Dorothy...we're a long way from Shrek.

Tweet In a previous post relating to latest Dreamworks animation Kung Fu Panda, I mentioned that Toy Story is one of my favourite films of all time. Oh wait...gimme a second, Channel 4 are about to do a video exclusive of the new Streets song. He's walking; a bit like that time Alan Partridge carried a tank of window washer fluid down a segment of motorway near Norwich singing Shirley Bassey's Goldfinger to himself. But whereas the fictional character Alan Partridge bled genuine pathos, it would seem the very real Mike Skinner is embarking on an excruciatingly cack-handed symbolic journey in this video. He appears to want us to think he is walking into a newly minted future of received wisdom and self-acceptance after scoffing a million Es and huffing on crack pipes for the last few years. Bollocks Mr Skinner. Bollocks.



I always find it arrogant and condescending when borderline retarded rock artists imply that their wild years of druggy excess ultimately lead to some sort of inner epiphany that they sincerely believe would not be possible without the drugs; therefore setting them apart from the squares in the public domain. They deludedly think they peered into the proverbial 'abyss' and are 'deeper' as a result. The beady-eyed, preening, late-fortysomething anorexic Bobby Gillespie is the prime example of this. He is a modern day Jim Morrison. Except he is alive and too old. He is the wretched, stiff wank-rag that the laddish '90s spunked all over in its blind love of hollow hedonism. He has a pea-brain, a toddler's grasp of politics, and a retrograde way with a tune that only ever sparkled when someone a million times more talented got involved (Screamadelica without Orbit and Weatherall? Mediocre jangly shite). The fact that the likes of Dublin's all-time spelling test champs (chimps?), and Sky News superstars, Humanzi, look up to him (and share his rudimentary grasp of politics and the english language) is another nail in the double sized coffin I am personally constructing for Mr Gillespie and his 'visionary' '90s counterpart Richard Ashcroft. Tossers. The pair of them. Actually the insult 'tosser' is not humiliating enough for these ragged drug grandads. Playground disses work best. Richard Ashcroft and Bobby Gillespie are silly billies with small willies.

John Lennon and Paul McCartney took drugs. Their minds opened and their careers blossomed. Why? Because they were talented. Give a genius drugs and they will create genius stuff. Give a chimp drugs and the poor, demented zoo animal will write the new Primal Scream album. Anyway. New Streets song in a nutshell? Looks to me to be the usual condescending wankery constructed by someone who put half of Bolivia up his nose and now thinks he is 'back' from the other side and needs to share his journey of 'discovery' with the world at large. If World War 2 started again tommorow, I would fucking love to put Bobby Gillespie, Mike Skinner and Richard Ashcroft over the top of a trench. Then they might discover that the genuine extremes of the human condition are not always dependant on a recreational chemical that you voluntarily introduce into your own bloodstream after a gig. Fucking empty, meaningless, tiresome, pompous, bland saps. Apart from Screamadelica (which was made by other people), the entire Primal Scream back catalogue is a wet fart in a deafening 90 mile an hour gale on an oil-rig. OK do your drugs lads (like about 30 million other people in Britain and Ireland). The rubber medal is in the post. But write a song I can fucking whistle. And remember, like most professional people who take recreational drugs on a weekend do, that drugs might be fun, but they only enhance what is already there. So if you are a twat and take acid...wooooobeeeedoooobeeeedooooaaaa-wooooooo.....hey presto! You're a twat on acid. Congrats.

Okay where was I? Yeah, a Streets video came on. Before that, I mentioned 'Toy Story'. I had an idea before this poisonous rant that I was going to write a series of blogs on my favourite films for children. Jaysis, the irony after the above rant. Anyhoo, it dawned on me that, apart from one or two choices, most of my all-time favourite films are children's films. I want to devote an entire blog to 'ET' and one to 'Toy Story' also. But in the meantime I would like to briefly discuss an animated Japanese film called 'Pom Poko'. My girlfriend introduced me to the back catalogue of her favourite Japanese animation studio, Ghibli. I thank her. These movies are magic in an exhilarating childlike way and utterly at odds with most of the current crop of western animation (I'm excluding the elegaic and poetic WALL-E here; it's a very affecting and unconventional movie). Recently, their most popular films such as 'Howl's Moving Castle' and 'Spirited Away' received proper releases around the world. They deserved it. The level of beautifully painted dreamlike excess, genuine humanity and rampant visual oddnesss made these movies global contenders.

