Imelda’s Come Alive

Earlier this year, I interviewed Ann Scott for Cluas.com. You can see the original interview here - http://www.cluas.com/music/features/anne-scott-interview-6704.htm or just click on the June archive to access it on this blog. Scott’s 2006 album ‘We’re Smiling’ is one of my favourite Irish albums of recent years: a beguiling and consistently inventive collection of songs from an unassuming, yet prodigiously, talented songwriter. Irish music video collective Heroes For Zeros recently made a video for one of the album’s stand-out tracks, ‘Imelda’ and it’s turned out rather well. It proves that, with a little imagination, clever editing and an interesting and evocative location, you can go a long way with a low budget. It helps too if you have very good song to work with.  

 

 

The ‘Otherness’ Of Kraftwerk

Behind a curtain bathed in a blood-red glow, the four silhouetted figures of Kraftwerk are standing motionless and stock-still behind a minimal keyboard/laptop set-up. They crank up ‘Man Machine’. As some clinical percussive beats are added to the equally clinical electronic melody, the curtain parts a little awkwardly to reveal the four members at their ‘workstations’, eyes down on their screens, each moving their mouse as if updating an excel spreadsheet or checking an email. There’s no wave or acknowledgement to the audience. They don’t look up from their screens. As intros go, it can’t really be topped and only serves to perpetuate the mythical status that surrounds this utterly unique band. Even at this gig in the grounds of Kilmainham Royal Hospital, Dublin – without founding member Florian Schneider and despite a malfunctioning curtain that threatens to damage the Kraftwerk enigma – they still leave you stunned by the power of their pristine, revolutionary electronic music.

Why does this type of introduction, and their continued refusal throughout the gig to engage with the audience,  work so well? How come it never feels contrived or forced or pretentious? Because there is a genuine mystique to the band, an ‘otherness’ that has been there since Kraftwerk’s core members Ralf Hutter and Florian Schneider created this completely new type of music all those years ago in Dusseldorf. A band this enigmatic don’t simply stroll on stage. They are revealed. The paradigm of what ‘live performance’ is supposed to be shifts dramatically for Kraftwerk and that is why seeing them live is such a thrilling, memorable experience. 

This sort of performance has drawn derision from some quarters. Why pay eighty euro to watch four Germans tapping on their laptops? You pay eighty euro because it’s Kraftwerk, they invented modern electronic and dance music and they can do whatever they want. The minimalist set-up, the vocoderised vocals, the ever-changing Expressionistic visuals,  the songs about cycling and German motorways and pocket calculators, the wry, understated, self-mocking humour is all part of the Kraftwerk concept. Whether the music is live or pre-programmed is unimportant. Again this is Kraftwerk and the rules don’t apply anymore. It’s about the concept, the idea of four expressionless men behind their Sony Vaios playing music that influenced everything that came after. Four Germans who were replaced by robots for, erm, ‘The Robots’. It’s about the communal experience of hearing this extraordinary music – that still sounds so vital and new, as if they wrote this music yesterday, even though much of it was written three decades ago – with thousands of other people.  It helps too that EVERY song aired tonight is a small masterpiece that has stood the test of time, especially ‘Radioactivity’, ‘Neon Lights’, ‘The Model’.

Bono said Kraftwerk are a ‘great soul band’. People mocked him, of course. Kraftwerk? Soul Band? But he was actually spot on. Despite the ostensibly ’soulless’ nature of the music, tear away a few layers and each song has something to say about the complexities of the human condition. It’s the paradox that lies at the heart of Kraftwerk: it’s easy to think of Kraftwerk’s music as cold, robotic and loveless because of the way it is delivered but it is actually full of soul, humour and hidden meaning. Think of ‘The Model’ as a song about unattainable women and unrequited love. ‘Neon Lights’ about loneliness in the big city. ‘Pocket Calculator’ as a sly, humourous admission of their own obsession with machines and electronics. Therein lies the genius of Kraftwerk. These robots have beating hearts too.

 

Kraftwerk, Dublin, 13.09.2008.

