the shopping baskets of old men at supermarket checkouts

Tweet Do you, like me, peek into the grocery baskets of other shoppers, curious about their lives? I'm terrible for this. I'm also addicted to surreptitiously spying into people's windows, to see the domestic innards of their houses. Although I don't hide in hedges, or wear an anorak, and keep it strictly to kitchens and living rooms, it's probably not the healthiest little habit to have.

But I can't help it. There is something about a lit-up room when viewed from the street that fascinates me enough to regularly interrupt my walks. The tendency is at its worst around Christmas, when people have their curtains open to display their trees, and the coloured lights pick out the shapes of things in the room beyond, such as bookshelves, mantelpieces, and bric-a-brac; the more shadowy bric-a-brac onto which my imagination can project itself, the better. Similarly I could sink an entire evening into scrolling through Flickr albums of old domestic photos belonging mostly to American families. It's the lives of others, innit? The wonderful strangeness of millions upon millions of lives, different from your own, yet moving along like your own, through plateaus of routine, events of personal importance, peaks, troughs and the bits in between, each as rich in its own way as the next. Each life, a perceptual universe unto itself.

Back to the shopping baskets. Have you ever looked specifically into the shopping basket of a lonely old man doing his own groceries? I often do this too, and I've noticed that many survive on vaguely sad, childish things; sugary spongey things. Stuff like jam and jaffa cakes, milk for the tea, and literally nothing else. In Aldi the other day, an old man in front of me had a basket containing 5 plastic boxes with a dozen tiny muffins in each, a white sliced pan, a jar of jam, and a kilo of granulated sugar. I felt strongly that this must be all he eats, that he probably lives in a dilapidated cottage outside the town, and spends his evenings in a dim, drafty kitchen chewing gummily on balls of white pan slathered in jam and moistened with slurps of tepid grey tea. There are surely things on his table that can't be moved without effort, adhered, as they are, by a seal of hardened sugar. Things like an old tin milk jug, a glass dish of rancid butter, a yellowing funeral mass missal, and a dead wasp.

fact: elderly Irish bachelors are 85% siúcra

MP3: Pentangle-Light Flight

I doubt there is a better time of year than Samhain (the start of the pagan new year) for listening to psychedelic folk such as Forest and Pentangle, and it is as good a time as any to remember the late Bert Jansch who I had only started to appreciate a couple of months before he died. 

BOOO!!! See I haven't forgotten it's Halloween

MP3: Forest-Autumn Childhood

So many of these songs conjures up mental ground-mists, the memory scents of fungus and leaf smoke, and even the odd spectre. You can sense that the music emerges from a point far along a rich continuum that has left plenty of residual ancient material in its DNA.  

MP3: Dr. Strangely Strange-Strangely Strange but Oddly Normal

These freak-folksters from the sixties were Ireland's very own Incredible String Band, but oddly, get relegated to a tiny footnote whenever we look back over our musical success stories. Okay, they did follow in the slipstream of other bands, most obviously the Incredible String Band, and weren't pioneers or anything, but the music on their debut album has a gently frazzled Hibernian identity of its own, more toylike and tinkling than the Incredible String Band - I can easily imagine songs of theirs clicking perfectly with the claymation story-inserts during Bosco or Wanderly Wagon. Perhaps the closeness of their sound to British folk led to unfavourable comparisons to more indigenous stuff such as Planxty and the Clancy Brothers? That's just some mad speculation on my part however. I genuinely don't know why more Irish people don't know about them.

Oíche shamhna shona daoimh agus bí cúramach nuair a bhíonn an banshee amach ann.

Generation zuppy

Tweet I came across this supremely silly article on Slate yesterday which pontificates about how the 'generation' (used in the loosest term as we are only talking about a window of a few years) of Americans falling somewhere between Generation X and 'the Millenials' (wut?) should define themselves. The writer tagged said generation, born between 1977 and 1981, as generation Catalano. In case you are wondering what a Catalano is when it is at home (and who isn't?) I'll save you a wikipedia tab and tell you that 'Catalano' was an eye candy character played by Jared Leto in a teen TV show called 'My So Called Life', which I vaguely remember as being a bit like Dawson's Creek, except a bit uglier (apart from the Leto HUBBA HUBBA), and in plaid.