Before these well received (over here) films came out, however, Ghibli released 'Pom Poko', a sort of treatise on how humans hurt the environment. It was entirely based on ancient Japanese legends. Some who watch it think it is about raccoons (like the ones in the States and Canada). It is not. It is about wild animals calleed Tanuki that are widespread in Japan but which are halfway between a raccoon and a dog. Traditionally the Japanese believe them to be capable of shape-shifiting. Changelings, if you will. 'Pom Poko' is my favourite film from studio Ghibli. Laser DVDs on Georges' Street have a full copy to rent, so I will not go into intricate detail about what happens in the film. But to get the full whack of it, check out old prints of Japanese legends (online? wikipedia?), then rent it from Laser. 'Pom Poko' is magnificent because it came out when Japan was the most technologically and industrially advanced country in Asia. It demonstrated, at that point in time, that an older bunch of animators were prepared to say "okay let's not accept the new status quo, something is environmentally rotten at the heart of Tokyo". Most of the phantasmagorical creatures in it are either in books of ancient Japanese Manuscripts or 18th century 'proto' manga cartoons in the British Museum. Loreana loves 'My Neighbour Totoro' because it is a beautiful film about children who place their entire trust in a Japanese wood spirit without ever questioning it. That's magic. I place my trust in 'Pom Poko' because it reassures me that the most technologically advanced country in the world is still fretting about its own version of the Irish Púca. The Japanese may have invented nintendo-land but they are still interested in small shape-shifting mammals out in the natural world.

I said we are a long way from shrek at the top of this blog. Watch the following clip from 'Pom Poko'. It is visually outstanding. And every outlandish thing in it is drawn directly from old Japanese Myths and prints. I love studio Ghilbi.



Finally. The theme from ET. It's magic.

MP3: John Williams-ET THEME (not available)

A special child I grew up with (and who is now in an Irish band) will be DJing at Una's sound check tomorrow night. Come down and give him support :)

Little Birds

Tweet In 1979, the American music journalist Lester Bangs wrote these words about Van Morrison

"Van Morrison is interested, obsessed with how much musical or verbal information he can compress into a small space, and, almost, conversely, how far he can spread one note, word, sound, or picture. To capture one moment, be it a caress or a twitch. He repeats certain phrases to extremes that from anybody else would seem ridiculous, because he's waiting for a vision to unfold, trying as unobtrusively as possible to nudge it along."

I wish he lived long enough to hear 'In the Airplane Over the Sea' by Neutral Milk Hotel. Never mind 'What Would Jesus Do?'. How about 'What Would Lester Have Said?'. I reckon a frail, defeated Lester Bangs (slumped ragdoll-like in a hospice for dying, disaffected rock fans), might have listened to 'In the Airplane Over the Sea' once, then jerked out of his wheelchair and jigged around like a cross between Charlie Bucket's 'oul Grand-uncle and Randle Patrick McMurphy, kicking over coffee tables, spilling prescription pills and shifting 'oul ones on Quaalude.


MP3: Neutral Milk Hotel-Holland 1945

There will be a 10th anniversary celebration for 'In the Airplane Over the Sea' going on in Dublin on August 23rd, in the Lower Deck. A lot of nice people are involved (especially Aoife Indie Hour), so I would recommend you all go to it if you are around Dublin centre and NMH fans. Because the album is very personal to me, I would like propose a small gathering to enjoy this event in my own indulgent way too; the night before possibly.

Update: My party idea is temporarily suspended due to logistical problems. Watch this space.

When the rain comes...

Tweet One night a Johnson. The next, a Johnston. Calvin and Daniel are similar on many levels. They are hugely revered figures in certain circles of alternative music (one interesting intersecting point on the Venn diagram is Kurt Cobain, who worshipped both). Both recorded prolifically in the '80s, and reveal an unnerving level of raw truth in their best work. However, as anyone who watched 'The Devil and Daniel Johnston' will know, there is one crucial difference between the two men. Daniel Johnston struggles with quite severe mental illness. For this reason, I often wonder about him and his relationship with the indie rock community. How healthy is it? Who is being served best? Is it okay for a man who is periodically severely mentally unwell to undergo the strains of touring his fragile songs to worldwide audiences thirsty for a bit of authentic emotion in a sea of affected indie bollocks? It is a prickly topic. A can of worms. I might not be able to unpeel my thoughts about this in full right now. I think it might need a blog or two more.