 

 

Together In Electric Dreams

Every Irish-based music blog and webzine has been singing the praises of the Electric Picnic since it ended late last Sunday night. The general consensus is that this year was the year that, despite a weak line-up musically, the festival came of age. It’s also the year it repositioned itself as a ‘Music And Arts’ Festival, a deliberate strategy to distance itself from other music festivals, especially MCD’s Oxegen, and to give it a distinct identity of its own. It’s a smart move but I hope the music will always remain the most important part of the festival’s remit. Comedy, spoken word, theatre, even the bloody cooking stage are fine, and nice diversions when you want to take a  break from the music, but they should always remain that: diversions. For me, the Electric Picnic will always be about the music and, despite a handful of big-name acts such as Sigur Ros, My Bloody Valentine and the Sex Pistols, they really need to improve the line-up for next year. Yet, it was still a brilliant and highly memorable weekend with little or no trouble and very little to complain about. Ok, the bars shutting down at 10 pm was a bit ridiculous. And the Body & Soul Area was too overcrowded. And everything is ludicrously expensive. And Franz Ferdinand were terrible. But apart from that, it was an amazing three days. 

Anyway here is my top eleven best bits from the festival:

1.My Bloody Valentine on Sunday night. Not as loud as when I saw them in London but still a mind-blowing exercise in audience annihilation. Brilliant. Brilliant. Brilliant.

2. Sigur Ros. I had reservations that such a musically introspective band could cut it as a headline act on an outdoor stage. How wrong I was. Life-affirming and beautiful.

3. Goldfrapp. Alison’s voice is the eight wonder of the world.

4. Henry Rollins’ spoken word performance. Charming, engaging and funny.

5. Getting The Clash’s Mick Jones’ autograph. An absolute gent.

6. The sunshine on Sunday. How the fuck did that happen? 

7. Wilco. One hour of musical brilliance that was over too soon. An extraordinary band.

8. The amazingly chilled-out, friendly and benign vibe. The way complete strangers talk to you as if you’ve known them all your life. The beautiful women, Irish women, everywhere. As Mr.Morrison might say: wouldn’t it be great if it was like this all the time?

9. Crystal Castles. Spare, brutalist-electro with an amazing frontwoman in Alice Glass, who doesn’t sing but instead emits a strange, guttural scream that will haunt you for days. Amazing.

10. Sex Pistols. Derided by almost everyone, and an unpopular choice to close the weekend, but I found it fascinating to see a band that changed the course of rock music in the flesh banging out ‘Anarchy In The UK’ and ‘Pretty Vacant’ and ‘Bodies’ in a field in County Laois. Johnny Rotten remains one of the most compelling and provocative frontmen of all time and he was his usual, sarcastic self on Sunday night.

11. The Leviathan Political Debates. Great fun.

Three Reasons I’m Going To The Electric Picnic.

Ulrich Schnauss

On My Own

 

 

Sex Pistols

 

 

My Bloody Valentine

You Made Me Realise (‘Holocaust’ section, live at Roskilde Festival)

Hi, How Are You: The Second Coming Of Daniel Johnston

Probably one of the most compelling documentaries I’ve seen in recent years is ‘The Devil And Daniel Johnston’ about the gifted yet deeply troubled cult US singer/songwriter Daniel Johnston. Sensitively directed by Jeff Feuerzeig, it is a brilliant and deeply affecting portrait of a life in turmoil and how a unique talent was constantly at war with the scourge of his own mental illness. It is also about unrequited love, the unconditional love (some) parents bestow on the their children and how music can sustain a broken life more strongly than any branch of religion or medicine can. Up until seeing the documentary, Johnston was always someone on the periphery of my musical tastes. A name I knew simply because Kurt Cobain, back in the early Nineties, was always photographed wearing his now iconic ‘Hi, How Are You’ t-shirt, usually under some tatty cardigan. The simple act of Cobain wearing his t-shirt resulted in Johnston being dragged along in the Nirvana slipstream as the grunge band went stratospheric. Suddenly people were asking ‘Who Is Daniel Johnston’?. The record label Elektra took an interest and offered him a record deal but Johnston turned it down as he refused to be label-mates with Metallica. He believed they worked for the Devil and would beat him up. Johnston’s moment had come and gone and within a couple of years Cobain would be dead.