3,798,983,223,123 seconds to Mars

You learn something new about yourself everyday it would seem. I know I was born in the year of the monkey and am a child of the late 80s, but it never occured to me that I might be a card carrying member of a generation named after a Jared Leto character in a dreary 90s teen show.

Hmmm, that doesn't quite work, does it? Maybe the reference doesn't carry that well across the Atlantic? Perhaps it is time the 'heap went a bit Sunday Times lifestyle supplement and created a few arbitrary horseshit tags for entire groups of people who have nothing in common, then feebly sketched these out with some two dimensional vignettes based on a handful of people I vaguely know in real life. You know the sort of thing: 'the bummy mummy - seen on the Chelsea school run, the reason YOUR hubby is so keen to drop the identikit curly haired miniature indie rocker kids to school, so HE can check out her posterior in those drop dead Cavalli jeans in the morning. She's a more glam version of the yummy mummy but what she doesn't know is her hedge fund husband already has his eyes on the younger model'.

Okay, this sounds easy as fuck. My turn please...

Generation Zig and Zag
Born between 1979 and 1983, Generation Zig and Zag's defining childhood TV moment was when Zig's friend Podge turned evil and an entire nation of school kids felt complicit in his schemes. The fourth wall of TV broke down as Podge regularly addressed the camera unbeknownst to Zig, thereby creating a sophisticated aptitude for postmodern critical theory and mass media in young Irish viewers. Unfortunately this aptitude did not come in handy when 80% of them scrabbled to throw themselves onto the flames of an overheating property market.

before they took her majesty's shilling, the alien fucks

Most Likely to Listen to: Radiohead
Most Likely to: Stand up at the back of a Dublin bus and weep "Sadly, I do know what a tracker mortgage is".

Generation Zuppy and Dustin
Children of the mid 80s, Generation Zuppy and Dustin were a carefree lot. Too young to become property bubble collateral damage but old enough to earn ridiculous amounts of money while still in college because of the boom. Their world was an endless merry-go-round of drink promotions, Oxegen festivals, J1 visas, county colours nights, and Rathmines and Drumcondra dreams. But the merry-go-round had to stop spinning, and the precise point when this happened, the high water mark where that beautiful wave broke and rolled back, was the night Dustin jumped the shark and sang a grotesque in-joke Italia 90 song in the Eurovision. A fiddle began to softly play, and thousands of talented youths packed up and left our shores.

Most Likely to Listen to: De Killers
Most Likely to: Be humming a song by de Killers while directing vans into an Ozzie construction site.

Generation Soky
Born between the late 80s and early 90s, Generation Soky were left permanently disturbed by a demented semi-coherent sock monster and his even less coherent squealing animatronic side-kick called Emma 'mad-eye' O'Driscoll. He had an imaginary friend from playschool called Thomas, and was obsessed with an empty blue bucket (a poignant metaphor for our State's values/coffers/soul). Needless to say, this generation are lost. They snort mephedrone for breakfast, listen to a new fangled variant of African Music called Dub-step (named after the capital city that spawned it from its seething ghettos), cycle bikes without gears into walls while high on meow meow, and spend 20 hours of most days staring vacantly at .Gif images on Tumblr in a hollow attempt to win back the fractured childhoods that Soky and Emma stole from them. Pray for Generation Soky.

