the UK: The Music of Attitude, 1977-1983 documents a time when British music pushed all boundaries. Janette Beckman has taken some beautiful photos of some of the true stars of the time and the fashion surrounding them. A musthave for anyone with an interest in the UK scene of the mid ‘70s.

Real Men Eat Puffer Fish and 93 Other Things to Consider weidenfeld & nicolson

By Robert Twigger OK, this maybe a spoof, but it’s not just a lame, tired parody. Twigger has had plenty of experience in things we all would like to try: facing down bears, building coracles, playing high-stakes poker and best of all, swimming with sharks. These are mixed with the faintly ludicrous and un-PC: performing a tracheotomy, slitting the throat of a sheep ’Afghan fashion’ and landing a Boeing 747.

Words by Tony Jessen

Criminal: The True Story of a Life in and Out of Prison review

By Caspar Walsh

Modern life is rubbish: The Sex Pistols from Made In

From the tender age of four, Caspar Walsh’s father was his primary carer. The only problem here was his dad wasn’t classic father material.

He robbed banks. He dealt in drugs and violence.

Yet despite the world he embraced, he loved his son. Criminal is the story of a childhood marked by drugs, violence and abuse and how a person can make a change in their lives.

best-selling memoir about surviving a horrifically abusive up-bringing, helped many people come to terms with their own past. Moving Forward is for anyone wanting to change their life, no matter what their past may have held.

Unaccustomed Earth

By Jhumpa Lahiri

My Father’s Watch: The Story Of A Child Prisoner In ‘70s Britain

By Patrick Maguire and Carlo Gebler fourth estate

bloomsbury

From the internationally bestselling, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Interpreter Of Maladies comes a new selection of eight short stories that take you from Cambridge to India, Seattle to Thailand, to explore the secrets at the heart of family life. Yet another beautiful and engaging book from Jhumpa Lahiri. Find it soon!

Moving Forward: Taking the Lead in Your Life

By Dave Pelzer

The UK

On the night of October 5, 1974, an IRA unit left bombs in two Guildford pubs,killing five people. This is the story of Patrick Maguire, one of the ‘Maguire Seven’, who at the age of 14 was convicted along with his parents, brother and other family members for the handing and possession of the nitro-glycerine used in those bombings. My Father’s Watch tells the story of both the ‘Guilford Four’ and the ‘Maguire Seven’, one of the worst miscarriages of justice of all time.

orion

There are not that many self-help gurus whose claims of having influenced millions of people ring true: Dave Pelzer has. A Child Called ‘It’, his

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Games [

Words by John Walshe

Ubisoft’s new first person shooter has echoes of some of the finest examples of the FPS genre to date, but manages to hold it own.

Haze PS3

(ubisoft)

Considering the wealth of top notch first person shooters out there, it’s surprising that so many development teams get it wrong when it comes to launching a new one (Army of Two, Turok Evolution). Surely the easiest thing to do is to look at the most successful examples of the genre (Halo, Medal Of Honor, Bioshock etc) and nab the best bits. That seems to be what the team behind Haze have done, utilising the finest attributes from the standards, while adding a couple of original aspects, and welding the two together with an intriguing, if hardly groundbreaking, plot.

The year is 2048 and you play the part of 25year-old Shane Carpenter, a new recruit into the army of Mantel, who are supposedly fighting for truth, justice and the American way. Or are they?

As Carpenter delves further into the violence, he begins to see cracks in the Mantel propaganda, forcing him to question his reasons for entering the army in the first place and just what he is fighting for.

The graphics throughout are superb, although the voice acting is more than a little hammy (particularly that of Carpenter’s Neanderthal teammates at Mantel). The gameplay is a combination of straight-up shooting fun and driving levels, the latter looking like they used Halo as their blueprint, although they’re arguably more frenetic than Microsoft’s shooter series.

One of the most interesting aspects of the game, when fighting for Mantel, is the use of Nectar, a seriously strong bio-enhancing medication that gives you a shot in the arm, while simultaneously ensuring that war’s gorier elements don’t register: basically, you become something akin to the ultimate fighting machine, with keen senses and no conscience.

Other than that, it’s the usual mix of simple

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puzzle solving (generally involving finding levers to open doors), exploration and toasting bad guys. Some of the weapons are particularly impressive (especially the flame thrower) and most are fitted with an automatic zoom, so you can play as a sniper if the mood takes you.

The fact that Carpenter ends up on both sides of the conflict is interesting, and has obvious parallels with world events, something games developers are usually eager to avoid for fear that offence might lead to lack of sales, primarily due to the size of the US games market. So Haze isn’t going to rewrite the rule-book for the shooter genre, but everything about it is carried off with such panache that it’s impossible not to be mightily impressed.

Speed Racer Wii, PS2, DS

(wb games)

The game of the movie of the computer-generated effects... or something like that: it gets confusing sometimes, with big screen movies resembling high end video games more every month. While Speed Racer’s celluloid sibling may be about as much fun as having your eyes gouged out with blunt spoons, the game of the same name is far better craic. It’s all about careering around futuristic race tracks at speeds of up to 500 kilometres per hour, winning championships and getting one over on your rivals. But is it any good?