Yet, a few weeks ago, Johnston came to Dublin for two sold-out shows at Whelans. It was billed as an ‘Evening with Daniel Johnston and Friends’. His friends being Scout Niblett, Jad Fair from Half-Japanese, James McNew of Yo La Tengo, Norman Blake of Teenage Fanclub and Sparklehorse’s Mark Linkous. Before Johnston came on stage, they each did a few songs of their own. A gaunt-looking Linkous treated us to a couple of tracks from his dark canon of songs and Norman Blake did a solo run-through of ‘Everything Flows’ ,which is, of course, one of the greatest songs ever written. When Johnston came on stage, he was helped by Blake. With his sensible haircut and specs, the Teenage Fanclub frontman came across like a male nurse helping a middle-aged man recuperate and find his feet again.

Johnston is still only forty-seven but a tortuous life has aged him at least ten years. With his huge pot belly, as if he’s hiding a basketball under his white t-shirt, and thick head of grey hair, he’s probably the unlikeliest rock star ever to grace the stage of Whelan’s. He started off with three songs by himself on acoustic guitar. It was rough and ready and a little shambolic. He’s clearly still not fully comfortable playing on stage and, to be honest, he’s not a great guitarist. His natural place is at the piano. But it was when he went electric and his indie superstar friends filled the stage and filled out his sound that Johnston really shone. He did ‘Speeding Motorcycle’ and ‘Casper The Friendly Ghost’ and ‘Devil Town’ and, with the band behind him, he grew in confidence. His music is not pop or indie or straightahead rock, it has elements of all these yet remains indefinable. It’s raw and innocent, at once full of pain and yet full of a child-like optimism. It’s as real as music gets. With a little help from his friends, Johnston is enjoying a second-coming of sorts, a hugely deserved second-wind that no one, especially those who saw ‘The Devil And Daniel Johnston’ saw coming.

Analog: An Urban Festival For Urban People.

The Analog festival, which was held in Dublin’s Docklands the weekend before last, was that rare beast: a sophisticated, trouble-free, imaginative and well-run event that I hope will become a mainstay on the Irish music festival calendar. What strikes you first is the location: Grand Canal Square, which is slap-bang in the heart of the new shining city-within-a-city that is Dublin’s Docklands. The concert area is situated within residential apartment blocks, corporate, glass-fronted structures and a one or two unfinished buildings. Here and there, cranes rise up into the sky like odd, alien-like creatures. With construction work halted for the weekend, they appear strangely forlorn and useless. The cranes are transient structures of course but one permanent fixture are the strange red poles sticking out of the ground at curious angles to each other. As evening descends, they light up, flicker and glow.

The music on the first night was provided by Hal Willner’s Rogues Gallery, featuring a redoubtable rag-bag of rock and folkie types plus one major Hollywood actor in the shape of Tim Robbins, all providing their own interpretations of various pirate ballads and sea-chanteys. Oh, and Lou Reed was there too. Come to think of it there were a lot of quite interesting people up on stage. Linda Thompson and her talented offspring Teddy and Kamila, Shane MacGowan, Martin and Eliza Carthy, Chris Difford of Squeeze, Neil Hannon, Rachel Unthank and the impossibly beautiful Langley Sisters, among many others. It is here we must mention the Virgin Prunes, who played their first gig together for twenty five years, renamed tonight as ‘Three Pruned Men’ . They were strangely unforgettable by being so dreadful but from what I’ve read, they were dreadful twenty five years ago also, so no change there then. Guggi, Gavin ‘I’m Bono’s pal,me’ Friday were joined by their old cohort Dave Id Busaras who is clearly insane. He stalked, pranced and growled his way around the stage like a man who had been released from a mental institution that very day. Maybe that’s where he was for the last twenty five years. Poor Tim Robbins didn’t know where to look. Nurse!

Saturday night featured some explorative-rock fare with a triple bill of Liars, Efterklang and Tortoise. Liars though did little for me, their unconvincing Krautrockisms proving mightily tiresome . The band I was really there for were Denmark’s Efterklang (above) who released one of my favourite albums of the last few years, the remarkable ‘Parades’. It’s a gorgeous, otherworldly and utterly uncatergorisable piece of work. Tonight they look a little daft though, dressed as they are in a curious set-up of white britches, white shirts and neckerchiefs, presumably a sartorial nod to the country of their birth. They are more energetic and Arcade Fire-like than I expected but ultimately they don’t disappoint. After this, we are treated to a rare outing from Tortoise but an hour or so of their experimental, freeform jazz-rock is over too soon. Blame the curfew. 