Most Likely to Listen to: A 'wobble'
Most Likely to: Be clicking mechanically through .Gifs in the wan light of an LED screen

MP3: Mount Kimbie-Carbonated

eager to tear apart the stars

Tweet There is a new Leyland Kirby album out called 'eager to tear apart the stars'. As usual, listening to it feels like becoming aware of some long overgrown thing come slightly dislodged inside of your heart. Treated pianos, sub-aquatic samples, and an all-pervading hiss. It may as well be the whispering net curtain of memory itself, that hiss.

he makes his own album artwork does Leyland - hmmm, I just wonder what this huge watch on a gloomy pedestal signifies

I'm going to sound like an absolute ponce here, but fuck it, (my next post will be about Guided By Voices or something), I've started reading Proust and am chugging towards the end of Swann's Way. Guess what the immersive soundtrack is? Yup, Leyland Kirby and the Caretaker simmering on the stereo at low volume while I read of little Marcel's kisses from his mother and his magic lantern throwing shadow stories on the bedroom wall. Seriously, dude's albums should come free with Proust or vice versa. All I need now is that big fuck-off watch on a pedestal in the corner of my room (making over-amplified ticking noises) and, with my tendency to blog about childhood, I might finally drift across the memory event horizon to crawl back into the memory-womb, where I'll curl up and watch a clip of myself catching a bug in a jar on a hot July day for eternity. 

You know that Spaceman 3 album 'Taking Drugs to Make Music to Take Drugs to', yah? All of Leyland Kirby's work should be called 'Exploring the Process of Memory to Make Music to Explore the Process of Memory to'. 

Oh, and if anyone else is in possession of this superb new record, can they tell me if I am hearing bits of Silent Night inside the track 'they are all dead there is no skip at all', or is that just my mind playing pattern games? Whatever it is, it makes me ache so much that its like a physical malady, and also feel like I'm grasping at a veil that I can't quite reach or remove.

MP3: Leyland Kirby-This is the Story of Paradise Lost

P.S. Vote Michael D. Higgins!

gathering fuel in ancient lots

Tweet So the Stone Roses, eh? I feel ambivalent about their reunion, mostly because my relationship with them, different to any other favourite band I've had down the years, depends on a solitary physical object - their debut album. That album, to my mind, is the Stone Roses. It is all they ever meant to me, and ever will. It's a fetishistic object for me, a cassette bought at a young age, worn to death, played over and over. Second Coming never meant jack shit. Also any live performances I've seen on TV looked underwhelming. But the album, well it has this quality, perhaps attributable to something others don't like about it, an over-produced quality maybe? The songs sound slightly 'unreal', almost a colourful projection, rather than a primary source, of a beautiful phenomenon experienced by lots of Irish and English young people who came a few years before my time.

But I loved the album for that. It was a hologram of something that I could never experience other than vicariously, imagining all those floppy hatted mentalers grooving away to Reni's feather light rythms in places like Manchester and Blackpool - huge oversized tee-shirts transparent with sweat, pudding haircuts bouncing in strobes, the smell of vicks filling the air. It was a time I didn't experience first-hand, so these reunion shows do not mean as much to me as Jeff Mangum's, for example, do.

Project Nim: The Sequel

In saying all that, the ticket scalping is going to be vicious. Ugly.

Let's move on. Here's what's on the stereo chez Gardenhead today.

MP3: Wolves in the Throne Room-Prayer of Transformation

Wolves in the Throne Room are experiencing a crazy crossover moment right now. They are ostensibly Black Metal but very far removed in their sound from the old-skool likes of Mayhem or indeed, from fellow American, Xasthur. Their lyrical concerns (if you translate the lyrics from 'cookie monster' to 'english' in babel fish) are an exploration of a very spiritual connection with nature, not in a cuddly way, but in a way that respects nature as a vast and sometimes cruel entity. It's a bit like Henry David Thoreau, if he had a penchant for gargling bits of briars and writing grandiose detuned guitar chords when he took time out from whittling sticks and catching things to eat. Their latest album, Celestial Lineage, contains highly cathartic music and comes recommended. I am going to take it for a spin when I go hiking up the mountains in Mayo soon. Here's hoping I get a day of boiling fog and horizontal Atlantic rain. Nothing less will do with this record.