MP3: Daniel Johnston-Lord Give Me Hope

First, last night's show was totally ace. Daniel Johnston's 'friends' were just that. Friends. They were all venerable alternative rock artists with considerable legacies-Yo La Tengo, Teenage Fanclub, Jad Fair, Scout Niblett and Mark Linkous. It was obvious that none of these artists were touring with Daniel Johnston so that some of his indefinable aura might rub off on them. Their careers are set in stone. I assume they wanted to give something back to a man who influenced them in one way or another. That is understandable. Also, Daniel Johnston seemed quite happy on stage. He sang well and appeared comfortable, supported and confident.

Yet. Yet. And yet. Maybe this is me. But some of the whoops from the audience felt a bit too extreme. A bit too 'we love you Daniel' patronising. Maybe I am being overly sensitive and paranoid? Maybe I think to much about mental illness? I dunno. But why do we all love Daniel Johnston so much? He sings in a childlike way. He fluffs chords. He shakes uncontrollably and stares at his feet. His songs deal with issues of childhood and teen angst even though he is (by any standard) quite old to still be consumed by these things. On the surface there might not be much there (apart from the shaking) that should distinguish him in any way from an entire fleet of fey indie bands. But why is he revered while they are mostly overlooked? This, I think, is the crux. What those bands often affect is what Daniel Johnston actually does. At the heart of some bands' music is a very conscious leap from a self-aware way of thinking to a mock innocence. People who could quite easily sing about fucking their girlfriend's sister will instead construct a ditty about falling in love with a duffle-coated girl on the park swing. While not always, sometimes much of this is coolly calculated, affected, and as much a carefully spun shell of artifice as the one which surrounds the Beamer driving tosser who chooses his best lucky shirt to wear to Reynards.

I really do not know what I am trying to say. Maybe I am just hand wringing. I hope I can articulate it better in a later post. Like I said, last night's gig was very good. Stunning, even. I enjoyed it a lot, especially the spirited closing songs, which to be honest inspired me. But I cannot stop thinking about these things. I know gigs did not go that well for Daniel Johnston in the past. I've thought about these things since I first heard Daniel Johnston. It's a tangled thing.

Thillpier's thoughts on same gig available here

Anyway. None of the above confuddlement has anything to do with the venerable bands playing support. Last night I rediscovered the joys of Teenage Fanclub. This song has a fucking amazing coda. I love codas.

MP3: Teenage Fanclub-My uptight life

Another solitary sun west bound

Tweet In one of the more outlandish gig experiences of my life, last night I found myself sitting in an overgrown back garden in Deansgrange with a bunch of music fans, watching a baritone fortysomething dude with an acoustic guitar strum a few tunes. So far, so hippyish. The thing was, the fortysomething dude was all round indie hero Calvin Johnson, founder of K Records/Beat Happening/Half of the Halo Benders/Dub Narcotic/etc/etc/etc. The gig went down in a place called Hideaway House. Hideaway House is occupied by an exceptionally pleasant young lad called Dylan, who, from what I can gleam, puts on all-ages gigs there every month or so. It's basically a detached south Dublin house that is gutted and renovated in a mad DIY way to make it suitable for live shows. It's the architectural equivalent of an old converse runner covered in duct tape. If you described the Hideaway House to me before I went there, I would probably have snorted in cynical derision and commented on young southsiders with the luxury of having entire chunks of prime real estate to fuck around with. Yet, the place won me over, thanks in no small part to Dylan, who appears to be putting some fierce effort into supporting the last brave remnants of the DIY/Punk ethic in Ireland.