Roll on Analog 2009. 

Some nice photos here…

http://www.state.ie/blog/photos-analog-festival-liars-efterklang-tortoise/

Video Of The Month

Santogold

L.E.S Artistes

 

Feist On Sesame Street

It just doesn’t get any better than this…

‘Irish Jack’ Interview

Here’s an interview I conducted with ‘Irish Jack’ Lyons that originally appeared on Cluas.com…

It was while living as a young man in London in the Sixties that something extraordinary happened to Corkman Jack Lyons. While they were still unknowns, he befriended legendary rock band The Who and went on to become their unofficial ‘fifth’ member. Furthermore, ‘Irish Jack’ became the acknowledged inspiration for Pete Townshend’s classic film and album Quadrophenia.

Jack left London in 1968 and returned to Cork where he has lived ever since but has remained in close contact with the surviving members of the band, Pete Townshend and Roger Daltrey. It was through his job there as a postman that he came to know another band that would go on leave their mark in their own unique way, The Frank And Walters. As an early cheerleader and mentor for the band, they returned the favour by asking him to write a book about them. The result ‘A Renewed Interest In Reading’ is out now.

Below, Jack describes how he always knew Ashley Keating and brothers Niall and Paul Linehan would go on to great things as the Frank And Walters but he also entertainingly recalls his friendship with The Who, his long ‘raging’ discussions with Pete Townshend, drinking late into the night with Keith Moon and how the tears welled up in his eyes when The Who played last year in his hometown of Cork…

Jack, your book on the Frank And Walters ‘A Renewed Interest In Reading’ is an entertaining overview of one of the truly great Irish bands, The Frank and Walters. Could you give us a little history of your relationship with the band?

Since I was the Frank And Walters postman for many years I was there when they first started to form the band and I knew them as young fellas. I used to deliver letters to the Linehans and Keatings in Glencairn Estate in Bishopstown and spent a lot of time talking and listening to their ideas (no wonder my letter delivery took so long!). I soon discovered that Paul, Niall and Ashley were, not only very knowledgable when it came to knowing what they wanted to do, but they also possessed a spark of originality and imagination. They were very, very down to earth and not at all swayed by the star system. They never wanted to form a band to be ‘rock stars’ – they couldn’t be that if they tried – but they did want to form a band because they believed in a dream. And that dream was to write some great songs and perform them in public. Everything else after that was a bonus. That’s precisely what made me want to write this book. I was their postman, mentor, adviser, cheer-leader and bill deliverer, and it wouldn’t have worked with any other band.

You knew Ashley, Paul and Niall from when they were young but you also appear to be genuine fan of the band they became. What attracted you to their music?

I think what really attracted me to their music was the simplicity. The Frank And Walters write about life in old exercise copy books. They’ve never really grown up. They’re still forming themselves in the sense that their songs are the stuff of young people still at school, the stuff of young fellas and girls in their first jobs and which further evolves into the stuff of fellas who are now married pushing buggies around town on a Saturday with their wives and safe in the knowledge that the band they danced to in the mosh-pit at Sir Henry’s all those years ago are still the Frank And Walters. You’ll see all these people at their gigs and hopefully they’ll buy ‘A Renewed Interest In Reading’. The Franks are everybody’s band because their songs envelope a community spirit of thought and action.

How did the initial process begin for the the book?

I got a phone call from Paul two years ago and it’s been a labour of love ever since. I never wanted to do this book initially. I feared that someday, because of our talks at the gate and me holding a bundle of letters and all the encouragement I had given the band, that I would draw this on myself. When Paul phoned to ask me if I would be interested in writing the book I said, ‘I knew I’d get this phone call from you some day.’ He and Ashley told me nobody else could write the book because I’d been their postman. I fell for it and I’m still trying to work out the logic behind what they said. They’re very surreal. A bit like Frank And Walter.

Do you think the Frank and Walters have had an influential effect on the Cork music scene?