MP3: Thelonius Monk-Mysterioso

The 'Heap goes jazz for the first time. The inclusion of a jazz track is to commemorate the long hairs I recently discovered growing from my nose, the fur developing in my ears, and the popping sound my knees make when ever I stand up. In addition to listening to Thelonius Monk, I've also taken up bridge, watching World War II documentaries, reading obituaries in the Irish Times, and standing outside the local girls' secondary school in a long coat.

the picture's faded, I'm still the same

Tweet Bet Fred. Paddy Power. Bookies are on to something. They give themselves such names so they have a cozy familiarity with the people who go into them - men mostly. Actually, here is a good one, stalk a bookies to check how many women make it their place of hanging out of an evening, then get back to me with your findings. Maybe men are from mars and women are from venus after all? Or at least one gender has a serious proclivity to wager its earnings on uncertainties.

The bookies in England seem to stay open very late. I walked past one at around 10pm last Saturday and there were three or four lads inside, staring at one of the high up tellies (with reinforced glass in front of it - explain? do people attack the tellies when they lose?). Was it a European soccer match, and hence the lateness? Regardless, they looked ser-i-ous. These were the leftover lads, the serious punters, still there after all the others ebbed casually away to their children, wives, xboxes, pet dogs, and cars. The floor was littered with paper slips, scribbled with casual bets, affordable punts. But the lads had a few slips sitting out in front of them that told a different story. A story of giros, weekly payslips, payday loans, speculative figures from shops called 'cash converters' or 'gold-in-a-hurry', wedding rings, boats, necklaces, watches - all solid things turning to atoms, atoms swirling around Steven Gerrard's or Wayne Rooney's head. All is fluid, up in the air like a soccer ball.

I tried to remember the last time I bet a few quid on something. I reckon it was on St Stephen's day (or boxing day this side of the channel). That's when most people in Kells who don't normally bet, put a bet on something. I think I put a tenner on a horse that some cousins of mine were linked to. It didn't win.

I had a bit of a laugh about it, and went home.

MP3: The Boo Radleys-From the Bench at Belvedere

our exquisite replica of 'eternity'

Tweet One of the very first conversations she had with her mother after she went into the hospital was about something called 'tomb-stoning'. It sounded stupid to call it that but, because of the funny name, she did know what it was when her mother asked about it.

"what's this new thing, you watch the news Jean, where children jump from stuff? Like the bridge down near Smithfield? It was in the paper. A child got hurt."

She explained that it was an Americanism applied to teenagers who jumped from heights into lakes, rivers, or the sea.

"Yes, but why is it called tomb-stoning?"

She thought about it, but didn't really have an answer. To be honest, there was something more pressing on her mind. She had bought a pair of shorts in Penneys the day before and they were navy. She had a strange feeling in her belly when she bought them and, since then, the feeling had grown. Navy was unlucky. Why hadn't she listened to her instinct?

"Mother. You know how my shorts are navy? I'm worried it's bad luck."

"Don't be silly Jean. Ah, Jean no, please stop saying those things, you're being foolish again."

"I'm going to take them off. I need to take them off. They're bad."

Her mother tried to quickly switch track, contorting her face as she thought of something new to chat about. Jean watched her, more carefully now, it was a shocking thing to admit, but, it was becoming slowly clear to her that her mum possibly knew something more about colours and luck than she previously thought.

"Why won't you chat to me about navy mam?"

"Oh please don't say those silly things in that voice"

"What voice?"

"The voice. You sound like a recording. You didn't have it earlier."

"Mam, these shorts are navy. I need new shorts."

"Jean, they are fine they suit you."

"No. They aren't fine. I'm not sure of them anymore. I thought navy was okay, but now I'm worried. Navy might not be okay. I don't feel good. No. I don't feel good. They're not fine Mam. Can you go home? I'm not sure of my shorts. Navy is bad luck, and you won't chat to me about navy."

The air caught a fragrance, lavender. Barry from the ward across from Jean stood nearby with his brother. They were talking softly and holding a couple of sprigs of lavender snipped from the shrubby flowerbed in the hospital garden. The turned top of a fizzy drink bottle hissed quietly. Somewhere upstairs, a woman began to cry and a softness of conciliatory voices descended on her.

"Mam. I want you to go home. I'm not right today."

At this point Jean was crying. She was doing everything in her power to not take off the shorts even though she knew what terrible luck they were. Her brain burned with thoughts of being nude in the shower, washing away the thoughts of colours, lucky or unlucky. She needed to be nude, free of coloured clothes. It was confusing to her Mam, but it was the truth.