While undoubtedly aimed at the younger end of the gaming market (experienced racers should have little or no trouble clocking up race wins in Class 1 and 2), Speed Racer’s genuine sense of velocity and fun, with speed squares, boosts, jumps, stunts and shunts (including something called Car-Fu), succeeds in making it an entertaining, if unessential, way to spend a few hours.

Victorious Boxers Challenge Wii

(ubisoft)

Taking its cue from the ringside action in Wii Sports, Victorious Boxers Challenge sports improved graphics and sound (crazee OTT commentary is very much the order of the day), as you lace up the boots of Ippo Makunouchi, an unassuming high school student who takes up boxing after being repeatedly bullied at school.

Ippo, it transpires, has a rare talent, and it isn’t long before the one-time bag of bones has bulked up to Rocky-like proportions and is on the fasttrack to becoming a contender for the featherweight championship.

The cut-scenes are almost cell-shaded and take far too long to get through in Story Mode. As is usually the case with sports titles, the majority of the fun comes from taking on your makes in two-player mode, and Victorious Boxers Challenge has the double bonus of getting to knock seven shades of virtual shite out of them onscreen while getting a decent physical workout yourself into the bargain.

Lego Indiana Jones: The Original Adventures Xbox 360, PS3, Wii

(lucasarts)

First it was Luke Skywalker, Han Solo & Co. who got LucasArts’ Lego treatment and now it’s everyone’s favourite archaeologist. Thankfully, the results are just as enjoyable, funny and playable as its space age predecessor, as you get to relive the most memorable scenes from the first three movies, Lego-style. All the main characters are present and correct, from Marian Ravenwood to Mola Ram, and the graphics, sound, humour and gameplay are as good as we could have hoped for.

Games Everybody’s Golf 2 PSP

(scee)

Everybody’s Golf 2, as its title may suggest, is all about making the game accessible to all, and it works. But behind the cutesey characters, the supremely irritating music and inane voice samples, there is a really classy golf game waiting to be discovered.

Like most games in the genre, you start off as a novice and work your way up through the ranks by competing in tournaments or taking on individual golfers in match-play. Certain challenges have interesting variables, however: on one course, landing in the rough will cost you two shots, while on others, it’s the bunkers that will cost you places on the leaderboard.

Recommended.

Emergency Mayhem Wii

(codemasters)

Crisis City is in, well, crisis – there are fires breaking out everywhere, people’s lives are in danger, and there’s also a horde of evil monkeys causing chaos on the streets. You take control of three emergency vehicles (fire, police and medics) and

try to control the mayhem: you have a certain time limit to get to your missions (like a kids’ version of GTA with time constraints), and the faster you complete them, the more time gets added to your clock. This sounds like it could be fun, and it certainly has potential, but awful graphics and clunky controls make it impossible to spend any time with Emergency Mayhem without wanting to fling your controller and nunchuck out the nearest window.

Overclocked: A History Of Violence (house of tales/ lighthouse)

PC

An edge-of-the-seat chiller, Overclocked puts you into the shoes of David McNamara, a veteran trauma specialist who is called to a very rainy New York to help with the cases of five young people found wandering the streets naked, disorientated, amnesiac and clutching pistols.

Your mission, should you dare to accept it, is to get inside their heads, forcing them to relive the experiences that got them there.

The New York environment is rendered in beautiful detail, from the run-down offices of the

Staten Island Ferry, to the creepy old hospital where the five are housed. The sound is similarly impressive, featuring some of the most natural voice acting we’ve heard in a video game in some time. That said, both the plot and the action are very much from the darker side of the tracks – McNamara himself is in the middle of marital mischord – and very few of the characters you encounter are genuinely likeable.

However, the game’s plot, pacing and simple point-and-click interface combine to make Overclocked a genuinely impressive adventure, albeit not to be recommended for those prone to melancholy.

Six of the Best Gaming highlights of the coming weeks. spy-themed adventure, as the Galaxy’s greatest undercover agent dressed in a tuxedo.

Featuring gadgets galore, as well as puzzles, platforming and the introduction of Clank-Fu, our hero’s very own style of martial arts, Secret Agent Clank promises to be yet another classic action title.

Okami

Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns Of The Patriots

PS3 Concluding Hideo Kojima’s Metal Gear Solid saga, Guns of the Patriots is set in a battle-scarred future where huge conglomerates fight for supremacy using armies of hand-picked mercenaries. It stars an ageing Solid Snake, who’s still capable of fighting a veritable army of bad guys in a storyline that promises to tie up key plot lines and loose ends.

Secret Agent Clank

PSP Ratchet, Clank, and Captain Qwark return to the PSP, with Clank taking the lead in this

Wii A surprise hit on the PS2 back in 2006, Okami tells the story of Amaterasu, the Japanese sun god, who takes the form of a wolf and sets out on an amazing journey to restore a ruined, darkened world into a beautiful place full of life and colour. Mixing Japanese folklore and a stunning traditional Japanese art style, Okami utilises the Wii’s revolutionary control system to full effect.