The Frank And Walters have had an enormous effect on the Cork music scene – and beyond. Their mainstay is that they have the ability to reach so many divergent people – and all ages. Don’t forget they were, and still are, the only band to come out of Cork and appear on the iconic Top Of The Pops with ‘After All’ – no other band from here has done that. In my book, I relate to the amazing number of current name-checked people who actually supported the Frank And Walters and were very glad to do so. People like Radiohead, Suede, PJ Harvey. Even Noel Gallagher of Oasis was their roadie on a UK tour. I think the main effect the Frank And Walters have had on musicians in Cork is how they’re able to show other bands that it can be done. That you can start from nowhere and achieve something worthwhile. But like everything else in this life it takes belief and sweat and toil.

Moving on to your time with The Who in the Sixties, what was that like? It must have been an incredible experience to be such a close confidante with one of the pivotal bands of that era.

It was the most exciting time of my life, in fact. Because becoming a Mod changed me completely into this ‘other’ Jack bursting to get out. Before that I had been a very naive young lad from Cork growing up in London, then I met Pete Townshend in the summer of 1962 and we became friends very quickly and suddenly I was a well-plumed peacock Mod whom Paul Weller would’ve been proud of and I discovered my whole life had gone into overdrive. Pete Townshend and I talked a lot about religion, style, music, philosophy and more religion (he was a supporter of Young Communists at the time) and we used to have these raging discussions. Unbeknownst to me, he was collecting all this information about me and using my character and, of course, my Irish eccentricity, as a catalyst or springboard for his songwriting.

What were they like as individuals? We all have this image of Keith Moon as the archetypal ‘live fast, die young’ rock ‘n’ roll hellraiser. Was he like that ALL the time?

They certainly didn’t have much respect for each other. What people don’t realise is that Roger Daltrey and Keith Moon came from a working-class background, whereas John Entwistle and Pete Townshend were middle-class. If Roger had never formed The Detours, and had continued to work in the Goldhawk Road as a sheet metal fabricator, people like Pete Townshend and John Entwistle would never have been in his social circle. Their backgrounds were so different. Roger knew all the local villains in Shepherd’s Bush – people you avoided like Georgie Harding, Norman Foreman and Reggie Chapel. He was a hard nut, Roger, and like all low-sized gentlemen, harboured a fantastic grudge towards anyone almost a foot taller, especially middle class ‘prats’ (as he would say!) like Pete Townshend from Ealing Common. Roger’s idea of discussing band tactics in the old days – even when we had our old drummer Doug Sandom who preceded Keith Moon – was that if you didn’t agree with Roger’s wishes you were liable to get a bunch of fives.

John Entwistle was a thorough gentleman. He worked across the street from me in Acton High Street with his mother Queenie in the Acton Tax Office at Bromyard Avenue. John was the only member of the band classically trained. He could read and write music and could play French horn and trumpet. He never wanted to get involved in band squabbles, all he wanted to do was just play. He was a truly gifted musician and some American magazine some years ago voted him the bass player of the millennium. I phoned him up and told him, he was a bit embarrassed but quickly gathered himself and asked ‘Is there some kind of monetary reward in this?’

Pete could be very moody and still is to this day. The strange thing is that he adopted me as the band’s mascot and treated me as if I was his younger brother, yet I was two years older than him. He could be as rude as f**k but inside was a heart of gold.