"I'm having a shower Mam. I have to go. Bye. Bye. Is it okay to just say bye? Sorry. Bye."

Her mother's face was already half turned away in a familiar saddening. It made Jean feel more happy than upset because she knew the shower was now close.

"I'll call you later when I sort it out Mam. I told you about the colours earlier. They're just bad luck you know".

"Alright Jean. I'll talk to you on the phone later. Your dad says hello as ever. Kiss?"

Jean leant in and kissed her Mam's cheek, feeling the side of her face soften and respond as it had done all down the years, right back to when she was a child on the first step of the school bus.

"Don't be afraid mam. I know you are afraid, but I'll be in the shower soon. And then I am going to put on a different coloured pair of shorts."

MP3: Boris-Spoon

A winged victory for the sullen

Tweet

Like so many days at the time, it was another early day from school to visit their uncle in hospital. All three of them felt overgrown and too close together in the back seat of the car as it traveled towards Donegal, their elbows and body scents embarrassing them in an unspoken teenage way. As the car entered Bundoran, the precipitation was coming down in sheets, windows wriggling with rain that beat funereally on the roof. They pulled up on a pier. Their mother smoked with the window up because of the weather outside. The inside of car was thick with the dry headachey smell of it.

He looked through the teeming windscreen and across the sea wall. A foaming green rolled continually over itself out in the murk, cancelling or adding to itself in complex geometries that spoke vaguely to him of a blackboard in maths class. Every now and again, a peak met a peak and a towering breaker would roll inwards, hurling itself against the sea wall to smash violently over cars in the nearby hotel’s car park. Looking up, he could see the rain in undulating patterns of a darker grey, writhing against the flattened steely lightness of the higher clouds. Everything outside of the car was engaged in a war of attrition against the inside of the car - the close, smoke-infused bubble that the five of them found themselves in.

He thought of his relative, green-faced in the hospital with a tube in his nose, then of the burger he threw away in a tantrum earlier and how pathetic it looked on the road beside the car, leaking watery ketchup on wet tarmac. Finally, he thought of the fact that there was no escaping death, that even though he would be happy again at some point, things ultimately end in torrents of wet sadness. A word formed in the back of his mind. A word like many others that he had heard on television and read in books so many times - depression. 

That was it. He mouthed it to himself, and the very second he did, he could feel parts of his tummy turning to iron, sinking fast, and white hot pricks of heat breaking out all over his scalp. The mouthing of it brought it into slippery nascent existence. Depression - a cold boiling green-grey molten misery on an autumn pier in Bundoran. Something changed there and then, and the palette of his life acquired a permanent wash of another, muddier, colour than those he already knew.

MP3: A Winged Victory For The Sullen-A Symphony Pathetique

I shall be tepid

Tweet The last few posts were a bit abstract, which means we're overdue one of those feeble reminders that this is in fact a music blog. Or that it at least pretends to be one, when it isn't getting in a knot over entropy, dementia, childhood and the turn of the seasons in England.

a bird can sing with a broken wing but not with a broken heart - Tommy McC

I've been listening to a lot of music over the past few weeks. I keep BBC 6 Music on in the background for most of the day, and I must say that give or take a Steve Lamacq (actually forget the 'give' bit) their output is top. Lauren Laverne's show is a great mop-up of lots of those pitchfork-type bands I tend to let pass me by. I've discovered a few real gems listening to her. But the real stars of the day are Stuart Maconie and Mark Radcliffe. Their show makes me grin away to myself (how stupid must I look through a window, alone, grinning to myself?), with its easy chatter, in depth playful interviews with classic rockers, and, best of all, the anoraky blokes (never women) who phone in for THE CHAIN ('officially the longest listener generated thematically linked series of records on the radio'). I could listen to those two all day, and thanks to the magic of digital radio I can keep up with them when I move back home to Ireland, land of Ray Darcy.