Alone in the Dark

Xbox 360, PS3, PC The survival horror classic is tarted up for next gen. consoles, and if the previews State saw in Barcelona last year are anything to go by, it’s gonna be super scary. Set in and around Central Park, NYC, the game follows paranormal investigator Edward Carnby over the course of one apocalyptic night in the

Big Apple. Presented in episodic, TV-series style, Alone In The Dark looks and sounds incredible.

The Chronicles Of Narnia: Prince Caspian

Xbox360, PS3, PS2, Wii, PC, DS. Based on Disney’s upcoming film of CS Lewis’ fourth book in the Narnia series, Prince Caspian is much darker than The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe, and the good news for players is that two scenes were filmed specifically for the game and will not appear in the movie. It’s an action adventure, offering gameplay for one or two players, in a drop-indrop-out style, featuring combat, exploration and puzzle solving.

Overlord: Raising Hell

PS3 Set in a seriously twisted fantasy world, Overlord: Raising Hell is an action adventure that has players being ruthless, determined and even a little despotic as they pillage lands and conquer kingdoms in order to be proclaimed the all-powerful Overlord. At the heart of the game is an army of slavish little creatures known as Minions, and their presence provides the game with deliciously dark comedic touches.

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Anger Management

Driving Mister Crazy Words & Bile by John Walshe Illustration by Christian Kirkegaard

Picture the scene... you’re on the way home from the office, defending your space on the battle-field that is Irish rush-hour traffic, in a queue of similarly pent-up commuters waiting to take a right hand turn. The lights only stay green for a few precious seconds, so you’re tensed, feet poised on the pedals, keeping her ticking over right at the biting point, ready to accelerate around the corner as soon as the guy in front moves. Why is he not moving? ‘Hey buddy, it’s a green light’.

You beep the horn, not aggressively mind, just to prod him gently. Still nothing. Flash the lights, that ought to work. Nope.

Another beep, this time a little longer. What the fuck? He starts raising his hands in helpless gestures: he knows you want him to turn the corner but something’s stopping him. What could it be?

Another beep, this one definitely with a side-order of ‘whatthe-fuck-are-you-playing-at-just-take-the-fucking-corner-so-wecan-all-get-home-while-we’re-still-young’ and he’s leaning out of his window, mouthing something at you and looking annoyed.

What’s he trying to say?

‘Wheelbarrow’? There’s no wheelbarrow, unless it’s in his back seat. But what does that have to do with turning right?

‘Bone marrow’? Surely not.

And then recognition hits..... “There’s no arrow.”

You roll down your window and lean your head out, smiling.

“WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU WAITING FOR A FUCKING FILTER FOR, YOU USELESS FUCKWIT? THERE’S A SOLID GREEN FUCKING LIGHT. LOOK AT IT. GREEN! YOU DON’T NEED A FUCKING FILTER!!!!”

A solid green light – for those of you reading in ‘moron’, that’s a normal roundy light - means you can go any fucking way you want to at a junction (left, right or straight ahead) once the road is clear. You don’t need to sit there and wait for the fucking arrow. I actually know somebody who failed their driving test for doing just this: ‘lack of progress’ they call it. Lack of fucking brain cells, more like.

Not moving at a green light is the traffic offence most likely

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to turn this driver into a screaming invective-spewing quasi-Tourette’s sufferer but it’s far from the only mindlessly stupid thing people do on our roads every day.

Traffic lights in general are a health hazard, certainly the way Irish people drive. If you look up the rules of the road, an amber light is supposed to mean that you must not go beyond the stop line or the light. However, you may proceed if you are so close to the line/light when the amber light first appears that stopping would be dangerous.

To most Irish drivers, an amber light means put the foot down and horse through the junction, looking neither left nor right.

A red light, any 10 year old will tell you means stop! Brake.

Don’t move. Stay where you are. To the majority of Irish motorists, a red light seems to mean ‘hurry the fuck up, we’ll only fit another five cars through!’

Taxi drivers are amongst the worst offenders, but then there’s very little that taxi drivers won’t do, as it seems that they do actually own the road. Or at least they used to, before deregulation, bud. Nowadays, they take out their rage over not being able to afford that fourth holiday per year by stopping randomly on the busiest streets in the country, popping on their emergency lights and ignoring the snarl-ups behind them. In fact, it seems that once you drive a taxi, the emergency light becomes a kind of cloaking device that allows you to disobey any rule of the road with complete impunity. Fuckers!

One friend of mine used to get so twisted up with rage every time he sat into his car that he brought a water pistol and ‘shot’ other drivers who did something stupid. I tried that, but after a week, I almost drowned. For me, the only solution is to crank up the volume on the stereo, roar obscenities til my veins bulge Roy Keane-style and then spend hours every night mumbling repeatedly “Stay out of the yellow box, how hard is it to just stay out of the yellow box?”

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