So, Calvin Johnson. He was supported by Crayonsmith and 'Patrick Kelleher and the Cold Dead Hands' (they change their name on a weekly basis. The only constant is Patrick Kelleher. Next week they will probably be called 'Patrick Kelleher and the Granny Vaginas'. They were very good. I will blog about them in full at a later date). Both support acts played in what used to be the living room. It got very crowded and sweaty there, so Calvin decided to lead us all down the garden path for his set. The Hideaway House's back garden turned out to be a bit of a Bosco's Box slash Narnia affair. It was deceptively small and curved into a secluded, overgrown corner that was conveniently just the right size for said fortysomething indie legend and about 60(?) fans. Everyone sat around on the nearest available briar and had their bare arms sucked dry by insects as Calvin played an acoustic set consisting of solo material, Beat Happening stuff and two Halo Benders songs. He was droll and animated, possibly shy, yet definitely sexed up. Sometimes he eschewed the guitar altogether. In "Sitting alone at the movies" he used his free hands to convey the nuances of the song in such a way that I got a frightful sense of Déja Vu. Then I realised I saw Jens Lekman use this schtick before. Then I realised Jens could only have learnt it off Calvin Johnson. THEN I realised that Jens owes a LOT to Calvin Johnson. Calvin was in fine voice too. And his voice is unmistakable; a rich, expressive baritone that became shorthand for American DIY rock in the 1980s. I wondered what the locals thought as they heard these deadpan songs, with their wafer-thin metaphors of lusty sex and mortality, drifting over the garden hedge at that hour? For the many converted heads there, however, it was about as intimate and as perfect a gig with their all-time musical hero could possibly be (I include my girlfriend here, but not me. While I love the Halo Benders and know a few Beat Happening tunes, Calvin Johnson never featured as prominently on my radar as the likes of Robert Pollard. I would trade a finger or toe to Satan so that Robert Pollard could play my back garden). At one point, I looked around and saw grown adults with closed eyes rocking back and forth on their front row briars as they mouthed Calvin's words to themselves in the suburban twilight. Even though I properly enjoyed the show, I envied them for lucking out spectacularly with a man who was so obviously their hero. For me, it was a gratifying, charming gig that will live on in my memory as much for its unusual circumstances as its music. Well done Dylan!

MP3 comes from the mighty Halo Benders. Calvin Johnson outta Beat Happenin' collaborating with Doug Martsch outta Built to Spill! Also, if Loreana can make the video footage brighter, I will soon put up a nice chunky youtube clip from the gig.

MP3: The Halo Benders-Love Travels Faster

Update: Some youtube courtesy of Loreana. It's a bit grainy but worth watching for some funny banter between Mr Johnson and Patrick Kelleher who is invisible and stage left.



Here is another nice (unrelated) clip. I can't stop banging on about these guys. Bathe in the all-encompassing aural magic and realise it will land here, in Ireland, on November 11th.

Nic Nax

Tweet Like many Irish towns, Kells is a graveyard for small, failed shops. There are certain buildings in various parts of the town that were surely built on severely fucked up Celtic burial grounds. The terrifyingly rapid turnover of small retail businesses in such premises is like watching time-lapse film of fungus plants growing then dying in a David Attenborough documentary.

In any given year, one of these doomed retail locations might house the likes of 'Hiz'n'Herz Teen Fashionz', 'Boombox Recordz', 'Kebab Krew Kebabs', and 'All Sewn Up: A Shop For Sewing Shit Together'. Like Dante's Inferno, the Kells retailocalypse will never end. I can solemnly predict that its next casualty will be the recently opened tattoo parlour, 'Painful Pleasures' (no, I did not make that name up, check the Golden Pages). I walked past it at least 5 or 6 times. Each time I did, I sneaked a look in. I saw an empty barber shop style waiting area and a hulking tattooed man with a goatee (owner?) flipping through a tattoo magazine. I don't know how much a tattoo costs. Yet, surely Kells with its population of 8,000 people cannot provide any more than one willing tattoo-ee per day? Painful Pleasures got me wondering today if we are the smallest town in Ireland with a tattoo parlour? That would be a cool claim to fame. I also wonder if they specialise in Kells related tattoos? For example, would it be possible to walk in and get a ginormous chunk of illuminated early Christian manuscript across your back? Somehow, I doubt it. After seeing the badly drawn grinning jester they have stickered across the front of the shop, I reckon those 11th century monks' efforts on vellum will not be outdone on Kells' people's flesh just yet.



Strangely, one absolute anomaly of a shop has weathered economic downturns, upturns, traffic bypasses and the zeitgeist. That shop is called Nic Nax. It sells varied weird shit. The last thing I bought in Nic Nax was a rubber Bart Simpson to attach to the top of my pencil. It cost 99p. I bought it because I was going home after a school tour in the year 1991. They brought us to some shameful, glorified petting Zoo in Kildare. All I can remember is straw, the smell of goatshit, and having a pound of my spending money left over coming home (I got three quid). Fearing that my Mam would take back leftover school tour cash, I knocked into Nic Nax and bought the Bart pencil thing. I am sure that nobody in Ireland, never mind my town, had seen the Simpsons at that stage. In Navan Market, though, the travelling community were already selling T-Shirts of this spiny haired cartoon dude with speech bubbles saying "eat my shorts" or "don't have a cow man". So we all knew some cartoon boy called Bart was cool. But we didn't know why. A year later, on the Late Late Toy Show I think, Gay Byrne made a cack-handed attempt to explain why Bart Simpson was cool to the scaldy-faced parent population of Ireland.