Keith Moon lived on Chaplain Road in Wembley. There’s a lot of stuff completely exaggerated about Keith, like driving a Lincoln Continental into a swimming pool at Peter Noone of Herman’s Hermits birthday in Flint, Michigan and then all that stuff about Keith throwing televisions from a twelfth floor hotel window but what most people don’t realise, and I say this in all my interviews, is that Keith was a genius when it came to comedy. He was a natural. When Keith guested on BBC Radio with John Walters back in the Seventies he did a weekly half hour show and thousands of listeners wrote to the BBC begging them to have Keith back for another series. He was an extraordinarily funny man but was rarely placed in his true context as a mimic and story teller. People only wanted to hear about smashing up his drum-kit, hotels and Lincoln Continentals. That was the sad part about it. I have seen Keith Moon get physically sick in the toilet twenty minutes before going on stage. I’ve been with Keith drinking at three in the morning in a hotel private bar and the odd time there was just me and him and we’re sitting there together and he’s still calling me ‘Dear Boy’ and everything coming out of him with an Oxford accent, and I’m there with him and I’m saying…’Keith, this is Irish Jack mate, I’ve known you since you were with the Beachcombers in 1963, y’know, you don’t have to do all that stuff with me.‘ And he’d say something completely ludicrous like ‘Jack, old darling, the lights are going out all over Britain (Churchill)…because people haven’t paid their electricity bills. Waiter!!’ People say that Keith was never going to live to a ripe old age. I disagree. If he had been usefully employed in what he was really good at in radio or television, and kept away from substances, he’d be alive today. Now and again that old British comedian and actor Norman Wisdom comes on Sky News at a royal garden fete or something and he does his famous foot trip and I look at him and I can see Keith Moon and in a strange Messianic way Norman Wisdom is Keith Moon continued.

Do you have a favourite Who song or album?  Which one of their gigs really sticks in your mind all these years later?

That’s an easy one. It has to be our very first hit ‘I Can’t Explain’ January 1965. Album: well, what do you expect other than Quadrophenia? There are so many special gigs in my memory that for some reason have left an indelible mark. Possibly Keith Moon’s last performance in May 1978 with the Who at Shepperton Film Studios just before he died, when we were filming ‘The Kids Are Alright’ He had put on a few unwelcome pounds but for some reason managed to bring himself to an unexpected performing level. Chemicals?..I dunno. He put in a fantastic performance and at parts it looked like the old Keith Moon was back. I’m actually in the footage standing at the side of the stage leaning against the band’s drinks fridge. During ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’ when they sing the line…’And the morals that we worship will be gone‘ the camera pans to the right of the screen and on the word ‘gone’ there I am in my cricket whites, red tee-shirt under my grandfather’s zip cardigan in a pair of Doctor Martens holding the mandatory can of beer, then four lines later they sing ‘And the men who spurred us on sit in judgment of all wrong‘ The camera pans back again to the right of the screen and there I am again…still looking for another beer on the word ‘wrong’. So the key words to one man’s immortality are ‘Gone’… ‘Wrong’.

Do you think the recent reunion was a good idea? Were you impressed by ‘Endless Wire’ and the recent gigs?

I think the reunion was the best thing that ever happened to The Who. That point was driven home to me when I saw them play the Cork Marquee last year on June 30th. It was a big family day for us and the band backstage. I was a bloody nervous wreck worrying over how their performance would go down because I’ve been bending people’s ears about The Who here in Cork, where I’ve lived since returning in 1968. There’s not a man or woman in Cork who is not in some way aware of my forty-six year association with The Who and I was just very worried that if they managed to get themselves a bad review or didn’t exactly cut the mustard that I would die the death. I couldn’t have been more wrong; I just couldn’t believe the reaction they got from the crowd and when Pete Townshend started to tell people about me and dedicated ‘Drowned’ from ‘Quadrophenia’ to me the tears were coming out of my eyes. What was lovely at the very end was when Roger was saying goodnight to the audience and said ‘Don’t forget to look after your postman!‘ – everyone in Cork was reminding me of that for a few weeks as I’ve been a postman for the past twenty-seven years.

It took me a little while to get used to the songs on ‘Endless Wire’. I thought it was a very brave album to do because obviously it was far removed from other Who albums where the sound and production was very different. But if Pete Townshend does anything he moves on with his musical creativity, he never stays in the one place. I especially love the tracks ‘Fragments’, ‘Man In A Purple Dress’ and the ‘Mike Post Theme’. I think they’re songs especially written for the voice of Roger Daltrey, who excels on a lot of the album.

What’s your relationship with the band like now? Do you still keep in touch with Roger and Pete?

My relationship with the band today isn’t all that very different to the old days except of course I now live in Cork. Back in the Seventies myself and Pete used to write every three weeks to each other. Long extended handwritten episodes of family life etc, streams of subconsciousness. And in one of these streams of letters I told Pete that he might be pleased to know that I had just become the first bus-conductor in Cork to wear the celebrated Doctor Marten boots. He wrote back to say he was elated in the knowledge that one of his oldest friends had embraced Seventies youth culture even if I was 28 at the time and he only two years behind me.