To go back to Laverne. Through listening to her show I've realized the importance of letting someone else pick out the records for a 'body every once in a while. When I go hunting new music, it is normally through recommendations thrown up based on my listener stats on last.fm or through a bunch of hoary old keywords I use on hype machine (roll up! roll up! lets have yis. Darragh's usual array of greying keywords: 'ambient' 'trippy' 'techno' 'melancholy' 'drone', and introducing their new friend...'stale'). 

There's a luxury in flicking on the radio, letting it burble away in the background, and every couple of days having a song coalesce into something gemlike, falling out of the background hum and into your lap so to speak. This has happened to me over the past few weeks with songs from White Denim, Laura Marling, PJ Harvey, Joe Goddard, and even Bernard Butler with his completely ridiculous over-the-top and skeezy new song about carpet burns. Apart from Butler, I'll cheerfully admit that I know next to zero about any of the above. Once you move into an adult appreciation of music your taste ends up chasing its tail round a small space, even though you convince yourself that you've got catholic tastes.

I'll propose a two-fer-one here and share a song that I've been listening to within the usual 'Heap furrow, alongside one that I've picked up by osmosis from Lauren Laverne's show. These songs will unfortunately have to appear in youtube format rather than the usual MP3 because my English mobile broadband dongle informs me that any more than 500mb downloads per month is breach of its 'fair use' policy on a price-plan that a cheery lad in a shop informed me was 'unlimited'. For what it's worth, I unwittingly used up the entire 500mb watching a repeat of the Great British Bake Off on iPlayer. Yup, 15 pounds sterling to watch some Brits competitively cook flan. Wot a swizz.

Laverne #1-PJ Harvey-The Last Living Rose

Guess where you could have found my knowledge of PJ Harvey before the last couple of weeks? Here's a hint - it's something you lick and attach to a piece of handwritten correspondence. She is but one name amongst a gallery of hundreds of artists that I have stubbornly chosen to overlook for completely petty reasons. It began, aged 11, with Pearl Jam. I hadn't heard a single song of theirs but quickly decided they were wack. After Pearl Jam, the ignored iconic artists came thick and fast...The Clash (I was going through an anti London phase), Nick Drake (seemed like the sort of wally in a blanket people in NCAD were into), Metallica (a guy who bullied me liked them), The Rolling Stones (Mick Jagger looked like an animatron), Tom Waits (beady eyed fraud), Nick Cave (charcoal-like string of shit that a fag-scented goth might draw in leaving cert art), Bob Dylan (acting old beyond his years - How could you have Visions of Johanna at his age, even if he came up with the very concept of Visions of Johanna?)...and so on.

PJ Harvey figured into this immature puzzle through guilt by association. She featured in a Bad Seeds song that struck me as being about as artistically valid as a hokey heroin-dependent community drama group art exercise when I saw it in my teens. I chalked her off. I'm sadly brutal that way. Now, after hearing the song in the video above repeatedly on Lauren Laverne's show I can colour in another major gap in my canon and admit I was silly. Nick Drake was the last revelation on a similar scale.

'The Last Living Rose' is a miniature masterpiece in ambiguity. Every single line in it can be read in two different ways, and I like how it skewers the fact that the things people most easily romanticize about their homes when they are away are the dead oppressive things. Yet these things can be alluring and romantic all the same. The video fairly neatly nudges the point home.

'Heap #1-Mark McGuire: Dream Team

Mark McGuire is on one. Like those mental rappers such as Curren$y, he just can't stop churning it out (one thing the net has definitely done music-wise is break the album-every-14-month-yawn-cycle that was in place at the turn of the millenium). There is a new album from him out now called 'Get Lost' where he does something new; that is, he sings properly.

'Dream Team 1' is a very early track of his where McGuire sorta sings (okay, audibly moans over the most emotive part of the track). It is huge and exploratory in the way that Mogwai were when they recorded things like 'Mogwai Fear Satan'. This early track nods to Sonic Youth, but the only other thing it nods to is the sky. It is constructed from a succession of outward looking waves of finger-picked distortion that race past each other and eventually gasp sighs of ecstatic release. The lad's a visionary.