I would say I was 13 the first time I saw an actual episode of the Simpsons on telly. However, I knew about Bart a good while before that. Good marketing dudes. Ye managed to infiltrate madrandomshitshops in Ireland before anyone ever saw the related comic creations on TV. For me, 'The Simpsons' was the first time I experienced a cartoon craze before its related cartoon. It was a bit confusing, and made me not only aware of America operating on a different cultural speed setting, but of satellite TV too. Even The Turtles (which I fucking hated) were well known on the Den before the T Shirts appeared. The Simpsons seemed to be the one cartoon where all the kids were prepared to invest into the buzz before seeing the tiniest frame of animation.



Nic Nax is still going. It was obviously built on the only few square metres in Kells that was neither a Celtic burial ground/haunted famine graveyard/or owned by a greedy cunt. I went in earlier last week to check shit out. They are currently selling lots of pot plants, back-lit pictures of waterfalls that are illuminated to make it look like the waterfall is moving, and an embarrassment of Man United/ Christiano Ronaldo related shit; including clocks. I reckon the pot-plants are the real money spinners. Something I secretly wished they still sold, but don't anymore, is the sort of rubber ball that bounces really high in the air and potentially gets lost 'cos of its bounciness. Everyone bought them after school tours. Bouncy balls.

Okay before MP3 time I want to recommend an Irish music blog. It is by Ciarán Gaynor. There is a lot of dross written about music. However, Ciarán writes fascinating and stimulating stuff. He loves pop. I would doubt there are many music bloggers around who are able to write about music in the informed way Ciarán does. His blog deserves notice. Here is a link to a fascinating piece about shortwave radio and number code. Also, Ciarán points out in the same post that the theme tune to an old kid's TV show called 'Picture Box' is one of the most satisfyingly strange pieces of instrumental TV music ever. I am inclined to agree. Nostalgic tsunami of surpressed memories available here.

Update: Ciarán's post is temporarily down because it will feature in the forthcoming print issue of Analogue.

MP3: The Boo Radleys-I hang suspended.

A cut off the best pre-Britpop album of the '90s (IMHO).

Having narrowly escaped my trip into town

Tweet A super quickie blog here. Everyone should come check out Storkboy Choons and Colours Move bring their brilliant snowdrifts of 4/4 nostalgiatronica to the Boom Boom Room next Monday July 21st. They love the street they grew up on, Maple Drive. It's also the street I grew up on. In fact, I can smell Maple Drive right now through my perpetually open back window. It smells like leylandii trees and night. Maybe the Boom Boom Room will smell like leylandii trees and night too?



Support will be provided by eclectic Cork band 'The Civilians' and 'The Former Soviet Republic' who is one man, a lot of pedals and a nice line in looping lo-fi. Not bad for a fiver eh?

Here is an MP3 from an album I just rediscovered. When I think of Grandaddy I always think of the word 'chug'. Their best music chugs along in a sad, pretty way. If dying rusty combines could sing, their last splutterings would sound like Grandaddy. Fuck, but I love combines.

MP3: Grandaddy-Collective Dreamwish of Upperclass Elegance

Eddie Murphy.

Tweet I went to see Kung Fu Panda today with my girlfriend who is obsessed with pandas. We once visited Berlin Zoo. It was all I could do to stop her scaling the glass of the panda enclosure spiderman-style so she could get in to hug the panda. I don't know what full grown pandas do to mad humans who try to hug them, but I doubt it's hug them back. Anyway, unlike Adam who unequivocally advises against Kung Fu Panda, I liked it a lot. It is a Dreamworks animation and I half-expected their usual exhausting barrage of double entendres and gags that reference adult movies to keep older viewers happy (oh look, the panda is doing the bit out of the matrix, oh look the panda is doing the bit out of the sixth sense, oh look the panda just made an implicit joke about masturbation etc...). Instead, the film was closer in spirit to classic Pixar (Toy Story is one of my favourite films of all time), in that the gags were purely slapstick, often very imaginative, and worked on a level that both parents and kids could laugh at mutually. Shouldn't that be the hallmark of a good kid's film? I bet most twentysomething adults still cough back a tear at the exact moment in ET that they blubbed at when they were five years old. I'm delighted Dreamworks apparently copped on to this. Still not a patch on Toy Story though.