The next few letters between us was all about youth culture and I sent him my old Goldhawk Social Club membership card (the club in Shepherd’s Bush where The Who had practically started out from), he returned the card to me by informing me that he had been reading a lot of what I had been telling him and remembering what it had been like when we had been Mods together in Shepherd’s Bush and that he was now writing another opera. And I thought, ‘Good Jesus, not another f**king Tommy?’ He wrote back to say this was going to be a Mod opera with me in mind. About a year later Quadrophenia appears as an album and the next thing is I’m in a newsagent’s having a free read of the New Musical Express and there’s an interview with the man himself and he’s telling his interviewer Tony Stewart that ‘Quadrophenia’ is ‘all about that legendary Who-charter fan Irish Jack’. I looked at my name on the page and my heart glowed, and I thought ‘Well, I might as well buy this.’ So people reading this are going to be bloody gob-smacked to learn that Quadrophenia – one of the all-time acknowledged classic cult films and albums – started with a pair of size 7 Doctor Martens bought in Drummy’s shoe shop on Lavitt’s Quay in CORK.

So from there on I have made an extensive career out of Quadrophenia. I have read my scribbled stories about growing up with The Who, being an original Mod and Quadrophenia at such illustrious places as the Oxford Union (twice), Cambridge University (three times), Trinity in Dublin where I was introduced on stage to over a hundred people by Stuart Clark of Hot Press. I’ve read in New York, all over England, Scotland and I think it’s fantastic that a man of my age, 64, is prepared to step up on a podium and read about a band like The Who… the one band who in their writing and performance mirrored their audience. So I suppose I’ll get away with saying that, as a 64 year-old retired postman, I am the acknowledged embodiment of The Who. One day a few years back my wife Maura, who has put up with me (and The Who) for the past thirty-eight years, was having a bit of a barney with me about bills and stuff. Just before she was about to throw the frying pan I said ‘Doll, you married a legend…but there’s no f**king pension!’ She couldn’t keep in the laughing. That’s what makes it all worthwhile.

Contact with Roger? Yes, I ring him every three weeks on his mobile. He worries about my drinking. He’s a diamond.

(C) Ken Fallon/Cluas.com.

My Bloody Valentine Live, June 22nd & 23rd, 2008

So how was it? How about like a bomb going off. Slowly. Or as described by Mani, who was in attendance, as a ‘post-apocalyptic war-zone’. Or how about just keeping it simple-it was loud. Very, very LOUD. Yet My Bloody Valentine aren’t solely about audience annihilation by waves of feedback. Up until the gut-wrenching and near-transcendental aural onslaught that is ‘You Made Me Realise’ it was pretty much flawless, as they filled the set with equal pickings from ‘Isn’t Anything’ and the more revered follow-up ‘Loveless’. It was a remarkable experience hearing these songs live for first time. Even more remarkable to see how the band have barely aged since the early Nineties, in fact frontman Kevin Shields seems to be getting younger looking. ‘I Only Said’, ‘When You Sleep’, ‘Soon’, ‘Feed Me With Your Kiss’ all sounded huge and reinvigorated in a live setting. They built the intensity as the gig progressed as if in preparation for that explosive climax, each increase in volume a portent for what was to come.

And then it came. When they launched into ‘You Made Me Realise’ you could sense the frisson of recognition throughout the crowd, a sense of ‘This is it. Cover your ears’. And then five minutes in, the song slowly shifts down a gear, a low rumble kicks in and then they crank it up again until we are completely immersed in the mercilessly protracted mid-section of sheer white noise (on the two nights I saw them, the ‘holocaust’ section went on for at least thirty minutes). Odd sensations take over. You can physically feel the soundwaves coming from the stage. A strange curdling in your stomach. A vague light-headedness as your eyeballs are bombarded by the odd visual imagery and the fierce strobe lighting. They kick back into the rest of the song on drummer Colm O’Ciosoig’s cue for a while and then that’s it. They depart with the whirring, coruscating swirls of ghostly feedback whizzing around the circular confines of the Roundhouse. There’s no goodbye and no contrived encore which is always a very good way of keeping your mythic status intact. Incredible.