I used to joke that a nice measure of a film's awfulness is how many of its characters are played by Eddie Murphy. If there are three Eddie Murphys in a film, and one of them is a grotesque stereotype of an obese black woman you know that you have not just busted right through the bottom of the barrel, but are now deep-sea drilling for civilisation's very last reserve of pure shite, embedded in the earth's crust, some 600 miles below the barrel. A trailer containing the words "starring Eddie Murphy AND Eddie Murphy" used to make my blood run cold. Tonight, I saw a trailer which incredibly went one step further. It was about a film called Dave. "Starring Eddie Murphy IN Eddie Murphy", it proudly proclaimed. Yes, I know. As if that was a selling point. Expecting a horrific comic porn flick where Eddie Murphy penetrates himself, I managed to make out through my tensely knotted fingers that this film contains a robotic Eddie Murphy controlled from the inside by a tiny Eddie Murphy (a bit like the real Eddie Murphy then). I wanted to vomit. I didn't ask for this eyeball shit-rinse when I paid for my Kung Fu Panda ticket. Also, has anybody else noticed that Eddie Murphy's face is becoming disturbingly more smooth, airbrushed and oval as he gets older? He now looks like someone pulled a rubber mask of 1980s Eddie Murphy over a rugby ball and polished the fuck out of it. Oh man, I want that movie to tank so bad. Eddie Murphy belongs in whatever sort of painful purgatory Rob Schneider is currently languishing in. Actually there's a movie idea..."starring Eddie Murphy AND Eddie Murphy IN Rob Schneider who IS Eddie Murphy playing an obese black woman". A guaranteed 18 certificate if ever there was one. It would never get past the censors though, would it? If it did, there would be plenty of gibbering post-traumatic wrecks clogging the waiting rooms of our mental asylums.

After Kung Fu Panda, we thought our Eddie Murphy woes were over. Were they fuck. In Cineworld there is only one escalator running down from the third to the second floor. Unfortunately, to go down that escalator you now have to travel through a gigantic 3D Eddie Murphy head promoting his new stinking stool of a movie. With their heads bowed like docile cattle, all the other cinema-goers smoothly passed through his 7 foot cardboard cranium like vitalinea through your digestive transit. I bridled. I panicked. I turned to Loreana. I said "there is no fuckin way I am going through Eddie Murphy's head to get out of here". If it wasn't for Cineworld's fire escape the Gardai would have had to airlift us out of the place tonight, because I would rather eat human poop than go through a giant cardboard Eddie Murphy head. It felt like being forced to take part in some gimpy advertising stunt to promote his latest self-fellating shitefest. And so help me God I wasn't going to let that happen.



MP3 time. Here is another piece of music which reminds me of childhood; Caecilia, by Fennesz (an artist who I posted about not so long ago). The album it appears on is called Endless Summer. Very few album titles accurately represent their respective albums' contents. I can think of a few. Endless Summer is definitely one of them. It is a disorientating, languid and reminiscent meditation on the hazy nature of a hot, sensual season. Fennesz's technique is to often create a graceful (albeit simple) melody, mostly using acoustic guitar. He then identifies its disparate parts, completely dismantles it, and does strange glitchy things to it using laptop software. At some point in the resulting chaos he just about reassembles it again, making it sound alien and transfixing. Caecilia is pure childhood. It wavers like a tarmac haze, and ripples outwards like the enigmatic traces of a young swimmer diving deep beneath the surface of a lake on a sunny day, revealing little until just over 2 minutes in. Then, things just about, but not quite, mesh together in a lysergic carousel ride of see-sawing melody and wonder. It drops you back into the adult world all too soon. Headphones recommended.

MP3: Fennesz-Caecilia

I'm aware I posted music by Fennesz here before that might have been quite droney and repetitive to people who aren't fans of ambient music. If that put you off, give this one a chance all the same. It's far more dynamic and varied in its structure.

We have tested and tasted too much, lover- Through a chink too wide there comes in no wonder.

Tweet My secondary school education was a potted history of instruction delivered by the brilliant, the banal and, well, the pure gobshites who I lump in my imagination in a box full of rusty sharp things, huge tropical beetles and rubbish teachers. Along with some of the best mates I ever made, there are things I carry from the leaving cert for life. These include a few poems from the English syllabus, particularly those by Kavanagh. Leaving Cert English, rather than stifling my love of the language (as it seems it did to many who were force fed dreaded 'standard answers' in those brutal hot-house schools), encouraged it. This was helped in no small part by a teacher who encouraged us to love the poems.



The title of this blog will be familiar to many, cribbed as it is from a poem on the leaving cert syllabus (well from the 1998 one, they could now be teaching scripts from channel 4's Skins for all I know). The poem is Kavanagh's Advent, and it's about how children find the sublime in ordinary things, before life experience comes along, opens a big door too wide and lets the light crowd those simple things out. I chose it because I want to do a thing about childhood, or more specifically the music that is steeped in the far-off emotional fragments of childhood memory. Now that I'm 27 my childhood memories are delicate yokes and hard to catch, like tiny floating dandelion burrs from things that were so pure and coloured with life once. They get fragmented too don't they? I think sometimes of a dust mote filled house, decorated by peeling wallpaper with a faded pattern of something beautiful. Yet, things come back sporadically to all of us from this halcyon time, whether spontaneously or evoked.

I say evoke, because, rather than deal with the sloppy quandaries of adult life, many musical artists mine the fertile seam of childhood to create songs that not only deal with this time of life, but, more importantly, evoke it in the listener. Indeed, Boards of Canada (to various levels of success) carved their entire career out of constructing a blurry world of bleached out sound from sampling old instructional TV shows for kids. I want to pick out a few songs that for me, not only describe childhood, but directly evoke it too. The scratched knees. The sunshine shattering to blinding pieces off the edge of a jam jar with a bug in it. Mud. Snow. Sour sweets. The endless late summer shadows and the microscopic thump of your own heart-beat through the glowing veins in your closed eyes as you lie in hay. Or, as old dead Irish dude Kavanagh puts it so much better himself:
'The why of heart-breaking strangeness in dreeping hedges.'

MP3: John Cale-Child's Christmas in Wales

This is inspired by a short story by Dylan Thomas, which in itself is a crystalline realisation of childhood memories. Cale's song bleeds similarly rich imagery. Musically, a steering piano melody melts into slow organ floes, evoking snow, the church, and surely a backwards drift through time itself to Cale's rural childhood. The organ line breaks my heart.

MP3: The Beatles-Penny Lane
MP3: The Beatles-Strawberry Fields Forever

The greatest double A Side of all time? On these two songs both McCartney and Lennon chose not to ride the psychedelic trip into outerspace like many of their stargazing American contemporaries. Instead, they retreated deep into a mental space that was a psychedelic re-contextualisation of their childhoods. Lennon always wanted to go back to the womb, to the innocence of when he was a lad, and Strawberry Fields is the most musically appealling realisation of his lad/womb wish. It's a perfect song. I'm including the Anthology demo, which, to me, is more welcoming, less complex, and therefore more childlike than the finished version with George Martin's sometimes spooksome orchestral overtones. What can I say about Penny Lane? Another strangely hallucinatory and freakishly deep reimagination of childhood by one of the two most talented popular musicians of all time. Both these songs are micro-universes. You can lose yourself in them completely. And all one single. Fuck me. But those Beatles eh?

Grab these Beatles MP3's while they're hot kids. Cos a dessicated purple-haired oldie who used to be one half of the above doesn't want people like me posting them on blogs.

I will post a few more childhood songs in the coming days. I can already think of a few less obvious ones. Any other ideas?

And now for something completely different...

Tweet Okay, I'm aware that the last post protrudes from my blog like a big bloodstained, septic toe from Amy Winehouse's shoe. So here's something a little different. I'm a big fan of Saturday Kitchen, especially the bit where there is a performance league rating guest chefs based on how quickly they can cook an omelet. I really like that. It's like a more gentle, environmentally friendly version of that bit in Top Gear where twerpy celebs spin fuck-off polluting cars around a track...actually Saturday Kitchen's motto should be 'destroy an egg: not the environment'.

I have a flatmate who can pretty much cook the perfect omelet. This is no mean feat. In fact, it's typically the standard trick an experienced chef will ask of a novice kitchen recruit in order to prove their culinary mettle. My admiration for my flatmate's skills, however, is somewhat tempered by his habit of calling his eggy creations phenomelets. Yes, that's right, phenomelets. A really bad omelet is a scromlet, because the eggs get scrambled as you furiously fiddle with them on the pan. The perfect omelet should be slightly golden on the underside, well seasoned, and slightly runny in the middle. Not easy. You need some good hot butter and a handy wrist...ugh doesn't that sound a bit like your average night in with Mario and Lisa from Big Brother? (digression: I capitulated and watched the odd episode because there was too much George Lee on the 9 o'clock news. It is completely rancid and not very compelling. If you are managing to avoid it let me describe Mario and Lisa. They are couple in their 40s who look like Xena warrior Princess and a swollen waxy version of Joey From friends. They sit in a bath together and apply fake tan on each other with some sort of huge applicator glove that was specially tailored to fit their mahogany tree-trunk arms. They have a lot of steroid addled sex in the house and tut-tut about the younger characters. They could be the two most awesomely disgusting creatures to enter that hell-hole house). Anyway, today, I made a borderline phenomlet. I called it a menomlet after the indie band menomona. It was yummy, a bit runny, but perhaps a tiny bit on the undercooked side.

MP3: Menomena-Evil Bee



I banged on a little bit about the Gift night on Thursdays in Spy in a previous post. I'd like to really give this a big up because it has some excellent DJs (Loreana, Jay and Frankie) and lots of seriously cheap booze. You're likely to hear mad psychedelic sounds, twisty indie, the odd 60s nugget and electro from Loreana. Her Lolomixes (which feature on the sidebar of this blog) give a good flavour of her musical tastes. Jay and Frankie play indie and new wavey stuff, also electro and basically shit to go mad to. Veritable menomelets of music. Its goes on all night and it's the type of night where people are encouraged to dance the bells off their shoes.

Oh and thanks to everyone who cheered me up in the last post. It's good to talk.

All is not so sweet on the compost heap...

Tweet In many posts here, I suppose I have flippantly dived into my personal life in an inconsequential way, picking out little details or observations to pad out my twitterings about music. I never spoke much about the more serious end of my personal life because other blogs can walk that emotional tightrope, and do that well. I believe that if I tried to walk that rope, I would fall face-first into a pit of navel-gazing mulch of no use to anyone coming here for a fix of MP3s and some random digressions. Also I get a bit embarrassed and feel like a sitting duck if I open up too much.

For one post only, however, I feel I should risk mentioning personal things in a wee bit more detail for two reasons. First, some of the regular readers here might have met me out and about the few times I ventured into town recently, and found me in odd form. Second, I want to provide a reason as to why I might not be posting up here as much as usual during the coming weeks. Without going into too many particulars, I have depression at the moment. This is why I am mostly at home in Kells. It's not something I am ashamed of, even though I think there is still a certain stigma associated with the illness in Ireland. It is affecting my life in different ways. Yet, I am on the path to wellbeing thanks to medicine and support. I would never want this to become a "depression" blog (even though, again, I am sure there are many good blogs out there dealing with that sort of thing). In fact that's entirely the opposite of what I typically do here. So I will only be writing when my humour and energy levels swing me into the comfort zone required for the usual ramblings.

My lovely girlfriend introduced me to a band called Galaxie 500 when we started going out 18 months ago. Some of their songs, and this one in particular, calm my mind when I feel troubled. It's that cathartic way that certain songs about being sad can paradoxically alleviate an upset head; simply because of their yearning beauty. Thanks for this LoLo and for everything else too!

Business as usual will hopefully return to the compost heap sooner rather than later.

MP3: Galaxie 500-Snowstorm

visiting day: maria has bought me a new drum

Tweet I initially wanted 'asleep on the compost heap' to be a cookery blog. This came back to my mind over the last few weeks. Mostly because I am at home, not going to that many gigs, and I have a big fat knife and shallots. So, I'm thinking of recipes more than music. I am also seriously reading books again. It's a crummy realisation, but a total wake up call that I have not read a full book in over a year. That's lame. We should all read books all of the time. Books make the world go round. Read, read, read. Second-hand knowledge and a good dose of someone else's life experience is a good thing. Especially if that person is a ridonculous genius like Fyodor Dostoyevsky or Leo Tolstoy. The book that I am reading right now is a tortuously translated piece of literature, "The Tin Drum" by a German, Gunther Grass. I'm fascinated by it. Yet, I know the tangled rhythms of the German language will never translate into english in a fulsome enough way for me to get the entire gist of it. I love it though. That little guy with his drum. The beat of it. The obvious allegory. Drum = Nazi Germany. It is a German man describing gigantic historical occurances that I will never fully understand because I was born in 1980 in Cavan.


Will perms come back now that there is a recession?

Some German Shit-MP3: Modeselektor-black block

Savage craic lies in wait later today. Niall and Una are going to DJ in SPY. And the mega Loreana will be DJing there too. They might play the above tune if you ask politely enough. It's a new night called 'soundcheck' followed by another new night (two for de price of one) called 'gift'.